Claim: Jane Fonda betrayed U.S. POWs during the Viet Nam War by turning smuggled messages over to their captors.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, 1999]
When I was at Camp Pendleton receiving combat corpsman training, I noticed that the pickup truck belonging to the gunnery sergeant in charge of our training was adorned with bumper stickers containing extremely unflattering remarks about Jane Fonda. I also noticed a few referred to Ms. Fonda and Vietnam, but at the time I honestly had no idea why.
Being an E-5 and close to rank to our E-7 gunny, after a training rotation one afternoon I decided to ask him about those stickers, and what they had to do with Fonda.
He muttered a few obscenities and proceeded to tell me the story. Fonda, he said, became a traitor during the Vietnam War — a war in which "gunny" had served two tours and for which he had received three Purple Hearts (which is why he enjoyed training Navy corpsmen to be Marine Corps combat corpsmen — they'd saved his life a time or two).
The following excerpts are not "gunny's" words, but when received them in an e-mail recently, it reminded me of his story. And, as ABC's Barbara Walters prepares to honor the traitorous Jane Fonda during Walters' "100 years of great women" program soon, I thought the American people needed to hear this story again. You see, Fonda isn't just exercise videos and the third wheel in "Nine to Five" (the movie).
* * * * * * *
"There are few things I have strong visceral reactions to, but Jane Fonda's participation in what I believe to be blatant treason, is one of them. Part of my conviction comes from exposure to those who suffered her attentions.
"In 1978, the Commandant of the USAF Survival School, a colonel, was a former POW in Ho Lo Prison — the Hanoi Hilton. Dragged from a stinking cesspit of a cell, cleaned, fed, and dressed in clean PJs, he was ordered to describe for a visiting American 'Peace Activist' the 'lenient and humane treatment' he'd received. He spat at Ms. Fonda, was clubbed, and dragged away. During the subsequent beating, he fell forward upon the camp Commandant's feet, accidentally pulling the man's shoe off — which sent that officer berserk.
"In '78, the AF colonel still suffered from double vision — permanently grounding him — from the Vietnamese officer's frenzied application of a wooden baton.
"From 1983-85, Col. Larry Carrigan was 347FW/DO (F-4Es). He'd spent 6 [product] years in the Hilton — the first three of which he was listed as MIA. His wife lived on faith that he was still alive. His group, too, got the cleaned/fed/clothed routine in preparation for a 'peace delegation' visit.
"They, however, had time and devised a plan to get word to the world that they still survived. Each man secreted a tiny piece of paper, with his Social Security number on it, in the palm of his hand. When paraded before Ms. Fonda and a cameraman, she walked the line, shaking each man's hand and asking little encouraging snippets like, 'Aren't you sorry you bombed babies?' and, 'Are you grateful for the humane treatment from your benevolent captors?'"
"Believing this HAD to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of paper. She took them all without missing a beat. At the end of the line and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs, she turned to the officer in charge ... and handed him the little pile of notes.
"Three men died from the subsequent beatings. Col. Carrigan was almost number four.
"For years after their release, a group of determined former POWs, including Col. Carrigan, tried to bring Ms. Fonda and others up on charges of treason. I don't know that they used it, but the charge of 'Negligent Homicide due to Depraved Indifference' would also seem appropriate. Her obvious 'granting of aid and comfort to the enemy' alone should've been sufficient for the treason count. However, to date, Jane Fonda has never been formally charged with anything and continues to enjoy the privileged life of the rich and famous.
"I, personally, think that this is shame on us, the American Citizenry.
"Part of our shortfall is ignorance: Most don't know such actions ever took place.
"The only addition I might add to these sentiments is to remember the satisfaction of relieving myself into the urinal at some air base or another where 'zaps' of Hanoi Jane's face had been applied."
And there is this account:
"I was a civilian economic development advisor in Vietnam, and was captured by the North Vietnamese
communists in South Vietnam in 1968, and held for over 5 years. I spent 27 months in solitary confinement, one year in a cage in Cambodia, and one year in a 'black box' in
Hanoi. My North Vietnamese captors deliberately poisoned and murdered a female missionary, a nurse in a
leprosarium in Ban Me Thuot, South Vietnam, whom I later buried in the jungle near the Cambodian border.
"At one time, I was weighing approximately 90 lb. [my normal weight is 170 lb.). We were Jane Fonda's 'war criminals.'"
"When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi, I was asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet with her. I said yes, for I would like to tell her about the real treatment we POWs were receiving, which was far different from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by Jane Fonda, as 'humane and lenient.' Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky floor on my knees with outstretched arms with a piece of steel re-bar placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane every time my arms dipped.
"Jane Fonda had the audacity to say that the POWs were lying about our torture and treatment. Now ABC is allowing Barbara Walters to honor Jane Fonda in her feature "100 Years of Great Women." Shame on the Disney Company.
"I had the opportunity to meet with Jane Fonda for a couple of hours after I was released. I asked her if she would be willing to debate me on TV. She did not answer me, her husband (at the time), Tom Hayden, answered for her. She was mind controlled by her husband. This does not exemplify someone who should be honored by '100 Years of Great Women.'"
"After I was released, I was asked what I thought of Jane Fonda and the anti-war movement. I said that I held Joan Baez's husband in very high regard, for he thought the war was wrong, burned his draft card and went to prison in protest. If the other anti-war protesters took this same route, it would have brought our judicial system to a halt and ended the war much earlier, and there wouldn't be as many on that somber black granite wall called the Vietnam Memorial. This is democracy. This is the American way.
"Jane Fonda, on the other hand, chose to be a traitor, and went to Hanoi, wore their uniform, propagandized for the communists, and urged American soldiers to desert. As we were being tortured, and some of the POWs murdered, she called us liars. After her heroes — the North Vietnamese communists — took over South Vietnam, they systematically murdered 80,000 South Vietnamese political prisoners. May their souls rest on her head forever."
In the words of Paul Harvey, America, "now you know the rest of the story."
ABC and Babs Walters will undoubtedly include "Hanoi" Jane in their televised celebration because their black souls are too hardened and too imbued with an anti-American sentiment to do anything else. And ultimately, they will all answer for what they have done in their lives. In the meantime, I don't plan on watching anything that has Jane Fonda's face anywhere near it. I won't buy her videos; I won't rent or go see her movies. As far as I'm concerned, she's already dead to me.
Whether or not you agreed with the war in Vietnam, whether you're a Vietnam vet or a former member of the protest movement, or whether you're too old or too young to have been there, the behavior of Jane Fonda towards our own military men is reprehensible beyond belief. All I ask is that you think about these accounts the next time you see her. Let your conscience guide your actions from there.
Variations: An October 2009 variant claims:
SHE REALLY WAS A TRAITOR!!
and now OBAMA wants to honor her ......!!!!
A TRAITOR IS ABOUT TO BE HONORED
KEEP THIS MOVING ACROSS AMERICA
How Barack Obama got dragged into this is a mystery, in that the proposed "honoring" the missive decries (inclusion in ABC's 30 April 1999 "A Celebration: 100 Years of Great Women") happened ten years before he became President.
Origins: It is perhaps indicative of the divisive nature of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s that one of the persons most commonly associated with the war was neither a world leader nor a politician, neither a general nor a soldier, neither a participant nor a casualty of the war, but an American actress.
In July 1972, during the waning days of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, actress Jane Fonda incurred the enmity of untold thousands of Vietnam veterans and their families (as well as service members for generations to come) when she arrived in Hanoi, North Vietnam, and began a two-week tour of the country conducted by uniformed military hosts. Aside from visiting villages, hospitals, schools, and factories, Fonda also posed for pictures in which she was shown applauding North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners, was photographed peering into the sights of an NVA anti-aircraft artillery launcher, made ten propagandistic Tokyo
Rose-like radio broadcasts in which she denounced American political and military leaders as "war criminals" and spoke with seven U.S. POWs at a carefully
arranged press conference.
Although Fonda's actions in visiting North Vietnam were sufficient to earn her the wrath of many Americans, in the years since those events took place they have been embellished to the point that the one tale most commonly associated with her Vietnam trip is an incident that never took place — a tale about U.S. POWs who furtively slipped messages to Fonda while she was meeting with them and whom Fonda promptly betrayed by turning those messages over to the POWs' North Vietnamese captors (resulting in several of those prisoners' being beaten, tortured, or killed). The fact is that while in North Vietnam, Fonda met with only a single group of seven U.S POWs: all seven of those POWs agreed to meet with her, no POWs were tortured for declining to meet with her (or for behaving inappropiately during the meeting), and no POWs secretly slipped Fonda messages which she turned over to the North Vietnamese. The persons named in inflammatory claims about this apocryphal incident have repeatedly and categorically denied the events they supposedly were part of.
"It's a figment of somebody's imagination," says Ret. Col. Larry Carrigan, one of the servicemen mentioned in the 'slips of paper' incident. Carrigan was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and did spend time in a POW camp. He has no idea why the story was attributed to him, saying, "I never met Jane Fonda." In 2005, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Carrigan "is so tired of having to repeat that he wasn't beaten after Fonda's visit and that there were no beating deaths at that time that he won't talk to the media anymore."
The tale about a defiant serviceman who spit at Jane Fonda and was severely beaten as a result is often attributed to Air Force pilot Jerry Driscoll. He has also repeatedly stated on the record that it did not originate with him:
Driscoll said he never met Fonda, as the e-mail claims — and therefore, never spit on her and didn't suffer permanent double vision from a subsequent beating. "Totally false. It did not happen," Driscoll said.
"I don't know who came up with [my] name. The trouble that individual has caused me!" he said, referring to the time he has spent repeatedly denying the persistent myth.
Mike McGrath, President of NAM-POWs, has also stepped forward to disclaim the story:
Please excuse the generic response, but I have been swamped with so many e-mails on the subject of the Jane Fonda article (Carrigan, Driscoll, strips of paper, torture and deaths of POWs, etc.) that I have to resort to this pre-scripted rebuttal. The truth is that most of this never happened. This is a hoax story placed on the internet by unknown Fonda haters. No one knows who initiated the story. Please assist by not propagating the story. Fonda did enough bad things to assure her a correct place in the garbage dumps of history. We don't want to be party to false stories, which could be used as an excuse that her real actions didn't really happen either. I have spoken with all the parties named: Carrigan, Driscoll, et al. They all state that this particular internet story is a hoax and they wish to disassociate their names from the false story.
Despite the claims of hundreds of Vietnam veterans who maintain they were "there" and affirm these tales as true, Jane Fonda met with only seven American POWs while in North Vietnam. All of their identities are known (Edison Miller, Walter Wilber, James Padgett, David Wesley Hoffman, Kenneth James Fraser, William G. Byrns, and Edward Elias), none of them was coerced into meeting her (they all volunteered to do so), and none of them reported her betraying their attempts to slip her information about themselves. There would have been no reason to conceal such messages in the first place, as the North Vietnamese allowed Fonda to openly carry home letters from the POWs to their families. Some of the POWs who did meet with Fonda have spoken out on the record to disclaim the apocryphal story about her alleged betrayal:
"The whole [e-mail] story about Jane Fonda is just malarkey," said Edison Miller, 73, of California, a former Marine Corps pilot held more than five years. Miller was among seven POWs who met with Fonda in Hanoi. He said he didn't recall her asking any questions other than about their names, if that. He said that he passed her no piece of paper, and that to his knowledge, no other POW in the group did, despite the e-mail's claims.
Jane Fonda's inclusion in ABC's 30 April 1999 "A Celebration: 100 Years of Great Women" fanned the flames of anger within many who felt she had never properly atoned for her behavior.
In 1988, sixteen years after the fact, Fonda finally met with Vietnam veterans to apologize for her actions. This nationally-televised apology (during which she characterized her actions as "thoughtless and careless") came at a time when New England vets were successfully disrupting a film project she was working on, leading more than a few to read a huge dollop of self-interest into her apology.
Fonda again apologized in 2005, an act which once again coincided with the release of a film in which she had a starring role (Monster-in-Law, her first leading role since 1990's Stanley & Iris) and a book tour to promote her autobiography. As she had several years earlier, Fonda made it quite clear that she was apologizing only for the act of posing for photographs while seated at a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, and even then her apology was couched in the most oblique terms possible (i.e., she didn't address the people she harmed and say she was sorry for hurting them; she only issued the self-confessional statement that she "regretted" one of her actions):
2000: "I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft carrier, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes. It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanized such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless."
2005: "I will go to my grave regretting that. The image of Jane Fonda, 'Barbarella,' Henry Fonda's daughter, just a woman sitting on an enemy aircraft gun was a betrayal. It was like I was thumbing my nose at the military and at the country that gave me privilege."
Fonda emphasized that she was not apologizing for any other actions connected with her trip to North Vietnam, or for any of her other anti-war activities:
The 67-year-old actress and activist, however, defended her decision to go to Hanoi and said she had no regrets about being photographed with American POWs there or making broadcasts on Radio Hanoi because she was trying to stop the war.
"There are hundreds of American delegations that had met with the POWs," she added. "Both sides were using the POWs for propaganda. It's not something that I will apologize for."
One man who didn't take Fonda's confessions to heart was 54-year-old Michael Smith. While Fonda was autographing copies of her autobiography, My Life So Far, in Kansas City in April 2005 as part of a promotional book-signing tour, Smith, who said he was a Vietnam veteran, waited in line for 90 minutes and then spat tobacco juice on Fonda.
