It happened on my last day in Hanoi. I was exhausted and an emotional wreck after the 2-week visit. It was not unusual for Americans who visited North Vietnam to be taken to see Vietnamese military installations and when they did, they were always required to wear a helmet like the kind I was told to wear during the numerous air raids I had experienced. When we arrived at the site of the anti-aircraft installation (somewhere on the outskirts of Hanoi), there was a group of about a dozen young soldiers in uniform who greeted me. There were also many photographers (and perhaps journalists) gathered about, many more than I had seen all in one place in Hanoi. This should have been a red flag.
The translator told me that the soldiers wanted to sing me a song. He translated as they sung. It was a song about the day Uncle Ho declared their countrys independence in Hanois Ba Dinh Square. I heard these words: All men are created equal; they are given certain rights; among these are life, Liberty and Happiness. These are the words Ho pronounced at the historic ceremony. I began to cry and clap. These young men should not be our enemy. They celebrate the same words Americans do.
The soldiers asked me to sing for them in return. As it turned out I was prepared for just such a moment: before leaving the United States, I memorized a song called Day Ma Di, written by anti-war South Vietnamese students. I knew I was slaughtering it, but everyone seemed delighted that I was making the attempt. I finished. Everyone was laughing and clapping, including me, overcome on this, my last day, with all that I had experienced during my 2 week visit. What happened next was something I have turned over and over in my mind countless times. Here is my best, honest recollection of what happened: someone (I dont remember who) led me towards the gun, and I sat down, still laughing, still applauding. It all had nothing to do with where I was sitting. I hardly even thought about where I was sitting. The cameras flashed. I got up, and as I started to walk back to the car with the translator, the implication of what had just happened hit me. Oh my God. Its going to look like I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes. I pleaded with him, You have to be sure those photographs are not published. Please, you cant let them be published. I was assured it would be taken care of. I didnt know what else to do. (I didnt know yet that among the photographers there were some Japanese.)
It is possible that it was a set up, that the Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know. But if they did I cant blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it. Had I brought a politically more experienced traveling companion with me they would have kept me from taking that terrible seat. I would have known two minutes before sitting down what I didnt realize until two minutes afterwards; a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever. The gun was inactive, there were no planes overhead, I simply wasnt thinking about what I was doing, only about what I was feeling, innocent of what the photo implies. But the photo exists, delivering its message regardless of what I was doing or feeling. I carry this heavy in my heart. I have apologized numerous times for any pain I may have caused servicemen and their families because of this photograph. It was never my intention to cause harm. It is certainly painful for me that I, who had spent so much time talking to soldiers, trying to help soldiers and veterans, helping the anti-war movement to not blame the soldiers, now would be seen as being against our soldiers!
If you were 40 years younger we would have photographs of you in Afghanistan helping the Taliban set up IEDs.
You are an evil treasonous Leftist and your legacy as the female Benedict Arnold is set in stone.
Jane, your explanation and your excuses ring as hollow with me today as they did back in the day. As proud service member at the time, and a still proud veteran today, your actions, your words and deeds, were treasonous, and very likely contributed to the emotional and physical stress and torture those POW’s were living with EVERY SINGLE DAY.
You will have to live with that.
For my part...you sowed that field, and you deserve to reap whatever putrid crop it produces.
Now, go away. There are patriots across the land with no need for you and your kind.
WinterSoldier.com has the only complete set of transcripts of Fonda's 1972 broadcasts on Radio Hanoi.
Note the similarities to the "war crimes" propaganda of John Kerry, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and generations of leftists since then.
My God, Jane.
You got fired because no one wants to buy your crap any more.
I wouldn’t buy from you because of being a traitor, but that is not why they fired you.
The people watching these shows have no freakin’ idea of who you are. You are just an old lady hawking crap.
Get over yourself.
Me thinks the bitch doth protest too much. And too unconvincingly. F you Jane.
Her huddy Hayden was also on the trip to Hanoi with Hanoi Jane and her infamous affair with the commie anti-aircraft gun. Both of them were and are traitors to our country. The two traitors are with Moonbeam Brown in the below pic, quite a trio.
Hanoi whore. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqN7WtgLXAU
Jane Fonda RARE BIO pt 8
In this clip, she is shown (at 4:18 in the video) seating herself at an anti-aircraft gun. See if it fits her recollection of what happened. (Somewhere, I saw her actually looking through the sight of one of these guns, but it doesn’t show that here.)
This clip also has (starting at 6:04) testimony from a POW who talks about being tortured at the time Jane was visiting. See if that fits with her contention that torture had stopped 2-1/2 years before she got there.
She was ‘’exhausted’’ and an ‘’emotional wreck after the two week visit’’. Oh Poor Jane. American POWs and soldiers fighting we just having a grand old time of it though and this pampered Hollywood ,self-important Marxist bitch was ‘’exhausted’’.
Putting up the crap about shooting at US planes is her effort to make people who hate her (with good cause) look like they're 'extreme'. Sorry Jane, going to a foreign country we're at war with - and singing and posing with the enemy is the act of a traitor. You don't have to be shooting at our men to qualify...
People died and were tortured because of Hanoi Jane.
Own it, Jane. It’s all yours. All that blood, pain, lost babies, families.
“What happened next was something I have turned over and over in my mind countless times.”
I get great satisfation knowing she turns that over and over in her mind every night she lays down to sleep.
Believe a lying traitor? Not me.