I was digging into the batter’s box one Saturday morning in San Pedro a couple of years ago when the catcher behind me muttered, “I’m a Vietnam vet, and I’ve been waiting for twenty years to say you should be dead or in jail for being a traitor.” The umpire said nothing. I flied out to center. Later we talked. Then we became friends.
It turned out that his hatred was toward my ex-wife, not me, because he believed certain website fabrications about Jane Fonda that circulate among veterans. Twice the Republicans in the California legislature tried to block my seating because of my trips to Hanoi. But I was never a target of opportunity like my ex–more like collateral damage.
While most Americans, perhaps including that former Yale cheerleader and elusive National Guardsman George W. Bush and, I suspect, most Vietnam veterans, would like to forget the past, the Vietnam War is about to be relived this election season.
Senator John Kerry, a veteran of both the war and the antiwar movement, is causing this national Vietnam flashback. The right-wing attack dogs are on the hunt. Newt Gingrich calls Kerry an “antiwar Jane Fonda liberal,” while Internet warriors post fabricated images of Kerry and Fonda at a 1971 antiwar rally. Welcome to dirty tricks in the age of Photoshop.
The attempted smearing of Kerry through the Fonda “connection” is a Republican attempt to suppress an honest reopening of our unfinished exploration of the Vietnam era.
Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy American reaction to false White House promises of victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from Baghdad. Young John Kerry’s 1971 question–“How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?”–is more relevant than ever.
Rather than give these reopened wounds the serious treatment they deserve, the Republicans substitute the politics of scapegoating and sheer fantasy. Most centrist Democrats, in turn, try to distance themselves from controversies that recall the 1960s. There are journalistic centrists as well, who avoid hard truths for the sake of acceptance and legitimacy. Such amnesia, whether unconscious or not, lends a wide respectability to the feeble confessions of those like Robert McNamara, who took twenty-five years to admit that Vietnam was a “mistake” and then, when asked by filmmaker Errol Morris why he didn’t speak out earlier, answered, “I don’t want to go any further…. It just opens up more controversies.”
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The case of Jane Fonda reveals the double standards and hypocrisies afflicting our memories. In Tour of Duty, the Kerry historian Douglas Brinkley describes the 1971 winter soldier investigation, which Fonda supported and Kerry attended, where Vietnam veterans spilled their guts about “killing gooks for sport, sadistically torturing captured VC by cutting off ears and heads, raping women and burning villages.” Brinkley then recounts how Kerry later told Meet the Press that “I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others,” specifically taking responsibility for shooting in free-fire zones, search-and-destroy missions, and burning villages. Brinkley describes these testimonies in tepid and judicious terms, calling them “quite unsettling.” By contrast, Brinkley condemns Fonda’s 1972 visit to Hanoi as “unconscionable,” without feeling any need for further explanation.
Why should American atrocities be merely unsettling, but a trip to Hanoi unconscionable?
In fact, Fonda was neither wrong nor unconscionable in what she said and did in North Vietnam. She told the New York Times in 1973, “I’m quite sure that there were incidents of torture…but the pilots who were saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that’s a lie.” Research by John Hubbell, as well as 1973 interviews with POWs, shows that Vietnamese behavior meeting any recognized definition of torture had ceased by 1969, three years before the Fonda visit. James Stockdale, the POW who emerged as Ross Perot’s running mate in 1992, wrote that no more than 10 percent of the US pilots received at least 90 percent of the Vietnamese punishment, often for deliberate acts of resistance. Yet the legends of widespread, sinister Oriental torture have been accepted as fact by millions of Americans.
Erased from public memory is the fact that Fonda’s purpose was to use her celebrity to put a spotlight on the possible bombing of Vietnam’s system of dikes. Her charges were dismissed at the time by George H.W. Bush, then America’s ambassador to the United Nations, who complained of a “carefully planned campaign by the North Vietnamese and their supporters to give worldwide circulation to this falsehood.” But Fonda was right and Bush was lying, as revealed by the April-May 1972 White House transcripts of Richard Nixon talking to Henry Kissinger about “this shit-ass little country”:
NIXON: We’ve got to be thinking in terms of an all-out bombing attack…. I’m thinking of the dikes.
KISSINGER: I agree with you.
NIXON: …Will that drown people?
KISSINGER: About two hundred thousand people.
It was in order to try to avert this catastrophe that Fonda, whose popular “FTA” road show (either “Fun, Travel, Adventure” or “Fuck the Army”) was blocked from access to military bases, gave interviews on Hanoi radio describing the human consequences of all-out bombing by B-52 pilots five miles above her. After her visit, the US bombing of the dike areas slowed down, “allowing the Vietnamese at last to repair damage and avert massive flooding,” according to Mary Hershberger.
The now legendary Fonda photo shows her with diminutive Vietnamese women examining an antiaircraft weapon, implying in the rightist imagination that she relished the thought of killing those American pilots innocently flying overhead. To deconstruct this image and what it has come to represent, it might be helpful to look further back in our history.
Imagine a nineteenth-century Jane Fonda visiting the Oglala Sioux in the Black Hills before the battle at Little Big Horn. Imagine her examining Crazy Horse’s arrows or climbing upon Sitting Bull’s horse. Such behavior by a well-known actress no doubt would have infuriated Gen. George Armstrong Custer, but what would the rest of us feel today?
In Dances With Wolves, Kevin Costner played an American soldier who went “native” and, as a result, was attacked and brutalized as a traitor by his own men. But we in the modern audience are supposed to respect and idealize the Costner “traitor,” perhaps because his heroism assuages our historical guilt. Will it take another century for certain Americans to see the Fonda trip to Hanoi in a similar light?
The popular delusions about Fonda are a window into many other dangerous hallucinations that pass for historical memory in this country. Among the most difficult to contest are claims that antiwar activists persistently spit on returning Vietnam veterans. So universal is the consensus on “spitting” that I once gave up trying to refute it, although I had never heard of a single episode in a decade of antiwar experiences. Then came the startling historical research of a Vietnam veteran named Jerry Lembcke, who demonstrated in The Spitting Image (1998) that not a single case of such abuse had ever been convincingly documented. In fact, Lembcke’s search of the local press throughout the Vietnam decade revealed no reports of spitting at all. It was a mythical projection by those who felt “spat-upon,” Lembcke concluded, and meant politically to discredit future antiwar activism.
The Rambo movies not only popularized the spitting image but also the equally incredible claim that hundreds of American soldiers missing in action were being held by the Vietnamese Communists for unspecified purposes. John Kerry’s most noted achievement in the Senate was gaining bipartisan support, including that of all the Senate’s Vietnam veterans, for a report declaring the MIA legend unfounded, which led to normalized relations. Yet millions of Americans remain captives of this legend.
It will be easier, I am afraid, for those Americans to believe that Jane Fonda helped torture our POWs than to accept the testimony by American GIs that they sliced ears, burned hooches, raped women and poisoned Vietnam’s children with deadly chemicals. Just two years ago many of the same people in Georgia voted out of office a Vietnam War triple-amputee, Senator Max Cleland, for being “soft on national defense.”
If there is any cure for this mouth-foaming mass pathology in a democracy, it may lie at the heart of John Kerry’s campaign for the presidency. Rather than distance ourselves from the past, as the centrist amnesiacs would counsel, perhaps we should finally peel back the scabs and take a closer look at why all the wounds haven’t healed. The most meaningful experience of John Kerry’s life was the time he spent fighting and killing in Vietnam and then turning around to protest the insanity of it all. Instead of wrapping himself in fabrications, he threw his fantasies and delusions, and metaphorically his militarism, over the White House fence. That’s what many more Americans need to do.
If I were George W. Bush, I would be terrorized by the eyes of those scruffy-looking veterans, the so-called band of brothers, volunteering for duty with the Kerry campaign. They look like men with scores to settle, with a palpable intolerance toward the types who sent them to war for a lie, then ignored their Agent Orange illness, cut their GI benefits, treated them like losers and still haven’t explained what that war was about. They know Jane Fonda is a diversion from a larger battlefield. They are the sort who will keep a cerebral United States senator grounded, who have finally figured out who their real enemies are and who are determined that this generation hear their story anew. They are gearing up for one last battle. Chickenhawks better duck.
