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."

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.

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.

TRAITOR JANE, COMMIE TOMMY HAYDEN, RAMSEY CLARK

Statement by Hanoi Jane, in 1970: "Its my fondest wish, that some day, every American will get down on their knees and pray to God that some day they will have the opportunity to live in a Communist Society."

"COMMIE TOMMY" HAYDEN A recent attempt to remove Hayden from the State Assembly in California failed by three votes. It was based on the State Constitution which disqualifies anyone from serving if he advocates the support of a foreign government against the U.S. in the event of hostilities. The charges were led by retired Marine officer Col. Gil Ferguson of whom Hayden commented, Maybe he "fought in one war too many." Ferguson claimed Hayden had gone to VN at Hanoi's invitaton, paid by them, gave up his passport to do so and propagandized our troops on radio. Hayden went to Prague to meet with the Vietcong where he raised his arms and said "I am a Vietcong. We are all Vietcong." When our POWs were released he labeled them "liars, hypocrites and pawns." (HE,10-4-86--personalities)

Traitor Jane visited Hanoi during the height of the hostilities, posed at the controls of their anti-aircraft guns, visited POW camps and commended Hanoi for their humane treatment of American POWs, later claiming "POWs are lying if they assert it was the North Vietnamese policy to torture Americans."

She made propaganda broadcasts for the North, "I loudly condemn the crimes that have been committed by the U.S. government in the name of the American people."

She urged our servicemen to desert and mutiny, and declared to the North Vietnamese "..we have a common enemy--U.S. imperialism...We hope that very soon, working together, we can remove the American cancer from your country."

In 1979 she denounced Joan Baez for sponsoring an ad condemning the human rights violations of the victorious North Vietnamese.

In 1982 she bought hubby Tom a seat in the California State Assembly for $2 million.(AFJ,Apr'88--Personalities)

Statement By Hanoi Jane, "Those POWs who implied a systemic policy of torture were lying."

During July, 1972 she made six broadcasts over Radio Hanoi. From the one on July 14, 1972 she said; "This is Jane Fonda speaking from Hanoi, and I'm speaking particularly to the U.S servicemen...I don't know what your officers tell you...but [your] weapons are illegal and that's not just rhetoric...The men who are ordering you to use these weapons are war criminals according to international law, and in the past, in Germany and Japan, men who committed these kinds of crimes were tried and executed."

The other broadcasts quoted Ho Chi Minh and had references to President Nixon as a "new-type Hitler", along with messages to the South Vietnamese soldiers to desert, "You are being used as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism."(AFJ,May'88--Personalities)

In 1971 she organized the FTA--F**k The Army--to undermine morale and radicalize the armed forces. When the POWs returned she added "I think that one of the only ways that we are going to redeem ourselves as a country for what we have done there is not to hail the POWs as heroes, because they are hypocrites and liars....History will judge them severely."

Tom Hayden: Co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the Chicago Seven, was charged with conspiracy after the Chicago Convention.

By Don Poss: There have been allegations by POWs to having received direct punishment as result of Hayden and Jane Fonda visiting their "hotel" or area. One POW, Nick Rowe, may have suffered directly from their visits to Hanoi. American Special Forces 1LT Nick Rowe was captured at the first Special Forces camp to be overrun during the Vietnam War. Rowe was tortured to try and coax cooperation with propaganda statements.
Tom Hayden went to Hanoi where POWs SFC. Jackson, and SFC. Pitzer were released to his custody. Hayden took the POWs to Lebanon where they were met by U.S. officials. SFC Jackson became friends with Hayden and his wife, Jane Fonda. Rowe, because of his failure to adopt Communist views, was not released to Hayden.

By Gene Kuentzler: The question raised by Gary Beaver, "Do you have any data on actual U.S. troops, by name who were killed as a direct result of Fonda's actions?" can be answered by reading the book written by General Giap, Commander of NVA forces. Giap clearly indicated that NVA troops were without sufficient supplies, and had been continually defeated time and again. By 1968, NVA morale was at it's lowest point ever. The plans for "Tet" '68 was their last desperate attempt to achieve a success, in an effort to boost the NVA morale. When it was over, General Giap and the NVA viewed the Tet '68 offensive as a failure, they were on their knees and had prepared to negotiate a surrender. At that time, there were fewer than 10,000 U.S. casualties, the Vietnam War was about to end, as the NVA was prepared to accept their defeat. Then, they heard Walter Cronkite (former CBS News anchor and correspondent) on TV proclaiming the success of the Tet '68 offensive by the communist NVA. They were completely and totally amazed at hearing that the US Embassy had been overrun. In reality, The NVA had not gained access to the Embassy--there were some VC who had been killed on the grassy lawn, but they hadn't gained access. Further reports indicated the riots and protesting on the streets of America. According to Giap, these distorted reports were inspirational to the NVA. They changed their plans from a negotiated surrender and decided instead, they only needed to persevere for one more hour, day, week, month, eventually the protesters in American would help them to achieve a victory they knew they could not win on the battlefield. Remember, this decision was made at a time when the U.S. casualties were fewer than 10,000, at the end of 1967, beginning of 1968. Today, there are 58,000 names on the Vietnam Wall Memorial that was built with the donations made by the American public. Although Giap did not mention each and every protester's name in his book, many of us will never forget the 58,000 names on the Wall. We will also never forget the names of those who helped in placing those additional 48,000 names there: Bill, Jane, Tom, Cronkite, and others.

When Jane Fonda traded in her Ho Chi Minh sandals and Viet Cong pajamas for a pair of tights and a leotard, most Americans quickly forgot how the illustrious star of stage and screen had only a few years earlier been one of communist Vietnam's most loyal and fiery supporters. Fonda's involvement with the Vietnam War began in 1967, after several visits with French Communists and underground revolutionaries in this country convinced her America was the bastard nation of the world.

Using her wealth and influence, she managed to garner support from American college campuses, advocating communism and encouraging rebellion and anarchy against the U.S. government. In a speech to Duke University students in 1970, Fonda told the gathering, "If you understood what Communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would someday become Communist."

Not content with spreading her poison within the home ranks, Fonda began soliciting returned Vietnam veterans to speak publicly about alleged atrocities committed by American soldiers against Vietnamese women and children. The broadcasts were coordinated with North Vietnamese officials in Canada.

A series of "Coffee Houses" established outside U.S. military bases was another scheme Fonda concocted to counter the positive effect patriotic entertainers such as Bob Hope, Martha Raye, and according to Fonda "their ilk" were having on the morale of U.S. forces. There, special employees would attract off-duty servicemen, get them relaxed, and then urge them to desert. According to some of those men approached, they were also promised jobs and money if they deserted.

Fonda was the major financial support to one of the most damaging pro-Hanoi groups called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), which was led for a time by Robert Muller, a Vietnam veteran who had been shot in the spine. VVAW, at its peak membership, mustered about 7,000, some of whom had been indoctrinated in the "Coffee Houses." That organization was later led by Vietnam vet John Kerry, now a U.S. senator and former co-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.

In 1972, Fonda took her pro-communist radicalism to North Vietnam. She visited that country's Russian built anti-aircraft emplacements and cheered the spirits of its communist gunners by wearing a gunners steel helmet and peeping through the gun sight, "looking for one of those blue eyed murderers."

At a time when 50,000 U.S. servicemen had already died on the battlefields of Vietnam, Fonda sided with the communists, making radio broadcasts from Hanoi designed to break the morale of U.S. fighting forces while encouraging the North Vietnamese to fight harder and kill more Americans. Fonda's Hanoi radio broadcasts and propaganda films were especially painful and damaging to American servicemen held as prisoners of war by the Hanoi Reds. Communist interrogators used the Fonda recordings, along with starvation and torture in attempting to brainwash American POWs into becoming turncoats.

Upon returning to the United States, Fonda told the world press that U.S. prisoners of war were being well treated and not tortured. Her outrageous claims were later exposed when American POWs were finally freed and told of years of agonizing tortures and inhuman treatment. Fonda responded, not with an apology, but with an accusation calling our returned POWs "liars and hypocrites."

Fonda's actions stirred up a firestorm in America, prompting nationwide demands that she be tried for treason. David Hoffman, a former POW who was shot down over North Vietnam in 1971, said that he had been tortured because of Fonda's visit to Hanoi. "The torture resulted in a permanent injury that plagues me to this day," says Hoffman, who suffers a disfigured arm inflicted by brutal communist guards at the POW camp known as the "Zoo." "When Jane Fonda turned up, she asked that some of us come out and talk with her," he recalled bitterly. "No one wanted to. The guards got very upset, because they sensed the propaganda value of a famous American war protestor proving how well they were treating us. "A couple of guards came to my cell and ordered me out. I resisted, and they got violently angry. My arm had been broken when I was shot down, and the Vietnamese broke it a second time. It had not healed well, and they knew it caused me great pain. "They twisted it. Excruciating pain ripped through my body. "Still I resisted and they got more violent, hitting me and shouting, 'You must go!' I knew there was a limit to which I could push them before they might actually kill me. "I was dragged out to see Fonda. I decided to play the role. I knew if I didn't, not only would I suffer - but the other guys would be tortured or beaten or worse. "When I saw Fonda and heard her antiwar rhetoric, I was almost sick to my stomach. She called us criminals and murderers. "When I had to talk to the camera, I used every phony cliche I could. My arm hung limply at my side, and every move caused me pain which showed in my face. "When it was over, Fonda unbelievably did not see through the ruse - or she didn't want to. I was taken away politely - then shoved back into my cell. "I detested Jane Fonda then and I detest her now - but I would fight to the death to protect her right to say what she thinks.
"What she did was a slap in the face to every American. It was wrong, ill-advised and stupid. But it was her right. Unfortunately, it was not my right to refuse to be seen with her. "There is no way I will ever forget what she did to me. I have the reminder here - in an arm that can never be normal again.

In late January, 1973, Fonda divorced her husband and three days later married pro-communist radical leader Tom Hayden, who had founded the revolutionary Students For Democratic Society in 1962 and was a defendant in the conspiracy trial of the "Chicago Seven." In 1975, after North Vietnam violated the 1973 "Peace Agreement" resulting in the takeover of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, Hayden greeted the news by saying "I see this as a result of something we have been working toward for a long time." That "we" includes Fonda of course.

Another infamous deed of Fonda is the naming of her son, Troy. Fonda returned to Vietnam shortly after the war ended in 1975, with her small son, to attend a special service being held in her honor. Fonda was still a recognized idol and hero to the Communist regime from her earlier years of sending money, food and moral support to the North Vietnamese. But the ceremony, it turned out, was not just to recognize and honor Fonda for her love of the Communists. Her newborn son was formally christened and named for the Communist hero Nguyen Van Troi. Troi was a Viet Cong sapper who was executed by the South Vietnamese in 1963 for attempting to assassinate U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Immediately after the christening ceremony, the baby developed a serious case of bronchitis, according to reports. The Vietnamese and Fonda panicked and called for a Russian doctor. The child was treated and Fonda and her child returned to the United States.

As a result of the communist takeover of South Vietnam, Fonda's friends in Hanoi turned all of Vietnam into a communist Gulag of slave labor camps with police-state oppression and no freedom of speech, press and worship. Millions of Vietnamese were forced to flee their country and turned into homeless "boat people."

Years later, Fonda was invited by NASA as V.I.P. to witness the first space shuttle launching. Apparently, one source said, NASA and its officials felt little or no threat from Fonda's taste for Red Government. In late 1987, when it became known that Fonda planned to film her new movie "Stanley & Iris," in Waterbury, Conn., there was a huge backlash from local veterans. Veterans held rallies, promising violent demonstrations if the filming began. Many bumper stickers reading "I'M NOT FONDA HANOI JANE," begin appearing throughout the community. On June 18, 1988, Fonda flew to Waterbury in an attempt to pacify the veterans. She met with them for four hours. Fonda later recalled "I told them my story - why I was antiwar and why I had gone to Vietnam."

A few weeks later Fonda appeared on TV with Barbara Walters and apologized saying: "I'm very sorry for some of what I did...I'd like to say something not just to the veterans in Waterbury but to the men in Vietnam who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of the things I said or did. I feel I owe them an apology...There were times when I was thoughtless and careless...I'm very sorry that I hurt them." The vets did not buy it. They said Fonda, an award winning actress, was faking an apology because veterans were protesting against her all over the country. As a result of the protest, the vet said, her movies were doing badly and she had been removed from Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes.

The vets said "no apology will ever erase the pictures of Jane Fonda in giggly bliss, laughing and clapping her hands, as she mounted the gunner's seat of a communist Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun."

Bui Tin, a former high ranking Vietnam Communist Party official and North Vietnamese Army colonel who served on the North Vietnamese Army general staff during the war, became disillusioned with communism after the war and went into exile in Paris and the United States. He testified in 1991 before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs about his knowledge of U.S. prisoners of war. Bui Tin said in a recent interview by Minnesota human rights activist Stephen Young, that Fonda's highly published support of the North Vietnamese gave them "confidence" to continue to fight and "hold on in the face of the battlefield reverses."

When Fonda appeared at a press conference in Hanoi wearing a red Vietnamese dress and declared she was "ashamed of American actions" in the war and that she would struggle along with the communists, "we were elated," Bui Tin said. He said the American antiwar movement was "essential" to the North Vietnamese strategy for victory. "I'd say a lot of American boys lost their lives because of the encouragement she gave the North Vietnamese," said a former rifle platoon leader from Texas.

In December of 1991, Hanoi Jane, the once fiery communist activist, who advocated violent revolution to overthrow America's democracy and the free enterprise system, married billionaire Ted Turner, a leading American capitalist and chairman of the Atlanta based Turner Broadcasting System Inc., the parent company of Cable News Network.

Today, the communist architects of Ho Chi Minh's brutal war against democracy, freedom and capitalism, which resulted in the deaths of over 3 million North and South Vietnamese, and 58,000 American servicemen, are now "best friends" with Western bankers and capitalist businessmen. They are even traveling the world appealing to foreign investors to bring more big business and money back to Vietnam, so like Hanoi Jane, they too can be rich.

A veteran summed it up: "It is a shame that some of those who fought so well for America can be treated as 'forgotten ghosts' and left to rot as POWs in Hanoi's prisons, while those like Fonda, who so passionately supported our enemy and condemned our system of government, are now overwhelmingly blessed by its wealth." Enough said?

Ramsey Clark:
"It has never happened in history that a nation that has won a war has been held accountable for atrocities committed in preparing for and waging that war. We intend to make this one different. What took place was the use of technological material to destroy a defenseless country. From 125,000 to 300,000 people were killed... We recognize our role in history is to bring the transgressors to justice."

Who are the "WAR CRIMINALS" that Clark is refering to? Former President Bush, Stormin' Norman, Colin Powell and others
The "ATROCITY" happened at the closing of the Gulf War, against armed military forces of IRAQ!!! Clark, you are either naive
or a fool. Thats what happens in war. Soldiers kill soldiers. EXCEPT....when they are unarmed and held captive. Such as your
North Vietnamese buddies did. You do remember them don't you?<this part is under heavy construction....

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