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Chapter 13

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Chapter 12

Birds of Prey

The frequency with which birds appear in the Fuhrman movie network as names and symbols requires more than a chapter or two to explore. Once you add Jane Fonda to the list of people Fuhrman borrowed ideas from, you begin to see birds of every feather flocking together around the Bundy murder case.

In the previous chapter we could have easily followed the bird links in five or six logical directions, any of which would have formed a strong chain of logical associations back to Mark Fuhrman and his profitable first book Murder in Brentwood. One of his favorite sports figures was basketball superstar Larry Bird, number 33 of the Boston Celtics. Perhaps coincidence can explain the Nazi Youth flag bearing a stylized eagle with a sword and a hammer that also bears the number 33. Perhaps it is another coincidence that the Bundy killer used a hammer and blade attack with the heel of the weapon in each hand leaving its imprint in the scalp of each victim. Sure.

As a Marine, an eagle was an integral part of Fuhrman’s identity. As a nazi, a collector of Nazi paraphernalia, and a history student, Nazi Germany’s subtle incorporation of the old United States Marine Corps emblem (unchanged since 1868) into their own collection of eagles, could not have escaped his attention. Most people don’t know that there were such things as Nazi Marines. Two things we know: They had a flag, and our Marines never fought them.

Had Mark Fuhrman wanted to fight in Vietnam with an elite military unit, his best bet when he joined the service in 1971 was to become an Amy Ranger or Navy SEAL. At that point in the war there were no large Marine combat units and not much chance that he would see action as a Marine. For a thrill junkie like Fuhrman, that could be a tad suspicious without a family tradition of Marines or a childhood wish to wear the proud Marine Corps Emblem on the collar of his dress blues.

There is no indication of any such motivations in his record to wear the eagle globe and anchor of the United States Marine Corps. He gave no indication that he saw honor in serving in the Corps. There is something else that would have drawn him to the Corps. You saw how easy it is to turn the Nazi Marine flag into the USMC emblem. Let’s take a closer look and see what happens when we correct for the off-center line in sliding the anchor through the small laurel wreath encircling the standard swastika. By enlarging the wreath and the anchor to the size of the USMC globe and anchor, you get perfect alignment. But you have to mirror the result to get the eagle’s head facing in the right direction and when you do that the swastika is turned in the wrong direction.

–Well, maybe it isn’t. If you start with the "Blood Flag of ’23," the eagle and swastika are on top of the standard and the direction of the swastika in the modified emblem is the way you would see it if you were marching behind it. You still need about a 1/16 rotation to the right to set the anchor at the proper diagonal angle through the circle. Splitting the difference between the rotation in the two swastikas gives you that.

You recall that the second of Fuhrman’s three favorite athletes was Michael Jordan, number 23. Something else about the basketball star set him apart from any other athlete, something that all basketball fans know—something that puts the flag and the eagle together in a way nothing else could. Michael Jordan could "fly."

The links to O.J. are obvious. Most people need an airplane to fly and a rented car when they get where they want to go. As we all know, O.J. Simpson represented Hertz Rent-a-Car. The Ford Bronco he was supposed to have driven from Bundy to Rockingham belonged to Hertz and the Hertz commercials he did on television involved a lot of running through airports. But how do you get from Jordan, 23 to Simpson, 32? A mirror won’t do it. You would have to be dyslexic like O.J. to see 32 in 23 or to have seen him as Nordberg in The Naked Gun 33 1/3. Does the combination of Larry Bird, 33, Sweet Lou Whitaker, 1, and Allen Tramell, 3 remind you of any two-fisted white birds on a black background that you might have seen recently?

The most famous white bird since the Great Flood is a dove named Jane Fonda. Jane worked hard to associate herself with American soldiers and to suggest that hers was the true voice of soldiers of conscience. She went to Hanoi in 1972 with a stage act called FTA. FTA, an acronym for Fuck The Army, was Jane’s anti-American answer to Bob Hope’s traditional entertainment show for the troops. FTA was an expression the troops used to blow off steam. International politics had nothing to do with it. Jane appropriated the GI’s FTA the way Hitler appropriated the swastika, an ancient religious symbol and good luck charm in Europe, India and North America. Once she began to use FTA for her purposes in 1970 and ’71 it became increasingly difficult for soldiers unaligned with her movement to use it for theirs.

By 1983, the image of American fighting men in Vietnam became so entwined with Nazi murderers that John Landis made the connection explicit in the first segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. That’s the segment in which actor Vic Morrow and two young Vietnamese children were killed doing a dangerous stunt. Fortunately for Landis and Warner Brothers "Segment 1" was filmed out of sequence. The ending had already been filmed and the Vietnam scenes involving the children could be left out.

Morrow played a man named Bill who is bitter at the "niggers" who moved six blocks from him, the "gooks" with money that he says his government paid him to kill in Korea, and a Jew named Goldman he blames for taking his job. Bill gets a taste of his own medicine when he steps out of a bar and gets thrown into one time warp after another, being seen each time by racists like himself as the people he hates. Klansmen see him as a nigger and try to hang him, Nazis see him as a Jew and arrest him. American GIs, shown as the moral equivalent of the Nazis and the KKK—with fewer brains and less class—see him as an unarmed Vietnamese civilian and blast away with everything they have.

When Jane took her FTA show to Vietnam the only marines left there to fight belonged to small units not likely to command enough press attention to make an appeal to them worthwhile. But paraplegic ex-marine Ron Kovic made enough TV appearances as a decorated, wheelchair-bound proponent of Jane’s point of view to give the Corps high visibility in the peace movement. Before he wrote his best-selling book, Born on the 4^th of July he was already a minor celebrity. Jane and her production company were set to produce the movie version of his book in 1988 when the economic pressure of Vietnam veterans protesting her promotions of her own books, tapes and fashions forced her so-called apology on 20/20.

With the rise of conservatism and her concentration on other pursuits she no longer led the image making of American Vietnam vets. But, with like-minded Vietnam veterans like NPR’s Alex Chadwick in strong positions of influence she no longer had to.

That’s when Vietnam war hero Oliver Stone stepped in. He fit the Hanoi Jane mold of a spokesman for the truth about Vietnam and they gave each other a large measure of legitimacy from their friendship. He had made his mark in 1986 as a writer/directory celebrity with his release of Platoon, based on his tour of duty in Vietnam with the Army. His was the first movie about Vietnam written by someone who had fought there. Until Platoon the Hollywood critics’ choice of the most realistic film about Vietnam was Jane Fonda’s Coming Home.

One scene from Coming Home might owe its existence to an early episode of The Twilight Zone in which Cliff Robertson plays a ventriloquist who trades places with his dummy in the end. You have to see it and know where it fits into the history of Hanoi’s 1975-86 war effort to get the dummy joke in Coming Home. I’m sure Mark Fuhrman got it, even if Jane Fonda and Willie Tyler with his black wooden buddy Lester in yellow-face didn’t get it.

You were supposed to notice that Willie, as a paraplegic marine, and Lester, as a Vietnamese peasant who could also be a Vietcong solder, were the best of friends. Most people did notice. You were supposed to notice that Willie and Lester were both unable to walk. Most people noticed that, too. These were the first layers of "insight" planted by the filmmakers for most people to notice and to pat themselves on the back for being so sensitive and so smart.

Uncommon intelligence like Mark Fuhrman’s is defined by what most people do not notice. Most people didn’t notice that Coming Home was a propaganda flick because they accepted the idea that the Vietnam War was over. To preserve the illusion that the peace movement was right about the futility and immorality of opposing the Communists, movies like Coming Home had to be made. As it was with the majority of Germans who collaborated with the Nazis and the majority of people in occupied France who "forgot" that they did, too, the truth, was too horrible and too shameful to admit.

Looking at the movie from the standpoint of effective propaganda wrapped in "sensitive and intelligent" entertainment, I noticed that Lester couldn’t talk any more than he could walk. I noticed that Willie was talking for him, a screenwriter was talking for Willie and the producer, the director or the biggest star on the project was talking for the writer. This was an important movie for the heirs of Ho Chi Minh who needed the world to look the other way while they committed genocide in Vietnam and Laos. To a man like Mark Fuhrman who studied movies for ideas and thought that genocide was a great idea, it was a blueprint for success.

I saw the dummy scene in Coming Home for the first time in 1999. Not until then did I see how the real leaders and would-be leaders of the peace movement used everybody in the game as dummies to say what they wanted the world to hear. Their collective voice was a chorus of Tom Hayden’s Chicago Seven and today’s media elite.

If you’ve read my first book, The Invisible Warriors you already know why the dummy scene struck a nerve with me.

Suffice it to say I had something of a vision when I was in Vietnam on the precipice of what I thought was imminent death. All I could see was a weeping dove like Tom Hayden using my dead body like a ventriloquist’s dummy while the enemy watched in glee. Now that I think about it, this image flowed naturally from the fact that my life hand been spared moments before by a sequence of events that involved my wind-up watch and a Twilight Zone story about a stopped clock. I thought about a dove reading my name and that’s the way it came out. If the peace movement had gotten its way, the offensive in Laos that destroyed the weapons the enemy needed to finish off my entire patrol would not have been launched.

The dummy and dove act I envisioned came well after doves started reading names of dead American servicemen at "peace rallies" staged for television. Seeing Willie Tyler and Lester in one of Hanoi Jane’s greatest hits showed me what little imagination it took to see that picture. A veteran in a wheelchair, like a dummy on the lap of a dove, was usually a part of the act, pleading for peace and confessing to war crimes against the people of Vietnam.

Forget whose names are on the credits for writer, director and producer of Coming Home. This was originally a story by Nancy Dowd about a love affair between two women, re-written to Jane’s specifications as an anti-war polemic with Jon Voight as an anti-war marine like Ron Kovic for her lover. The words "WAR HERO" are mockingly written on his jacket that has his USMC sergeant strips in the wrong place The lessons to be learned from this depend on who you are and how far you are willing to go to get what you want. Jane was a big star who could make her own image and remake the image of anyone she wanted who didn’t have her access to the media. Ron was a nobody—until he learned how to get his face, his uniform and his wheelchair on television. It was the picture the media wanted to show and he was saying what the media wanted to hear. He couldn’t lose.

Getting your name and face on network television follows a formula as dependable as C=p r². Cast yourself as the star of a newsworthy event and you’re in. The question now becomes, what is newsworthy?

News is in the minds of the men and women who report it. If a blister on someone’s big toe strikes them as being information their audience should hear about it’s news. Moreover, it could be the biggest story of the day, the week or the decade depending on whose toe it is and what it’s worth to the reporter to have his or her name associated with it. In a system of government or privately controlled news outlets the reporters’ priorities are the same: 1). Report nothing that will embarrass or offend the boss. 2). Do whatever it takes to make the boss look good.

In any system it always pleases the boss to win awards for his organization. Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and other anti-war masterworks that made their way onto the silver screen in the late ’50s and early ’60s pointed the way for a new generation of media award winners in Vietnam. Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy’s bogus "anti-Communist" routine helped the Communists tremendously when he was exposed on television for the insincere, unpatriotic megalomaniac he was. By the time television journalist Edward R. Morrow finished raking him over the coals in 1954, a real "Communist dupe" in Washington and Hollywood could get away with anything.

It took the media two and a half years after the first Marine division landed in Vietnam to break the habit of supporting the government’s aims in wartime if not its tactics. But a few uncensored stories of the good guys looking like bad guys as well as a few well-rehearsed stories of the bad guys looking like good guys changed that forever. Ambitious newsmen angling to become the next Edward R. Morrow couldn’t do it by saying or showing what was so bad about the Communists that they had to be fought. That looked too much like propaganda. They could say and show what was bad about the Americans and our allies. That was news.

Years before Jane got into the game, prestigious awards were being handed out left and right for the best stories and the best pictures of American atrocities, American blunders, American casualties and American protesters of the madness. Guess who looked like real "war heroes"? Guess whose voice cried, "stop the bombing!" whose wheelchair, bearded face and USMC sergeant stripes appeared in an award winning Vietnam documentary? His initials are RK—as in best selling writer Ron Kovic. Jon Voight won an Academy Award in the "Best Actor" category for his performance in Coming Home. Write Jon backward and drop the N as you would drop one of the Fs on the Marine recruiting wall to get MF and see what’s left.

The Jon Voight character patterned after Ron Kovic was Luke Martin. Jane played his lover Sally Hyde who was married to Bruce Durn’s character Bob Hyde, a Marine Corps officer. Luke drove a white mustang. Because of the incident at the gate, Luke and Sally were put under surveillance by a black undercover cop in a knit cap and a white one with a heavy gray mustache. They watched the Hyde house and listened to Luke and Sally’s private conversations.

To frame O.J. in a way that explains Fuhrman’s knowledge of his cut finger when he proposed his bleeding killer theory, two surveillance experts would have been required; one to watch O.J. and his white Bronco on Rockingham, the other to watch Nicole and Ron Goldman. Ron Shipp and Brad Roberts match those requirements perfectly. Coming Home’s version of Ron Shipp—who had to be the watcher at Rockingham equipped with a telephoto lens—wears the knit cap. His partner asks him if he has a good angle. He assures him he does. The watcher at Rockingham had to have a good angle on the Bronco and a straight line to the area behind Kato’s bungalow where Fuhrman said he found the second glove.

The black cop in the knit cap watching Jon and Jane plus reference to surveillance of the Hyde house because of the gate gives new meaning to the name Hyde. Fuhrman and Shipp helped to establish a Jekyll and Hyde personality for O.J. that other’s built on after Nicole was murdered. The Jack the Ripper movie in chapter 1 that gives the Ripper a Jekyll and Hyde personality also introduces a variation of the second Mrs. Fuhrman’s first name, Janet. Marie Jannet Kelly was the Ripper’s last victim.

Think about the iron gates of the Marine recruiting office that Luke chained himself to as a publicity stunt and the F.M.F initials on the wall next to the gate. Think of the wall next to the Ashford gate on O.J.’s estate that a USMC veteran of the Vietnam War—a former sergeant and bitter critic of the Corps with the initials M. F. climbed to enter the compound. Think about the publicity M. F. got for the chain of events that tied him to the gate, and the best selling author he became as a result of being interviewed on camera by some of Jane’s most influential friends.

Like Luke who played basketball in Jane’s Coming Home, Fuhrman played basketball with Jane’s war buddy Geraldo Revera. What would that look like as a political cartoon on Mark Fuhrman’s desk? A Jew playing ball with a nazi.

So, in Coming Home, we have art imitating life with Luke Martin filling in for Ron Kovic, and we have life imitating art with Mark Fuhrman using Luke Martin and Ron Kovic as inspiration to fill in for Robert Hyde. Hyde appears to be a weapon collector like O.J. and Fuhrman. He has an unusual assault rifle with a built in bayonet that folded out like the lock blade of a knife.

O.J. had an assault rifle and a large collection of knives that Fuhrman knew about before he searched O.J.’s house. Fuhrman put the killer outside of Nicole’s garage with his theory of the 22 cents he said he found there. The real killer had to have been waiting for Ron in the garage. In Coming Home, Captain Hyde waits in his garage with his fixed bayonet, filled with barely contained rage at his unfaithful wife and her lover. When he confronts them, it looks for a while that he is going to do to them what Fuhrman said he would have done to Janet Fuhrman and the man she had an affair with. Mark Fuhrman was not a Marine Corps officer. However, policemen are called officers and Fuhrman was a policeman.

From Robert Hyde we can go right back to Robert Redford in The Chase, The Electric Horseman, The Natural and Three Days of the Condor for elements of the Bundy murders that aren’t as apparent in Coming Home. But why stop there when there are so many more avenues to explore and so many more aviaries to visit? Yes, aviaries, the places were birds are kept.

In The Natural, you’ll find a bird wherever the very best athletes are found. She seeks them out and shoots them with a silver bullet. In her last murder attempt she only wounds her victim, a baseball legend-to-be called Roy Hobbs. But she leaves him to take the wrap for a murder he did not commit. Barbara Hershey (who has the same birthday as Mark Fuhrman -- whose first wife was Barbara) plays the victim and the killer named Harriet Bird. If a Barbara or a Harriet can be a bird of prey, so can a Larry.