My Life So Far (55 page)

No sooner was it announced that I would be filming in Waterbury than a Ku Klux Klan flag began to fly across the street from the Waterbury newspaper and several KKK members attended a meeting at the VFW hall in Naugatuck, trying to whip up the hostility against me. The Naugatuck Vietnam vets told the KKK to leave. But there was a large population of Vietnam veterans in the area and the controversy quickly caught on with them. As Rich Roland (retired First Marine Division, Seventh Marines) from Waterbury told me recently, “You were a lightning rod for the vets. A lot of guys had come back and didn’t feel accepted as people. There were all those feelings of anger and frustration about our war experiences that had never been expressed and they all focused on you. After all, what could we say to the government?”

One afternoon Gaetano Russo organized a rally in Waterbury’s Library Park, where I was hanged in effigy from a tree. Many people came out for the event and it was decided they would try to get a resolution passed by the board of the city’s aldermen to bar me from coming.

Vietnam veteran Rich Roland was there to speak in favor of the resolution and was shocked that only eight Vietnam vets showed up. Where are all the people? he asked himself. This is a joke. The resolution was overwhelmingly defeated.

My friend and publicist Stephen Rivers had been monitoring the situation. I was in Mexico filming
Old Gringo
and Stephen kept me updated with news clippings. I remember studying the pictures in the papers that showed the faces of the veterans who attended that town hall meeting. These were familiar faces. I entertained guys like this with the FTA show. I knew how to talk to them. Because of the time I spent with the GI movement, I felt I was closer to their experience than other people who weren’t in Vietnam.

I asked Stephen to try to organize a meeting with the Waterbury vets—just the ones who were in Vietnam.

When I arrived in Waterbury Stephen had arranged for a local minister to host the meeting with the vets in his church hall. I don’t recall being afraid as I went into the meeting room. If anything, I felt relief that the time for the encounter had come. I trusted the situation. I knew in my heart I had never felt anything but compassion for the soldiers in Vietnam. I wasn’t sure I would be able to communicate this to all of them, but I was confident that, at least for some, this face-to-face would have a positive effect.

There were twenty-six veterans sitting in a large circle when I entered the room. Some of them were in uniform. A few wore buttons and hats reading
HANOI JANE
and
TRAITOR.
These men had been the ground troops, the grunts, as they called themselves.

I could tell they were surprised that I was alone, no escort, no bodyguards. Later one of them said to me, “You walked in, and I said to myself, Oh, she’s so little. Just one little woman.”

Rich Roland wore a camouflage jacket and had an ace of spades in his pocket, the “death card.” When he went to Vietnam in 1969 he took with him an entire pack of aces of spades. His Marine Corps company was known as the Delta Death Dealers, and they would leave an ace of spades on each enemy corpse they killed.

“I intended to throw the card in your face if I wasn’t happy with what happened in the meeting,” Rich told me later, in 2003.

I took my place in the circle and suggested we go around the room and each tell our story. I began. I told them I wanted to put my trip to North Vietnam into context so that they would know why I went. I told them how concerned many people were at the time about the bombing of the dikes right before the monsoon season. I told them the government had denied the bombings. I told them many of the things I have written in these pages and about my previous work with active duty GIs and veterans. I told them how sorry I was that some of my actions had appeared callous with regard to U.S. soldiers and that that was the last thing I intended. I apologized for that and said that I would go to my grave regretting that pain and misunderstanding—but that I could not apologize for going to North Vietnam and doing everything I could to expose Nixon’s lies and help end the war.

“I’m proud that I did that,” I said, “just as you are proud of doing what you felt you had to do. No one has a corner on righteousness in this. We were all caught in the horror and did what we felt we had to do. All of us were affected. None of us will be the same. All of us were deceived.”

Then we went around the room. It was raw, angry, and emotional. Many tears were shed. It felt like an exorcism. I had not realized how many families in that part of Connecticut were first-generation Americans. For these young men, serving their country in Vietnam was a rite of passage into true citizenship. One said to me, “There are two ways we can become truly American. One is to go to college—my sister has gone to college—and the other is to join the armed services. I joined. And I became American.” The next man had also joined for this reason.

“But we’re the first American soldiers to lose a war,” he said, trying to stifle his emotions.

I was staggered. It had never occurred to me that our soldiers blamed themselves and thought they weren’t good enough.

“But
you
didn’t lose the war,” I said. “It was not a war that could have been won—and Kennedy and Johnson both
knew
that. It was the men who
sent
you there who were responsible for losing, not the soldiers!” I despaired at ever being able to convince them of this.

Some talked about things they had done out of hatred for me.

“Every time I go into a video store,” one said, “I make a point of turning all your exercise videos around on the shelf.” Another said, “I have never read a magazine that had an article about you.”

Rich Roland had come into the meeting furious and was made more so when he heard me speak about the innocent Vietnamese civilians who had been killed by our smart bombs. “You tell me the difference between those dead civilians and a GI lying there with his dick stuck in his mouth,” he demanded when it was his turn to speak.

I don’t remember exactly what I said to him, but it wasn’t my answer that was important for Rich; it was the fact that for the first time he had expressed some of what was inside of him. “Coming to the meeting in spite of my anger at you was positive. It was good for me to be able to vent my feelings. I heard you say you were sorry, and I was able to accept it,” he told me recently.

The meeting lasted for about four hours. As we were winding down, Stephen Rivers came into the room and told me that word of the meeting had gotten out. I had wanted it to be confidential, but the local Channel 8 TV crew was outside wanting to talk to us. I told the assembled men about the situation and asked them how they wanted to handle it.

“Look, I’m not the one that went to the press,” I said, “but they’re here. What do you want to do? We can sneak out the back or we can invite them in and tell them what happened. It’s up to you.”

They wanted to invite the press in, and in they came, expecting, I suppose, to find an angry free-for-all. Instead they found us talking quietly, some of us hugging, a few of the men sitting silently. The reporters were clearly surprised to find so little tension in the room. Vietnam veteran Bob Genovese told the reporter (and it was broadcast on ABC’s
20/20
the following week), “There was a lot of things that she talked about that I personally didn’t know about before, and I don’t think a lot of the men in the room knew before, and it helped to explain some of the reasons why she did some of the things she did back in 1972.”

Instead of throwing his ace of spades in my face, Rich went out and threw it in the trash. “That was the beginning of my healing,” he says.

The vets and I couldn’t have started from two more wildly divergent places, but the fact of our being able to face one another for those four hours was important for all of us. I have come to feel that one reason healing doesn’t happen more often is that the two sides don’t allow themselves to really hear each other’s narratives.

Empathy is the answer.

T
here must be a stepping back, a looking at the big picture. Stepping back is hard when your life has been traumatized and hatred has built up against the “enemy” and against those who opposed the war and seem to have sided with the enemy. This is why wars begun unnecessarily and for the wrong reasons—like the one we are fighting in Iraq as I write this—develop a momentum of revenge and justification.
We have to keep going. Our men and women can’t have died in vain. The people on the other side are truly evil. If we pull out now, we’ll lose our credibility. Better to continue to send Americans to fight and perhaps die than to say we made a mistake.

A
fter my meeting with the vets in that church hall, the energy seemed to drain out of the controversy. There were always a handful of demonstrators around whenever we filmed outdoors, but few of them were Vietnam veterans. During the worst of it, a dozen women from Waterbury sent me a videotape of themselves, one by one, expressing support for me, telling me they admired the way I lived my life, and thanking me for being a role model. They will never know how much that helped get me through those bruising times.

Later that summer Robert De Niro and I worked with a coalition of local Connecticut Vietnam veterans, including Rich Roland, to hold a fund-raising event at Lake Quassapaug. There were threats against us; we were warned that helicopters would fly over and drop things; local officials refused to take part. In spite of it all, on the evening of July 29 over two thousand people came. Thousands of dollars’ worth of food was donated for the event and over one hundred volunteers, most of them Vietnam vets, worked hard to make it a success. Together we raised $27,000 for children who had birth defects as a result of their fathers’ exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Supporting our troops has always been of great interest to me, partly because I have spent so much time listening to soldiers, veterans, and their families and have seen their issues up close and personal. I wonder how many Americans were as outraged as I was when—as soon as our soldiers had left for Iraq in 2003 with the Bush administration’s “Support Our Troops” ringing in the air—Congress cut their benefits, and entire classes were frozen out of the VA system. Policies were proposed that would exclude some five hundred thousand veterans from the VA health-care system. An attempt was made to increase fees and co-payments for medical services, which will drive another million veterans out of the system, and to cut 60 percent of federal education subsidies for soldiers’ children. This is patriotism?

We create victims of new wars while not even taking care of the veterans of past wars.*
 
⁸

CHAPTER TWELVE

ADIEU, LONE RANGER

The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.

—M
OTHER
T
ERESA

F
UNNY, BUT DESPITE OUR COMMITMENT
to having a child, there never really was any discussion between Tom and me about the nature of our future together. Knowing the other women he’d been in relationships with, I have to assume he had had such conversations with them:
What do we want from this coupling? Where do you think this is going?
I assumed that the avoidance of explicit long-term commitment must have been my fault. After so long as a Lone Ranger I was ready to have someone in my corner and was just holding my breath, hoping things would evolve in a stable and loving direction, fearful that if I tried to make the future explicit, the bubble would burst. I didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted, for fear of losing what I had. What we sensed (although this was never talked about, either) was that on the political level we made an unexpected and powerful duo—an odd couple in an odd time.

Tom was living with me by now and supporting himself writing and teaching. In June 1972, right before my trip to Vietnam, we had discussed putting together a national speaking tour for the fall aimed at exposing Nixon’s escalation of the war and reenergizing the peace movement. Tom named it the Indochina Peace Campaign—IPC. The plan was to make a two-month, ninety-five-city speaking tour of unprecedented proportions. Joining us as full-time members of the tour were Holly Near and George Smith, who had been a prisoner of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam for three years.