Jane Fonda is a powerful symbol to some Americans of why we lost the war in Indochina, of what that meant to the people we abandoned there and the people we would abandon elsewhere in the future in the name of peace. That is not a consideration to be taken lightly. Symbols are what we think with, what we think about and why. And Vietnam was nothing if it was not a war of symbols.

By the time our representatives in Congress decided to cut the lifeline to our beleaguered Indochinese allies, Vietnam itself had come to symbolize unwinnable wars in general. Hawks had come to symbolize barbarism, shortsightedness and stupidity. Doves had come to symbolize compassion, farsightedness and wisdom. Jane Fonda, the dove, was therefore seen by most of the civilized world as morally and intellectually superior to her brown feathered foes without her having to say a word. It was enough that she was Jane Fonda and that she had once been an activist in the peace movement.

But Jane was much more than a symbol. She was the driving force behind a symbol-making institution, the ministry of propaganda for the peace movement, the Entertainment Industry for Peace and Justice. Jane’s EIPJ was the most formidable propaganda machine for the advancement of tyranny and genocide since Stalin created his for his Soviet empire and Goebbels created his for Hitler’s Third Reich. It has the potential of being more costly to the world than Stalin’s or Hitler’s because it has been absorbed by the popular culture of the world and will continue after its members are all dead.

In the absence of a formal declaration of war which became obsolete in the shadow of a Russian mushroom cloud, government censorship of the kind imposed on the entertainment industry in WWII, also became obsolete. "The Smothers Brothers," the TV show canceled by NBC in 1967 for the immortal words of a guest singer, "Knee deep in the big muddy and the big fool says to push on," was the closest thing to an exception. When Walter Cronkite came over to their side in `68, there was no longer any limit to what an entertainer on any network could say on the air to undermine the American war effort.

No American out of uniform was ever put on trial for giving aid and comfort to the enemy in Vietnam, although the suicide of an American POW who collaborated with Jane may have been the only thing that saved her. On the other hand, the sheer number of popular, influential people who worked with her in the EIPJ may have done the trick.

In its first two months of existence in 1971, the EIPJ had among its many sponsors, Burt Lancaster, Barbara Streisand and Richard Basehart, the narrator of Stanley Karnow’s "Vietnam: The 10,000 Day War." It included prominent writers, directors and producers as well as local media insiders throughout the country, all working to end the war in Vietnam on Hanoi’s terms. And least anyone forget what she fought for, she made a movie in 1978 about America’s war in Southeast Asia and the kind of men who fought there, "Coming Home."

Of all the names for a movie about Vietnam veterans that Jane Fonda, "peace delegate" to Hanoi could have chosen to star in, "Coming Home" had to be the worst. The foremost reason for that was the name, "Operation Homecoming," in which all American POWs were supposedly accounted for by the Hanoi government. Every day the newspapers highlighted the words, coming home.

Coming home.

Coming home.

Who was coming home?

During that tense sixty-day period in early 1973, coming home was a phrase that burned itself into the minds of some Americans forever. Men who had been tortured to appear with peace delegates to Hanoi were coming home. If any had been tortured to death, they wouldn’t be coming home. No one would ever know for sure whether such men even existed. If any had been murdered when the others were set free, nothing would have been said about them either. Not, at least, until all of Hanoi’s acknowledged POWs had been released.

On January 29, 1973, a day after the Paris peace accords were signed, the Detroit News ran this headline: "War ends with joy for 10 POW families in Mich." But there were twelve Michigan men on Hanoi’s list of prisoners, one of whom had been carried as MIA because the Communists did not officially acknowledge that they had him. The News story had this to say about him: "The prisoner list brought only tears to the Detroit family of Sgt. Dennis Hammon, who were informed that he died in a prisoner of war camp three years ago.

"Sgt. Hammon apparently died shortly after the family was informed by three men released in 1969 that Dennis was in good spirits in a prison camp." It wasn’t until much later that another story about Dennis Hammon appeared in the local press. It involved a returning POW who had been with Dennis in a VC prison camp while the 1973 prisoner release was being negotiated. He said that their captors told Dennis he would be allowed to go home with the others only if he begged for the privilege.

He did.

Then they killed him.

I remember Dennis every single time I hear the name Jane Fonda or the expression, coming home. Dennis was my friend.

The reason for the delayed report about my friend’s murder at the hands of Jane Fonda’s war buddies, was a practical one. Newly released prisoners were under orders to speak no ill of their former captors until "Operation Homecoming" was over. By the same token, they had to remain silent about the influence of self-appointed peace delegates to Hanoi, like Jane Fonda and her new husband Tom Hayden, one of the Chicago Seven who help to elect Richard Nixon president. That didn’t stop Mr. and Mrs. Hanoi Jane from taking some of the credit for their release and accepting the applause of many who agreed with them. As of January, 27, 1973 the Vietnam War was officially over for the United States because our men were coming home—not counting Dennis Hammon or the 55 other MIAs known to have been held prisoner at one time or the 54 others unaccountably listed as dead.

Coming home stories were front page news for two solid months. Finally, we learned that the Indochinese communists’ last acknowledged American prisoner of war was on his way back to The World, and the silent ex-POWs were free to speak their minds. Many of them spoke of torture and threats of torture for refusing to meet with the "peace delegates." For the most part, those stories lasted about a week.

Tom and Jane were indignant. They called the men "hypocrites and liars," taking full advantage of their access to the media to say whatever they pleased.

Two weeks later, a small article appeared in the Los Angeles Times concerning Lt. Commander David W. Hoffman, who said he was forced to appear with Jane Fonda. He said he was tortured. But it was a military officer’s word against a peace activist’s, a no-name vs. a star. When he was asked to comment on Jane’s statements regarding his apparent health and fitness, he is quoted in the Times as saying, "If Miss Fonda thinks for a minute that any of the people that she saw were able to speak freely, and not fully aware that any deviation from what we were told to say or could say would bring instant punishment the moment she departed the area, then she’s got another think coming."

I can find no evidence that she gave it another thought for over a decade, and only then when she was given no other choice. Jane knew for a fact that the officer was wrong because of the POWs she talked to and helped to arrange early releases for during her Indochina Peace Campaign tours. With "Operation Homecoming" complete, hawkish statements of ex-POWs carried no more weight than the hawkish statements of any other Vietnam vet. As far as clout with the media was concerned, they had no more than I did, and I had none. Coming home was one thing; being home was another.

The American people quickly forgot about the POWs they had welcomed as heroes when we were pretending that Nixon’s deal with Hanoi was the "peace with honor" he said it was. Every one of us knew it was a lie but we didn’t talk much about it. We knew that the peace movement had gained the upper hand in Congress and Congress was well on its way to gaining the upper hand in the war.

Hundreds of Hanoi’s backers in Paris had, in fact, celebrated the signing of the peace accords outside the building where the ceremony was held as a communist victory. Looking at the terms of that agreement, it’s hard to see how they were out of line.

The war was not yet over. But, with doves running the war in Washington and hawks running the war in Hanoi, who could kid anybody about the expected outcome of both sides? When, not if, Congress pulled the rug out from under Saigon, the conservatives could blame its fall on the liberals. The liberals could say that it fell of its own corrupt weight. The public could take its choice of politicians to blame for doing it wrong or doing it at all. The media could take credit for having stood up to the government and shown the people "the truth about Vietnam." Accordingly, peace advocates like Jane Fonda could claim to have been "on the right side of the issue" all along. And who could challenge what she said? Surely not a no-name Vietnam vet.

Jane Fonda’s "Coming Home," fixed in the minds of generations the kind of Vietnam vet who was worth listening to and the kind who was not. In 1979, Sylvia Chase of ABC’s "20/20" went so far as to excerpt a speech by "Luke" in "Coming Home," to illustrate, "movies that brought home the reality of the Vietnam War." That famous, bitter, bright and articulate antiwar enlisted man, played by Jon Voight, was invented by Jane Fonda. So was the mindless Marine Corps officer rival for her character’s affections.

It should surprise no one that Hanoi Jane was able to exert so much influence over the public’s perceptions of Vietnam veterans. Then, as now, she had a huge loyal following which included some outspoken antiwar vets. She had always been a mouthpiece for them, at our expense. Furthermore, for everyone who empathized with them, she was doing something wonderful. She was putting a human face on some of the ongoing costs of an unpopular war and forcing the public at large to pay attention to them. That, in turn, was forcing our government to address them and it was making her look like a saint.

Jane knew what kind of power she had in the image-making industry. To use it in our behalf, the only thing she required of us was what she required of our POWs in 1972: All we had to do was go along with the program.

In 1979, six years after the second declared end of the Vietnam war, Jane Fonda was sailing with the current of conventional wisdom toward her latest war related goals. That is to say, she was going with the flow of ideas about us that were popular with the star-makers of the American press. Even the ones who may not have agreed with her style, concurred with her conclusions. They were in general agreement that the peace movement was right and any other account of the war was a revisionist denial of the truth. By logical extension, Vietnam vets who did not accept that belief as the truth, were out of touch with reality. Our insights on our role in the war were therefore given the same weight as you would give the Mad Hatter’s insights on tea parties, while the visions of truth endorsed by Hanoi Jane were hailed as, "brilliant!"

Since then, the non-conservative media elite have hosted a kind of party in Jane’s honor. Her critics have not been invited. That, of course, would be unthinkably bad form.

Let me tell you how I came up with the party analogy: I started with the invariably shabby treatment given to those of us who have tried to make an issue of her role in Hanoi’s war effort. Then I searched for a social situation that would produce the same results, and there it was, in the latest decade of Hanoi’s war for Indochina, a party in honor of Hanoi Jane.

You know what would happen if you crashed a party and proceeded to say nasty things about the guest of honor. In the first place, you can forget about any of the invited guests getting the message. You would become the issue. Some of the other guests would have nasty things to say about you. Others would try to behave as though you didn’t exist. Still others would try to have you escorted to the nearest exit with as little fuss as possible. All would agree that you are either a nut case or a jerk and you would certainly get that message. Worst of all, it would be clear to neutral observers that the occasion is all wrong for what you’re doing, that you are totally out of place and way out of line.

Those reactions to a party crasher are what some of us learned to expect in the first decade of Saigon’s collapse each time we attempted to broach the subject of Hanoi Jane. When highly respected members of the press began to question her in the "Gee, you’re swell" mode of interrogation, you began to get the idea. You knew what kind of pro and con feedback they anticipated and how little regard they had for the cons. You also knew that it was possible for you to be a public critic of Jane Fonda only when she appeared on the media’s agenda. You might have thought of trying it, knowing full well that you were planning a long, hard swim upstream in stereotype infested waters, but given that knowledge, you wouldn’t have been likely to take the plunge.

Ironically, no universally recognized stereotype of a Jane basher existed until some of us vets forced the issue in 1984. Small groups of angry men in jungle fatigues were picketing the sites where she was scheduled to appear on behalf of some new commercial products bearing her name. You could say they crashed the party. As a result, they became the issue. But with Hanoi’s soiled reputation as the good guys in Indochina and the recent dedication of the Vietnam veterans Memorial in Washington, the issue had gotten complicated.

It was no longer as popular as it used to be to trash unrepentant vets directly. They couldn’t be ignored or escorted to the nearest door either. Young people who idolized Jane Fonda were beginning to ask, "Who is Hanoi Jane?" and the pressure was on the media to come up with an answer that didn’t incriminate them. They had done their job in reporting the news of her trips and they had disapproved of her style. They had forgiven and forgotten any pain she may have caused them by stating their case so bluntly in the enemy’s capital. But now the issue was once again relevant.

So, for the first time since she accepted her Oscar for "Coming Home," Jane Fonda was forced to break her self-imposed silence on Vietnam. She did what she had to do to protect her good name, to make people forget her bad one and to preserve her status as a world famous peace activist. To accomplish all of that, she had to discredit the fatigue-clad picketers without attacking them head on. She had to make them appear guilty of hounding her without mercy for some minor indiscretion she may have committed in her youth. With a little emotional support from her immediate family and some editing help from the media, she did all right.

First, she apologized—sort of. She said in an interview with People magazine that she had been, "too strident," and that she was truly sorry for any pain that might have caused. HOWEVER, she was unequivocally proud of having had a leading role in the peace movement. She failed to even hint at disapproving of her old Communist war buddies—who were still at war in Cambodia and still playing games with their accounting of our POWs.

Needless to say, the protesting vets were not satisfied with that, "I’m sorry... but I’m proud," routine. They kept right on picketing her public appearances. But, by all indications, the media did accept her apology as sufficient and proceeded to depict the picketing vets the way she and her husband did. Take for example, this classic, Tom Hayden explanation for what was going on when their bewildered young son asked why those awful men were being so mean to his mother. "Some people have trouble forgetting the past," said Tom. That became one stereotype of anti-Jane vets which has been called up by the media several times since. For candy coated poison, it’s tough to beat. But Jane, herself poured the mould for the kind of fanatic most often alluded to as her critics....

While the men in uniform carried protest signs outside of an exercise class she was leading in an affluent suburb of Detroit, our local media went inside to get her view of things. She had the last word when the Detroit Free Press summed up the entire episode with one clever line from her to her nervous class of admirers. Conjuring up the vile specter of Senator Joe McCarthy, the black list era’s Republican demagog from Wisconsin, she asked, "When was the last time you were called a communist for attending an exercise class?"

The vets outside could have replied with an analogous question of what it would have meant for adoring Americans to attend an Axis Sally exercise class during World War Two. But they weren’t asked.

No national convention of media movers and shakers was held to decide upon the quiet burial of Jane Fonda’s wartime alter-ego. They simply agreed that Hanoi Jane was no longer relevant to anything that was happening in the `80s and something was terribly wrong with anyone who believed otherwise. For reasons that may elude 21st century students of Hanoi’s war for Indochina—which was progressing nicely—that view prevailed. On the other hand, it will pose no intellectual challenge to those who understand that ideas and objects obey the same rule of motion, that ideas in motion tend to stay in motion and ideas at rest tend to stay at rest. They will readily appreciate the link between our ideas at rest about Hanoi Jane and Hanoi’s ideas in motion about MIAs, genocide, and their "inevitable" conquest of Indochina.

It seems to me that the groundwork was established for Hanoi Jane’s emergence in 1968 when the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy robbed the peace movement of its brightest stars. The movement still had celebrities like Benjaman Spock, the famous baby doctor, and Joan Baez, the popular folk singer. But it no longer had a banner carrier who mattered as much to as many people, in as many key positions, as King and Kennedy did. It no longer had a spokesman who came across so convincingly on TV, who aroused such feeling, who commanded so much attention; whose name was so closely linked in the American psyche with courage and integrity.

Jane’s father, Henry, was famous for his portrayal of men with those special qualities, in classic movies like, "The Ox Bow Incident," "The Grapes of Wrath" and "12 Angry Men." If there was one name in Hollywood that everybody of my parent’s generation and mine could relate those qualities to, it was Henry Fonda. He and Jane did not share the peace movement’s assessment of the war early on but they did share that magic name, Fonda.

In 1968 Jane Fonda took her first baby steps toward Hanoi when she was in Paris and made a determined effort to inform herself about the war. In her own words taken from Thomas Keirnan’s biography of her, "[I] met American deserters and Vietnamese of the National Liberation Front [Viet Cong], who knew facts that I had not been aware of. Then I saw a movie on the Washington march; boys with long hair and professors and radicals putting flowers into the guns of the guard standing in front of the Pentagon. A lot was happening, and I learned...."

Jane’s learning didn’t stop there. She had other sources of information she chose to draw on for her education. In the words of Thomas Keirnan, "Elizabeth Vailland was a different kind of communist... In Jane, Vailland found a confused but eager student. Jane, for her part, found in Vailland a sympathetic and understanding teacher. Jane listened to Elizabeth Vailland’s bitter but inspiring stories of her thirty years of political activism with a growing admiration for what a woman could do in the world besides make movies and keep house."

Something else happened in 1968 that had a major impact on how a lot of people in America would later come to view significant events in the course of the war. In January, Walter Cronkite declared that the war was over. For all practical purposes, that is. Uniformed combatants were still at each other’s throats, but the Viet Cong’s "spectacular" offensive proved to him that they could not be beaten. If that was true—and every CBS news report since then rested on the proposition that it was—thousands of soldiers and civilians were suffering and dying for nothing while we were waiting around to lose. Ergo, the best thing we could do "to end the agony" was to get the hell out as soon as possible.

Most American’s, however, considered it their patriotic duty to support the commander-in-chief’s war effort. If he was a rotten, stupid bastard, he was their rotten, stupid bastard whether they voted for him or not. If they thought he was blowing it, they would try to elect another commander-in-chief that they hoped would do a better job.

That’s how a conservative Republican was elected to the White House, not counting the help he got at the Democratic national convention from Tom Hayden and company. That election is what made Vietnam the right-wing issue it has been ever since. It’s how the complete withdrawal of our ground forces began. It’s how the increase in the air war over North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia began too. It’s how issues of efficacy and morality in American bombing campaigns became priority topics of the war and peace debate along with the question of how to get back our POWs and account for our MIAs. Should the people of the United States join forces in support of the President to bring maximum pressure to bear on Hanoi? Or should we invoke our right of dissent as free men and women to pressure the President into accepting Hanoi’s terms for peace?

Jane became an active member of the peace movement in 1970, the same year I enlisted in the Regular Army. She had been a late comer to the movement for which it seemed she tried to compensate with excessive zeal. From the beginning, GIs were a special target group of hers for conversion to the cause. She was already giving financial aid and moral comfort to Army deserters through organizations in Paris previously established for that purpose. But she didn’t have a starring role in converting soldiers to antiwar activists until she met Fred Gardner.

Fred Gardner was a straightforward backer of Hanoi’s war effort who started something called, "The GI Movement." The idea had been to help GIs with their problems and to capitalize on their dissatisfaction with the Army, as a vehicle for bringing them into the antiwar movement. Warriors make incomparable peace advocates, as Jane could testify to from her learning experience with the Army deserters in Paris. Here was her chance to educate uninitiated soldiers the way she had been educated in Paris, and to provide an expanded public forum for disaffected combat vets to speak out.

How could she resist? She couldn’t.

You may have heard somewhere that Jane was involved in an "antiestablishment" show called, FTA. That is true. You may also have heard that FTA is an acronym for Fight The Army. That is not true. FTA stands for "Fuck The Army," and it’s a mistake to think that fight, in this instance can be used as an acceptable euphemism for fuck. The reason has to do with what I said earlier about Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose speaking the GIs’ language and the icebergs beneath the surface of certain words.

FTA is a Vietnam era addition to the language invented by the troops to blow off steam. And, you can trust me on this one, the Army is a place where an awful lot of steam can build up. It was an expression meant to be shouted at the top of your lungs when some use or misuse of Army discipline had you so angry and frustrated you thought you’d explode. Anytime you saw the letters FTA scrawled over some wall in big bold letters or carved into the trunk of a tree, you read it with an exclamation point, knowing that there were some intense emotions behind them. And you knew that the reasons behind the emotions were personal. They may not have meant that much to anybody else but, to that individual, they may have been as important as life itself.

Maybe some low ranking GI got "stuck in the playpen," while a brother in arms got a weekend pass or a love-sick kid got a "Dear John" letter from his pregnant girlfriend and the CO wouldn’t let him go home. Maybe a guy had a Samson complex and his platoon sergeant was on his case about getting a haircut. A poor boy who would have gone into business with some friends if he hadn’t been drafted may have gotten word that they struck it rich, the same day he got orders for Vietnam.

When you use the long or short form of FTA, you are speaking the GI’s language. You are bypassing his brain and going straight for the solar plexus.

Using the off-base facilities of Fred Gardner’s GI movement as a springboard for her own GI movement in 1971, Jane Fonda launched her traveling FTA show.

"Bob Hope and company seem to have a corner on the market in speaking to soldiers," she said at a press conference while I was in my second month in Vietnam stringing barbed wire, standing guard and doing mine sweeps. "The time has come for entertainers who take a different view on the war to reach our servicemen too. Antiwar shows are what today’s soldiers want."

She couldn’t have been talking about me. I’m glad I didn’t find out about it until that summer in the States, because I would never again be able to even whisper a soothing FTA without linking it to Jane Fonda’s traveling GI show.

Another thing to remember about FTA is the place it had in Jane’s ascension to the throne of leadership in the antiwar movement. It did not, of course, make her the leader. The movement had many leaders and as much dissension in its ranks as there was in ours. But Jane got the most media attention and her burgeoning feminism, which she injected into the show, broadened her base of support among women just as her attacks on white racism broadened her support among blacks. Before FTA, she had been an obedient follower of media favorites like Mark Lane and super stars within the movement like Fred Gardner. Now she was being seen and identified on television as a leader and she was playing the part.

Jane was turning off more people than she was turning on with her strident authoritarian style, but the ones she was turning on were the only ones she gave any sign of caring about. Moreover, as she revealed in a 1977 BBC documentary, they were the ones she most wanted to care about her. FTA was her show. She was running it the way she saw fit. She had learned enough about Vietnam and her other causes to avoid putting her foot in her mouth every other time she opened it. She was starting to speak with something that sounded like real authority because we were beginning to hear the same things from real authorities—and people were beginning to listen.

I got to Fort Lewis, Washington a few months ahead of her FTA show. I was there just long enough to get processed for duty in Vietnam. I was no different from any other GI in wondering whether I’d be coming home on my feet, in a wheelchair or in a body bag. The last thing any of us needed was Barbarella telling us how undesirable it was for us to cooperate with the United States Army. We knew.

My last memories of Jane Fonda before I left The World were kind ones. I liked her as an actress and I didn’t take what she was doing as a peace activist seriously enough to feel threatened or betrayed by it. I wasn’t sure what it was exactly that she was doing anyway, other than trying to make a name for herself as someone other than Henry Fonda’s daughter.

Being the undistinguished younger brother of a very popular high school honor student whose reputation I could never live up to, I empathized with her. I even admired her spirit of action in behalf of what she thought was right, as I did most peace activists with whom I agreed on most other issues. The fact that I thought she was dead wrong about Vietnam had nothing to do with it. I believed that people of conscience were, for the most part, what they said they were and Jane was one of them. I thought of myself as one of them too, in that our values and ideals were the same. I thought tolerance for dissent was one of those values and I foolishly expected them to be as tolerant of my opinions about the war as I was about theirs. I thought we were all doing what our conscience said was right. If the war ended in a communist victory, we’d all know the truth by what followed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. As people of conscience, we’d all own up to it.

One thing I couldn’t handle very well about Henry’s daughter, Jane, was her instant expertise on the subject of war and peace in Indochina. It was a constant source of irritation to me to find out how many of our national leaders in Washington, New York and Hollywood knew as little as she did. That is not to say that the hawks knew any more than the doves. They didn’t. They both informed themselves in the same way, seeking enlightenment only from those sources with matching pieces to the puzzle that they had already established the framework for. Neither side was ever willing to study or retain facts that might have weakened the opinions that bore the weight of their conclusions, so both sides remained perpetually half-informed. Jane’s antiwar activism was, therefore, less of a sore point with me than her ignorance was and her zeal to "raise the consciousness" of GIs to her level.

I arrived in Vietnam on the 6th of January 1971. My first few months there were pretty shitty. I burned shit. I blew up shit. I stumbled around in the bushes trying to shoot the shit out of people who were stumbling around in the bushes trying to shoot the shit out of me. From what I could gather, the war had been put on semi-hold until I got there. Then, business started booming again. It wasn’t like the old days when thousands of troops would be committed to fierce, high casualty producing battles that everybody in the world would hear about. But the small unit sweeps we went on were as likely as not to get any one of us killed. That knowledge was never far from our thoughts.

When somebody you trained with or fought with got wasted in the field, the reality of what could happen to you at any time hit you with full force. You were sorry that he lost his arm, his legs, his mind or his life, but you were thrilled that it didn’t happen to you. And you felt guilty about it. In general, support troops felt more of that kind of guilt than field troops who could usually counterbalance such feelings with pride in having survived the test of combat with honor. But the peace movement had succeeded in making the concept of honorable service in the United States Army a contradiction in terms to our "knowledgeable" peers at home. As far as they were concerned, you were supposed to feel guilty for having served.

In early July, I was sent home on emergency leave when my mother, who had never smoked a cigarette in her life, was operated on for lung cancer. That leave was my most traumatic experience of the war.

It was good that I could be of some comfort to my mother who didn’t try to make me feel like an oreo or a criminal for wearing the uniform of the United States Army. It was good that George and Sara and my cousins, who were all like brothers and sisters, were glad to see me. But I couldn’t watch television or listen to the radio or go anywhere with my friends without being bombarded with the same hit tunes: You’re a chump for going to Vietnam; you’re a coward for not deserting; you’re a tool of white oppression for killing other people of color; the Viet Cong are the good guys and the good guys always win.

Jane Fonda was getting a lot of press and she was saying in no uncertain terms that the peace she was working for in Vietnam was, "a victory for the Viet Cong." On top of everything else, my wife and children weren’t receiving the allotments the Army was supposed to be sending them and the last I heard they were living in destitution. I didn’t know where they were. I couldn’t find them. And I couldn’t scream FTA!

I was home for a full 30 days, then returned for whatever came next. I had lost my illusions about how wonderful it would be to go home, so it wasn’t as hard as it might have been to get back on the plane. But I was still afraid of getting badly wounded and almost panicky at the thought of getting lost in Vietnam and staying there forever.

Unlike my predecessors, I could anticipate something better than death or serious damage to my better parts for an early ticket home. President Nixon’s so-called, Vietnamization strategy, held out the promise of an early exit for entire divisions. If you were lucky enough to be in one of those units, you left when it did, provided you’d been in country a minimum of four months. My unit was withdrawn in mid-August and most of the men I served with were fated to come back with it alive and well. Some, of course, didn’t make it back alive and some didn’t make it back all that well. But one guy, I just don’t know about....

When I first saw him he was holding court with a half dozen or so troopers near the back door of our forty man hootch in LZ English. From the shards of lecture material I could pick up as I unpacked my duffel bag, I knew it had to do with politics, dope and the Viet Cong. I didn’t catch enough of it to pull it together. Somebody jerked a thumb in my direction and the court holder quieted down.

Later on he came over to my bunk and started asking me questions. He was a pipe smoking, dark-haired heroin addict with a large head and a large IQ. His face was set in such a serious way that I couldn’t picture it enlivened with a smile. He made a point of telling me that his IQ was over 140. Anything over two digits is all the same to me, so I was impressed only with the fact that it impressed him.

I had just been assigned to the 173rd Engineer Company and he was feeling me out to see whether or not I was a cop. He soon decided that I wasn’t and we ended up in a far-ranging conversation that could have gotten him in a whole lot of trouble if he had been wrong. We were both members of the 4th platoon, which meant that we would go with the 4th Battalion of infantry when they took to the field. But he had his own ideas about who he should go into combat with. He was thinking about joining the Viet Cong.

This guy was as screwed up on Marxist philosophy as he was on drugs. You couldn’t tell him anything that he didn’t have a preformulated answer to. It was almost as bad as trying to talk to a born again Christian. All of the answers were in "The Book," and every answer could be made to fit any conceivable question. The whole thing was low key and neither of us saw any reason to get angry at the other. He didn’t try to pressure me into accepting his ideas and I didn’t tell him what a weird motherfucker I thought he was. We got along fine.

The details of my talk with that guy escape me. I was tempted to throw in some things that may have been said, but I know that they may not have. Thinking back to that time, I can see and hear in my mind the two of us talking about the possibility of confronting each other in combat. I draw a blank at what he said about that but I speculate that the reason is because he was talking over my head (Does Hegelian dialectics really make sense to anybody?) and I am left with the impression that it wasn’t personal. Who can say whether that came from what I remember happening or from what I remember thinking before I crashed or what I dreamed. It may also have come from my experience later on in the kill zone with an "imaginary" flying orb, which turned out to be an American made hand grenade.

The guy who talked to me about joining the Viet Cong was, or is, a real person. In January of 1971, he and I really were assigned to the 173rd Engineer Co, 173rd Airborne Bde. at an Army base called, LZ English in the central highlands of South Vietnam. I can’t tell you any more about him than I already have because the night we talked is the last time I can remember seeing him. I know he went AWOL. And I know that I put him totally out of my mind until the 173rd was packing up to go home and the engineers who had been with different companies in the field were back together.

Someone in the crowd asked, "Remember that guy who went AWOL—said he was going off to join the Viet Cong?"

That’s when the light went on.

Somebody else said, "Yeah, the dumbfuck. I wonder what happened to him?"