The Vietnam War can be said to have lasted anywhere from 10 to 70 years depending on the composition of events you use to define it. However you define it, it did have a finite life span. The same will be true of the peace movement, though it has yet to be determined whether its end will come before or after the demise of the free world. That’s the war I’m fighting now with this book against the EIPJ alumni and friends’ greatest recorded hits.

Those Siren songs from the `70s and `80s have lured the Clinton ship of state to jagged rocks of protracted negotiation and debate about tyrants moving swiftly in the `90s to get what they want through force of arms. Time cannot exist without the movement of all finite things at different rates of speed from one point of departure and arrival to another. Think of that difference in movement between coming and going as the difference between hitting and missing a moving target, and you’ve got the picture.

The world now has a quarrelsome, volunteer police force which takes longer to assemble than most crimes against humanity take to commit. That rules out the possibility of a rapid response to any of them, much less a deterrent. Citizens of the world for whom that’s unacceptable have no organization through which we can speak or act. And who knows how long it will take for one of us to launch our first pre-emptive strike against the moving target of another killing field scenario with the publication, distribution and promotion of a book like this. When it happens, the celebrated works of the EIPJ alumni and friends will already be in place to thwart it.

Prior strategic positioning obviously gets them there first, by shortening the interval between departure and arrival to zero. That "interval between" is where the Fates in Greek mythology, more powerful than the gods, spun, wove and cut the threads of life in ways known only to them. Of the three, Atropos, with her abhorred shears, was the final authority on life and death. The power of termination is the ultimate power of time. Only when we have wrestled it away from the EIPJ, with the certainty of an overwhelming military response to any killing field scenario before it begins, will fewer of them begin and more of them be cut short.

Meanwhile, the free world scrambles to respond to the Serbs’ use of peace talks to launch a crushing assault on a Moslem city designated a "safe zone" by the UN. Bill Clinton, of all people, declared that they will not be allowed territorial gains by force of arms without paying a price—to which a Vietnam parallel was legitimately called for but never drawn. Can you picture Cokie Roberts reminding her media audiences that President Johnson said the same thing in 1964 about a power grab in another young republic? That’s what "Operation Rolling Thunder" was supposed to do and why enemy body counts relative to our own became the measure of success against them when that bloodless show of air power proved our reluctance to use it on them. Can you picture anyone at NPR drawing a parallel between the arms embargo against Bosnia in the name of peace and the cutoff in military aid to the defenders of that other republic, also in the name of peace? That would be a reading of history which would not have allowed the cutoff of arms or the assault on Gorazde under cover of a peace accord in the first place.

It’s hard to talk about history as a dynamic component of time because its coming and going can take several human lifetimes to be recognized and confirmed as true. You need a simple standard tied to events in progress that operates on the same principle as all events in progress. You will find it in an old-fashioned analog clock with a hand that you can see in sustained motion.

When I was learning how to read the hours and the fractions of hours in a day, the sweep second hand of the clock on the kitchen wall never slowed, accelerated or hesitated. Its constant, visible movement through each point ringing the clock’s face clearly illustrated a future of some kind where it was going and a past where it had been. But have you ever looked at where a sweep second hand was and tried to point to now?

I never did learn how to tell time in that kitchen or in a classroom. I just learned enough to fake it the way everybody else was faking it. Telling time was a convention of language that didn’t require an understanding of time beyond the utility of its measure for planning the activities of a day. We could say what time it was, but we didn’t know what that meant and didn’t have to, apart from what we needed to catch a bus on Monday, to watch the latest episode of "The Twilight Zone" on Friday, or to hear the latest word in current events any day of the week. History was something we read about in books without "cuss words" or sex or useful connections to the present. The future was a theoretical abstraction, the exotic domain of great actors on the world stage of the moment, of science fiction, parapsychology and the occult.

Time was a mystery. All we knew about it were the cyclical events in earth’s relationship to the sun that gave us a common language of clocks and calendars.

When you’re talking time, you’re also talking relativity, wherein an event relative to other events might be past, present or future depending on where you are in relation to it. You can say, for instance, that you sat down an hour ago, that you are currently reading this book, this page or this paragraph (but not "this word" because that’s already in the past) and you will watch a movie later on. Sitting down would be the past for you, reading would be the present and watching the movie would be the future. All of that would be the future to me and the past to our future generations. But wherever we face the same issue from past years, decades or centuries, where the future is ahead of you and me, the time for both of us is now.

Now, is not a segment of time between past and future; it is the process that weaves them together, the motion of the second hand I saw as a child relative to the fixed segments ringing the clock’s face. It is the combined efforts of Clotho and Lachesis, the Spinner and the Disposer of Lots who have granted me the power to write these words and you the power to read them. I am, in fact, counting on our working together, right now, to change the way America chooses the types of wars it will sooner or later have to fight and how it fights them. This is a practical application of how we can make events move in time, as well as space, before it’s too late to exercise our will. Faster than light speed, means going backward in time, which is the only way I know to leap ahead of it.

I’m not playing with words. I am literally talking about time travel, the power of mind to willfully shape events in progress by altering the past from the future’s point of view. Ahead of me in time is a dictator who will use the Vietnam model of peace for "ethnic cleansing," power grabbing or as a model for cheap military victory over the free world in some other circumstance. He could come from an outlaw state with nukes like North Korea or a place that doesn’t even have a name yet. It will happen until that model of giving peace a chance in the face of genocide gets the burial it deserves.

Not everyone can see it happening now because a current event cannot be perceived independent of how it was perceived before. Only by recalling the past as it must apply to the future can we see the future as it must be. That’s what it means to tell time, a prerequisite to successful time travel.

My friend Calvin who has a passion for flying calls it "staying ahead of the power curve." When a pilot is ahead of the curve, it means that he has the power to fly his plane and to land it wherever he wants. When he gets behind the power curve, the plane flies itself into the ground. That can and does happen when low visibility conditions distort his trusted earthbound perceptions of which way is up. He must rely on his instruments to compensate for those distortions in advance of a fatal compounding of errors that can’t be perceived or controlled. That can mean doing the opposite of what feels right because he can’t feel himself leaning to one side. It can mean listening to voices that tell him to do what common sense tells him is crazy.

I’m sure that the men in charge of the Challenger’s last flight thought it was crazy to postpone it because of a silly thing like marginally cold weather when a dramatic message to Moscow was riding on a timely lift-off. If the shuttle had not been designed with a crappy o-ring system, a few degrees of temperature would not have made a vital difference. If NASA had been managed so that warnings of engineers not subject to the perceptual distortions of politics could be judged on their own merits, those warnings may have been heeded. Considered only on the level of their merits, like the instrument readings of a plane in thick clouds, they would have been.

Those low-level engineers who knew the real potential for a space shuttle catastrophe were in the same position of trying to hit a moving target that I’m in with the ever changing new world disorder. Being where they were is what allowed them to see what the problem was. But getting the message up to higher management required a higher level of status than they could acquire in time to do it through the political gravity of NASA’s normal channels. That pull of gravity did not work against the White House emissaries who had a message about a speech the president was determined to make with the Challenger in orbit. It went down to NASA’s top team who did not want to embarrass the president or themselves by having the speech changed because they couldn’t get the ship off the ground. That lean toward the wishes of higher authority put the entire mission behind the power curve.

Seven people died horrible deaths in the attempt to coordinate the orbit of a shuttle carrying the first teacher into space with a prime-time presidential speech. By the same token, hundreds of thousands of times as many people have died horrible deaths to keep Hanoi Jane’s friends in charge of prime time news from "changing their speech" on the lessons of Vietnam.

Governments can prevent credible dissent on key issues of policy from becoming public only when they control the national media, which is why tyrants insist on it. When they don’t, whoever does can. A low-level sponsor of public radio would not have to write and publish his own book to put those issues on the public discourse agenda if it could be done through normal channels. The EIPJ alumni and friends are the normal channels. They are accessories before the fact who report on crimes against humanity after the fact with award-winning style and compassion for the immediate victims of someone else’s policies. Timely comments, within the bounds of good taste, are always welcomed. Only, no connection of the media in general to the peace movement is ever considered timely or within bounds.

I have had different feelings about listing the names of EIPJ members. In the first place, I never saw such a list. When I was researching it for The Invisible Warrior, I ran into a dead end at the library. I suppose I could have taken my search elsewhere, beginning with WDET’s former news director, Chuck Wilber, who mentioned over the air that he was once a member of "that Jane Fonda peace thing." That was before I knew there was one other than FTA. But when she was interviewed for the second time on National Public Radio, I realized that membership in any Jane Fonda thing for peace was not the crucial question. Loyalty to its mission and its members was.

I had to know only one member to know what would be considered out of bounds by the people at NPR who were loyal to her. Their loyalty to her EIPJ philosophy of peace through war on the Pentagon and the lessons of Munich that drew us into Korea and Vietnam was all I needed to know about that.

You may not find that philosophy in the EIPJ charter; you will in its practices and those of NPR. At 47 years of age, I can see that as I could not have at 27 or 37. At 27, I didn’t know what the EIPJ was, since the publicity surrounding it came during the months when I was in physical combat in Vietnam. At 37, when I read about it in Thomas Kiernan’s Jane Fonda: Heroine For Our Time, I was in figurative combat over lessons of Vietnam which had not been tested enough to know how consistently they would be applied. There was still a chance that what I saw in The Authorities would be episodic rather than systemic, with no predictable pattern traceable to the war and peace philosophy of Hanoi Jane. That is no longer true.

You fight an institution by attacking its image and an idea by attacking its worth, which is what EIPJ members and sympathizers did until the media-wise American generals of Desert Storm gained their favor. But the only way to fight an idea like the lesson of Munich is to deny its relevance or to ignore it, which they also did.

A blatant example of both was a Fonda Films movie with Charles Durning, a decorated veteran of WWII, as the president and Burt Lancaster as an escaped convict who kidnaps him to expose the truth about Vietnam. It was, fortunately, too blatant to be as effective as she would have liked.

Robin Williams’ "Good Morning Vietnam" did a far better job of saying how stupid the war was and how criminal our military was in pursuing it. Jane herself told "20/20’s" Barbara Walters that he said in his movie all the things she tried to say in all of her antiwar activities, including her FTA show for American POWs in Hanoi. I’m glad she did because most people absorbed the message in "Good Morning" without making the connection, and those of us who said there was one were labeled paranoid for doing it.

According to Jane’s movie, the secret motive for the war was a stupid thing called "credibility." President Durning was assassinated in the end by an American enlisted man on orders of an American general to keep that secret from being revealed to the American people. Alfred Hitchcock called the motive in a movie like that a "McGaffin," or some such widget-like word. That’s a dramatic device for moving the plot along. It could be any number of things depending on the action you want to see. Ironically, it was essential for the credibility of the movie to pick something real.

Credibility was one of the big reasons for pursuing the Vietnam War, but it was no more a secret than Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia or his threat to bomb the NVA if they violated the terms of the `73 Paris peace accords. The idea being attacked was that our military credibility was worth the price of war against the communists in Vietnam.

American military credibility was an oxymoron joke among the media elite, as much of an oxymoron joke as American military intelligence. You can see how that would be humorous to those "peace now" people of the `60s and `70s in charge of deciding what were timely concerns at NPR for the `80s and `90s. It might be to anybody who couldn’t tell time.

That brings us full circle to 1990 and the introduction to a book that was begun three years earlier. In reading that introduction, you are stepping back to the beginning stages of the Gulf War, the moving target I was trying to hit when I started the book and sent the first rough copies of the manuscript to Alex Chadwick.

It took a year to write and rewrite what you’ve read so far. It was a year of image warfare in Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia and Rwanda, where an early credible threat of American military force could have produced a more humane result than "compassion fatigue." As you proceed from here, remember that the next six chapters were written before the 1990 introduction, during a time when the lessons of Vietnam were guiding us into the last decade of the 20th century. Everything you see, hear, read, think and say about it is war, including whatever reaction you might have to my full letter to Jane Fonda in `87 and her presumably unrelated appearance on "20/20" in `88. If you are not already a veteran of that Vietnam War which could extend into the 21st century, you are about to become one...

Note: The book proposal I sent to the Texas A&M University Press, included the cover on the opposite page, a sample of text and letters of recommendation by Bill Harris and Kathleen Dalessandro. For contrast, I added a critical letter from an unimaginative lout claiming to be a literary agent. John Steeter retrieved my proposal from the trash, read it and told me he wanted to see the whole thing. He told me he was drawn to it because he was a Vietnam vet himself. He liked the sample text. He said it reminded him of an old friend, and he wanted me to know the mistakes I made which caused it to be rejected. He said the art work was "horrible," the favorable letters were worthless because he didn’t know the writers, and the critical one should have been left out. He asked me if the critic was right.

January 18, 1990

Dear Mr. Steeter,

I am grateful to you for your kind words about my manuscript sample. I am even more grateful for your instructive criticism of everything that came with it. In that same spirit of useful enlightenment, please allow me to return the favor.

Without your publishing experience to draw on for a common frame of reference, I was unable to discern either the meaning or the reasons for most of what you said. I thought, for instance, that it was obvious what you meant about the art work being "horrible," until I showed your words and my picture to other people and got different interpretations. By working out a simpler, less violent and more competently rendered design, I think I’m headed in the right direction but it’s only a guess.

At some point in my book I wanted all of my readers to feel, as you did, that I was talking to them in the voice of someone they knew and cared about. As you so distressingly noted with your comment about readers you don’t know, it’s much easier to get through to people who see you as a valued individual. That is a vital part of what The Invisible Warriors is about. Now I find that I shouldn’t have asked people who told me good things about my book to tell them to the publishers. I never thought that their opinions would count for much, no matter how brief (Bill’s) or how eloquent (Kathleen’s). But, because they are the kind of people who read the kind of books you publish, I did think that they would count for something.

It scares me to know just how wrong I was about that and how right I was in my book, about experts. Although I believe your question about the opinions of one person only claiming to be an expert, was merely a rhetorical hammer to drive home a point, I can’t be sure. So, if, for whatever reason, you want an answer in advance of the one you will discover for yourself, here it is:

His critique says more about his reading than it does about my writing. People who do not have the time, inclination or ability to think about things they have never had to think about before, might easily get confused. My style is carefully structured with an inquisitive, unhurried, better informed and brighter than average reader in mind. The tone and language are exactly what they have to be to lay the essential groundwork, convey the intended messages and encourage people to think.

Thanks again for everything. You will notice that I added an "s" to the title. I hope our association will be long enough for that to mean something. If not, I thank you anyway and wish you the very best, one Vietnam vet to another.

Sincerely,

Jasper Garrison

March 28, 1990

INTRODUCTION

How do you win a war—any war?

You convince the enemy to quit.

Either you go all out to deprive them of the physical means to carry on or you fill their hearts and minds with so much fear and loathing that they will choose not to. Whether it is by tactical or psychological warfare that you win your terms for peace, victory is still victory; defeat is still defeat.

In 1949, news of Stalin’s atomic bomb together with fresh images of Hiroshima made the concept of "all out war" with any Soviet ally unthinkable to most Americans. That was good as long as they felt the same way about us. But as clear as it was to us that the leaders of the growing communist world would go to extreme lengths for communism, it wasn’t at all clear to them how far we would go for freedom. So they tested us.

The Soviet-sponsored attempt of North Korea to take over South Korea was a test that failed. It’s unlikely that it would have if North Korea had had the kind of sponsors that all of Indochina’s communists had in the American mass media. Their peace terms were called "peace," their claims to power were called "justice," their eventual victory was called, "inevitable," and the worst military disaster for them was called "a decisive psychological defeat for the U.S." They had no reason to quit and every reason to believe that we would.

With all of the Soviet Union’s military hardware at its disposal, Hanoi could not have continued its war for Indochina all the way through the 1980s without the power of images.

For over two decades the name "Vietnam" has evoked emotion-charged images in the collective American consciousness of an "unjust, immoral and unwinnable war." Before the 1968 Tet offensive, those words were used with little success by North Vietnam’s faceless Hanoi Hanna to undermine the American war effort. Whether it was true or not that we were the bad guys with no hope of winning didn’t matter. What did matter was the fact that most of us just couldn’t see it that way. But when our brightest stars of news and entertainment began to use similar words with pictures to match, things changed. It became increasingly difficult for us to see it any other way.

If you could see the pictures other people carry around in their heads, nothing they did would surprise you. You would know what animates them, what inhibits them, and why. You would understand the life and death power of images-and the power of the few people on earth who can put whatever images they want to into the heads of millions.

ABC NEWS, 20/20. SHOW # 824. June 17, 1988.

"ANNOUNCER: For the first time, Jane Fonda talks with Barbara Walters about her most controversial role.

"JANE FONDA: I am proud of most of what I did and I am very sorry for some of what I did."

During that interview, conducted at Jane’s request, most of what she said had to do with her infamous nom de guerre, Hanoi Jane. Some of what she said sounded fine—out of context—like "a clear, unconditional apology to a small, aggrieved minority of vets and their families for what she did to earn it." It looked even better, but only if you forgot about something else she said; namely, "I’m in the communication business; I know the power of images."

That’s what all of us should remember about Jane, the media, the Vietnamese and the veterans of the Vietnam War.

June 15, 1987

Dear Ms. Fonda

You are entitled to know right off the bat that I am one of those people who has referred to you in the media as, Hanoi Jane. Yes, I am a Vietnam veteran. No, I don’t live in the past. I am not a white racist, a black oreo or an undereducated loudmouth of either tint. I do not wear jungle fatigues and I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of any fanatical, right-wing hate group. Where some things are concerned it’s impossible to separate the message from the messenger....

And so it is that you may never have heard of Vietnam vets like me with legitimate reasons for complaint about the editing of your role and ours in Hanoi’s war and peace. In our place there has been a "platoon" of like-minded veterans, known to millions, who speak of what the war was really all about with the quiet eloquence and authority of truth itself. One of them looks just like Jon Voight. And he sounds just like Hanoi Jane.