It's absolutely overkill. John Egan woke up that morning hung over and thinking it was pretty likely his best friend burned to death, watched most of his squadron blow up around him, and then spent two days stealing cabbages and running for his life DEEP inside a country that was immensely hostile, and then got caught, interrogated, and shipped off to a PoW camp. He was having a Very Bad week anyway!

If I had to guess as to why they added that plot element, I'd say that it goes with the show's Everything And the Kitchen Sink approach to narrative. They knew it'd happened to someone, it was pretty dramatic, so why not include it, with very little thought to what it did to the story or what themes it introduced. That's my charitable reading, anyway.