High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Volunteers is a 1985 comedy directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Tom Hanks and John Candy. Tom Hanks stars as Lawrence Bourne III, a rich kid with a large gambling debt in the 1960s.After his father refuses to help him out, Lawrence escapes his angry debtors by jumping on a Peace Corps flight to Southeast Asia. There he is assigned to build a bridge for the local villagers with Washington State University Grad Tom Tuttle (from Tacoma, Washington), and the beautiful and down-to earth Beth Wexler. What they don't realize is that the bridge is coveted by the U.S. Army, a local Communist force, and a powerful drug lord.