Forgive Jane Fonda?
Jane Fonda has written an autobiography. She's been all over the media promoting it, and the question of whether Vietnam veterans and other American citizens should forgive her past anti-war activities* has gained new currency.
I'm a Vietnam veteran. I served two tours as an attack helicopter pilot, with a couple of real Purple Hearts among the other ribbons I wear on my uniform. People who know my background have often asked my opinion of Jane Fonda, apparently believing that I'm somehow better qualified than most to judge her. But I'm not. I'm just a citizen who, on behalf of my country, spent some time in hell in my early and mid twenties. In a larger sense, the Vietnam war profoundly affected all of us, even those born long after it ended. It continues to resonate throughout our society, even among ill-educated people who don't know where the echo comes from.
By the time I was in Vietnam on my second tour of duty, I agreed with those who thought the war was a mistake. As many combat veterans who served during those later stages of the war will tell you, my main purposes were to help my brothers-in-arms survive and to live through it myself. I often wasn't able to do the former and very nearly failed at the latter. I live with it every day, even now. Some days it's only a fleeting thought, or maybe the face of a long-dead comrade flitting through my memory, but it's there. Other days it comes from outside, most recently in non-stop news reports showing photos of a laughing Jane Fonda perched on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.
I didn't march with them, but I didn't disagree with those who demonstrated against the war in a reasonable way. I thought those who refused the draft and went to jail were admirable, at least in the sense that they were willing to pay the price for doing what they thought was right. I had less regard for those who fled to Canada and other countries, but I understood them.
However, there is a line beyond which opposition to war and government policy in general is unacceptable. That line can be defined in various ways, and different people have different definitions. For me, when it comes to a war in which American troops are committed, "adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort" is never acceptable. That quotation is from Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. It's the simple, easily understood definition of treason. And Jane Fonda is guilty of treason.
For various reasons of political expediency, neither she nor others who crossed the line in their opposition to the Vietnam war were prosecuted for treason or lesser appropriate offenses. For her to apologize, as she has in various limited ways since the late 1980s, is not enough. Murderers rotting in jail are often sorry for their crimes, but they're still murderers. I'm always happy to see them admit the error of their ways, and it doesn't bother me if they write autobiographies in their jail cells. Which is where Jane Fonda should have written hers.
Do I personally forgive Jane Fonda? Of course not. No more than I forgive John Kerry, who didn't cross the line as clearly as Fonda but, at the very least, danced all over it.
*Go here for a useful discussion of what Jane Fonda did and didn't do.
I'm a Vietnam veteran. I served two tours as an attack helicopter pilot, with a couple of real Purple Hearts among the other ribbons I wear on my uniform. People who know my background have often asked my opinion of Jane Fonda, apparently believing that I'm somehow better qualified than most to judge her. But I'm not. I'm just a citizen who, on behalf of my country, spent some time in hell in my early and mid twenties. In a larger sense, the Vietnam war profoundly affected all of us, even those born long after it ended. It continues to resonate throughout our society, even among ill-educated people who don't know where the echo comes from.
By the time I was in Vietnam on my second tour of duty, I agreed with those who thought the war was a mistake. As many combat veterans who served during those later stages of the war will tell you, my main purposes were to help my brothers-in-arms survive and to live through it myself. I often wasn't able to do the former and very nearly failed at the latter. I live with it every day, even now. Some days it's only a fleeting thought, or maybe the face of a long-dead comrade flitting through my memory, but it's there. Other days it comes from outside, most recently in non-stop news reports showing photos of a laughing Jane Fonda perched on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.
I didn't march with them, but I didn't disagree with those who demonstrated against the war in a reasonable way. I thought those who refused the draft and went to jail were admirable, at least in the sense that they were willing to pay the price for doing what they thought was right. I had less regard for those who fled to Canada and other countries, but I understood them.
However, there is a line beyond which opposition to war and government policy in general is unacceptable. That line can be defined in various ways, and different people have different definitions. For me, when it comes to a war in which American troops are committed, "adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort" is never acceptable. That quotation is from Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. It's the simple, easily understood definition of treason. And Jane Fonda is guilty of treason.
For various reasons of political expediency, neither she nor others who crossed the line in their opposition to the Vietnam war were prosecuted for treason or lesser appropriate offenses. For her to apologize, as she has in various limited ways since the late 1980s, is not enough. Murderers rotting in jail are often sorry for their crimes, but they're still murderers. I'm always happy to see them admit the error of their ways, and it doesn't bother me if they write autobiographies in their jail cells. Which is where Jane Fonda should have written hers.
Do I personally forgive Jane Fonda? Of course not. No more than I forgive John Kerry, who didn't cross the line as clearly as Fonda but, at the very least, danced all over it.
*Go here for a useful discussion of what Jane Fonda did and didn't do.
28 Comments:
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I'm having trouble formulating my comment (imagine that, me at a loss for words). Your writing is so real and affecting. You remind me a lot of my father. He didn't write as well, that's not the reason :-). He taught me (perhaps through example) that people do good and bad things, and that they should be expected to pay for the bad ones. He (like you) was never one to discount real feelings and respected those who disagreed with him, but he also held fast to certain principles. It was not about donning a mentality for him; it was about right and wrong, and remembering the difference.
One of my favorite memories of him was an interview he gave in Arizona years ago when his design for the state's Purple Heart license plate was unveiled. A witless reporter asked him whether he was proud to have earned a Purple Heart. I'm sure he just sounded like a crotchety old man to most of the world, but his response is telling about the man that he was. He replied, "It isn't pride in earning a Purple Heart. I am proud to have served my country." Makes me tear up to think of it even now.
Thanks for sharing your wonderful insight with the world (and me).
Tom, that was a very beautiful and moving post.
diogenesfreed, that was a very beautiful and moving comment.
Since your a Vietnam veteran you might be interested in visiting the Federal Observer (www.federalobserver.com) the sites host is also a Vietnam veteran, a door gunner. Besides hosting the site he does an hour long on line broadcast starting at 10:AM EST. You can hear that by going to his site and clicking on "On The Air"
God Bless America, God Save The Republic.
I've been reading the same news stories about Fonda, and I believe that she'll do anything to remain in the spotlight. That doesn't excuse her action, it makes it worse. To use a war as self promotion is the very height of conceit. In her book, she blames her father or her ex-husbands for every mistake she ever made. Horse Hocky!! The woman should just grow up (at her age I would think she already had) and take credit/blame for her own actions. Bad Jane. Bad, bad Jane.
My father is a Vietnam vet, and I have never liked Jane; mostly because I felt like the men and women who served in Vietnam did not need someone stirring up support against them in a scary and deadly time. I have no problem with her anti-war stance, but I also feel as if what she did helped to make a hostile environment for vets. Her asking for forgiveness seems genuine, but then I heard this week that she is starting to become vocal about the Iraq war now. It looks like a case of a dog returning to her vomit.
Lovely post; I enjoyed reading it as well as all of the extra links contained within it.
Excellent post! I was in Nam also (5th Mech) and have a similar opinion of Fonda.
While I don't share your views of Fonda, I found your reasoned opinion to be very persuasive and heartfelt. Where you lost me is with your need to end your post with a swipe at John Kerry. Here is a man who got smeared during the campaign after serving honorably in the same war as you, and risking his own life in the service of our country.You may disagree with his stance on the war upon his return, I personally do not, but you should certainly respect his service.
I'd say that meeting with likeminded people to plan assassinations of U.S. Senators and meeting with communists in Paris and returning to spew communist talking points is a tad bit more than dancing on the line!
But...to each their own.
Thank you for your service and Welcome home!!
(Better late than never...but I've been doing it for 33 years.)
I'm just a random anti(current)-war reader passing through when I came across this post. It was very moving and I liked it very much. I wish that in the 'arguments' over whether war is right or not more people could express theirselves like you did, instead of getting lost in round after round of name calling. It also makes the case more clearly for why people hate Jane Fonda so much than I have heard before. Just being 21, I wasn't around for all this as it happened. Thank you for the good read.
That was one of the more powerful and persuasive posts I've read. I was too young to serve in Vietnam, and probably would have taken steps to avoid service (as I was not too young to oppose the war). Even before reading your post, however, the sight of Jane Fonda on that anti-aircraft gun always made me cringe. You are right in saying that there was a line crossed in how she voiced her opposition. Excellent post.
Tom,
What a well-reasoned opinion. Although I was a Kerry supporter, I strongly agree with being able to disagree with someone in a cililized manner.
I also agree that Fonda stepped over the line in her actions. As she ages she has to accept that her actions will follow her to her grave. Her obit would be incomplete without a mention of her actions during a time of war.
Great post as always, Tom. I'm just curious as to why Fonda was never prosecuted.
I have no respect for her. Never have. Never will. But, she did look pretty good in Barbarella. As far as treason, correct me if I'm wrong, but, doesn't an act of war declared by Congress apply in this particular situation? Which never happened with Vietnam, now Iraq, and previously, Korea. Could she have been legally found guilty, under that pretext alone, plus taking into consideration the amount of money she could afford for legal representation?
Great post, thanks for serving your country!
TY Tom for your service to our Nation. Great article I saved it.
Forgive Jane Fonda? NEVER..Even if she begged on bended knee to me pesonally..She did not have to go over to Nam to do her dirty work..and causse more suffering to the prisoners there..What an Idiot stunt..and she can't suffer enough in her lifetime for this colossal mistake..
Good comments on a good post.
Anon took issue with Tom's "swipe at Kerry". I think Tom has made it clear that he does respect Kerry's service. I'm old enough to remember what Kerry did on returning and the effects of it. I saw it then and still see it as very wrong.
I think Kerry betrayed those still serving by going before Congress and testifying to all sorts of atrocities. And it wasn't just that - the same types of things were being said at demonstrations. Sorry, but it's relevant. I don't believe for a moment that the majority of the soldiers or sailors were committing atrocities over there.
It was a bad war being conducted badly because of what I now see as political stuff coming from the very top of the US administration. The war put people serving in our Armed Forces in a bad position. Kerry had the absolute right to speak out against it.
Kerry could have made the same points by talking about the difficulty of countering guerilla tactics conducted among civilians - he did not have to claim that our military people were committing atrocities right and left to make the protest his conscience demanded. Plus, the man went to Paris and met with the enemy.
Our guys got shot at twice - once over there and then over here. Kerry had a significant part in creating that situation and those cries of "babykillers". There's a limit. Granted, Kerry was young. If Kerry had apologized for some of what he said including the gratuitous slams at the people still serving I would have forgiven him. He didn't. I would have found it almost impossible to vote for Kerry because of this point alone. I don't really feel that the Democratic party gave me an option in the last election.
As for Fonda, pfui. She doesn't have the moral sense of a cow. If you can't figure that sort of thing out by the time you are 60 you never will. No one owes forgiveness to someone who doesn't recognize his or her own responsibility, and Fonda doesn't and has made that clear.
I'm all for being "anti-war" and all but Jane Fonda can ROT in the personal hell she created for herself at the expense of the comfort of our servicemen in Nam. To speak out against war is in itself, honorable (for a great example of an honorable anti-war pundit, see Pope Jean Paul II) but what Fonda did was tragic, unexcusable, disgusting and unforgiveable. I would expect that one day in the future, her grave will be urinated upon by many.
Obviously, I am not as "eloquent" of a writer or "opinion expresser" as the rest of you are. My hat's off to ya.
I graduated from high school in 1971. My draft lottery number was 29 which meant that I was near the top of the list at my local draft board.
I remember getting a notice to appear along the side of a rural highway at 6 a.m. on a summer morning in 1972 to catch a bus into Houston for a morning full of aptitude tests and an afternoon physical exam. I remember standing in long lines in my underwear waiting for my turn, hearing an occasional thud up ahead, the sound of healthy young men fainting at the sight of their own blood. I remember standing in a row, side-by side, twenty abreast, as we were told to drop our drawers, turn around and grab our ankles while the doctor, a young lieutenant, inspected our posteriors one-by-one. I remember waiting for the bus at the end of the day and watching that same lieutenant use his dog tag to pry the tongue out of the trachea of a young man who had collapsed on the street in the grip of a grand mal seizure.
Two weeks later I was notified that my status was 1-A and later that summer I took another exam at the office of a Coast Guard recruiter. I was told that when I got my draft notice I could still enlist with the Coast Guard and that was my plan, not realizing then that many of the men on Swift boats in the Mekong Delta were serving with the Coast Guard. I spent the next two years expecting greetings from my president every time I opened my mailbox. That notification never arrived and I've never understood why.
I know I lived in a real nice suburb and my dad was a college professor and the fact that I was a college student wasn't supposed to make any difference. I know that I campaigned for George McGovern that summer as the youngest delegate at the county caucus from one of the only towns in Texas that always voted Republican. I had no reason to suspect that anyone might have intervened or pulled strings on my behalf until last year when I began reading about the distinguished service record of a certain pilot with a prominent surname who allegedly did or didn't drill with the Texas Air National Guard that summer.
When the war ended in 1975 I nearly enlisted in the all volunteer army, mainly because I had spent the better part of three years getting psyched for the military service I had considered inevitable. I understood what Watergate meant the day it was first reported in the news. I didn't understand why it took over a year before the story gathered enough momentum to result in an investigation. The war ended because the Nixon administration lacked sufficient credibility to pursue it. John Kerry and Jane Fonda played key roles in undermining Nixon's credibility. I admire them for exercising the courage of their convictions.
I visited Viet Nam for the first time in 2002. I toured the Cu Chi tunnels the same day that I watched footage on CNN of bunker busters exploding at Tora Bora. My guide was a pleasant young fellow who was obviously the son of an American G.I. and I was polite enough not to contradict him when he told me with a straight face that all of the children of American soldiers had been sent to the U.S. many years earlier.
Last year I ate Thanksgiving dinner here in Manila. I was seated across the table from a Vietnamese physician. Another person, a woman next to me, was talking about trying to decide what kind of table she should get for her dining room. I suggested that she not ask Americans for advice as we Americans are famous for spending years quibbling over the shapes of our tables. The Vietnamese physician burst out laughing. Nobody else got the joke.
I have one word for you Tom
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forive others, neither will your father forgive your trespasses.
Matthew 6:14-15 Jesus
To serve and protect is a high honour, to say that soldiers are war criminals in such a way as to insinuate that that is their function is taking it too far. In saying that, I believe that many people step in manure due to whatever reason, ignorance being the primary reason (when they’re adults), and they do realize it at a much later stage and they can’t, of course, reverse such errs.
I have a problem with celebrities taking on large causes, namely because their celebrity gets in the way of the cause. To effectively head over to enemy territory during a time of armed conflict is treason, if Fonda served within the military she would have been severely penalized but because she was an actress this, although not forgotten and always referred to, has been ‘excused’. ‘She’s an actress and what does she know’, things like that. The reality is she was an adult, and she should have had more sense to not make American soldiers the subject of her protest. Soldiers (on frontlines) endure things that civilians will never endure in their entire lives and to tar soldiers from one’s own nation is pure folly.
I haven’t directly experienced the Vietnam War, Fonda was there a year after I was born but over the years I’ve come across the reference ‘Hanoi Jane’ many times but at the same time I’ve also come across references of glam celebrity Barbarella so her celebrity merges with her tainted protest all the time, it can never be erased. Her obituary will most likely contain references to her as ‘Hanoi Jane’ (I’m thinking). Because my ex partner is a war veteran (different war), I’ve had the privilege of discussing many aspects of his experiences and they were never pretty.
The only wars I’ve experienced, directly (although indirect due to the distance), was Desert Storm and the most recent war in Iraq. Although people were divided and I wasn’t ‘for’ this war, to sit there and blame soldiers is insane. A soldier never has the luxury of picking and choosing the war they are going to fight in, it’s their duty to serve. I suppose what disappointed me most of all was seeing celebrities, on many awards night shows, receiving their awards (their Oscars) or whatever else and then including their own little anti-war rant within their speeches. I suppose in their mind, they think that their celebrity will illuminate an issue, but they hardly do anything but use five minutes of their time to rant an anti-war epithet before sitting in their VIP seats while soldiers are out there looking out for their own colleagues (I prefer to use the word associates or friends, I’m veering toward friends), getting shot at and/or witnessing death before their eyes.
The Vietnam War, thanks to celebrities such as Jane and their pathetic efforts, veterans have experienced a rough ride upon their return. I’ve read about Australian Vietnam veterans being spat on here, and for many years (it’s only been recent) they weren’t accepted to march in the annual Anzac Day parade here. That’s only been a recent phenomenon.
I’ve always thought it bad enough when religious institutions tangle their limbs with governments/politics but what is becoming more prevalent now are celebrities using their image to effectively kill two birds with one stone, publicity wise and it’s wrong.
As always, your posts are very illuminating.
L'etranger, thanks for your thoughtful comment. Fonda is often criticized for not being particularly bright, and I think that's true. Kerry, however, doesn't have that excuse. He's a smart guy, and his treason (what else can we call it?) was motivated by political ambition.
In the beginning I thought John Kerry did have a running chance, but sometime after this I was watching Letterman one night here and saw Bill Clinton on the show (promoting his book at the time) and he used it as an opportunity to rail on about Kerry. Then after these, on the short news footage of the campaign, there was an image of Ted Kennedy singing (at one of the conventions) and, this is a really far fetched opinion, I thought that Kerry was 'sunk' right there.
It's one thing to be capable professionally, and other thing to have Ted Kennedy, a man who shirked his responsibility of reporting a woman's death, and Bill Clinton, a man who globally humiliated his wife, 'backing' you as an electoral candidate for federal office.
Fair enough, Arnold Schwarzenneger isn't a prime intellectual piece (but that's because of his career in Hollywood), but no one knows behind closed doors and he was never a dumb man he just did what he did to succeed in a new land, but Arnie doesn't turn around and say 'I didn't have sex with that woman' or try to convince millions that fellatio isn't 'sex'.
Definitely motivated by politicial ambition, it also helps that his wife is a 'Heinz' widow as well.
You know, it's similar to Australia in that the Labor Party here has basically imploded compared to the Liberal Party which is the dominant party in federal parliament in terms of senate seats. But we're disimilar in that there is more stability within ranks in the US compared to what's happening here. Here, Prime Minister Howard has to step in to curtail ministers within his party who try to create feminist debates of little merit.
Jane Fonda did what she could to help out the ones morally in the right, the North Vietnamese who wanted what the vast amjority of South Vietnamese ALSO wanted: a unified and independent Vietnam, free from foreign occupation. If the U.S. would have stuck by its word and let the elections take place in 1956 the country would have peacefully unified through the ballot box but the U.S. realized the Communists, favoring unification of Vietnam, would win by an overwhelming majority so they cancelled the elections and ruled the puppet state "South Vietnam" with greatly unpopular puppet dictators. But the good guys won in the end and the last fascist helicopter left Vietnam on 30 April 1975 as the Communists crashed through the gates of the U.S. embassy in then-Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). They were in the right, and America was 100% in the wrong in trying to keep the Vietnamese people artificially separated. By helping the side who was right instead of dead wrong Jane Fonda can hardly be legitimately criticized, and only is by the "my country right or wrong" brainless apes who sadly are a majority of America's people if one would stretch the meaning of the word "people".
Jane Fonda's mistake was selling out and going back to the dungheap America when she could have lived overseas.
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