THE MISSING PART IN “MY LIFE SO FAR” by JANE FONDA

Phan Vu

This letter had been sent to Ms. Jane Fonda around July, 2005. Three month later I received her e-mail reply.
Thank you, Ms. Jane Fonda.

Ms. Jane Fonda,
I am a Vietnamese American, and three years older than you. My life was tied to the war before I had been a grown up man. I got old when I could escape from the Communist regime to freedom very long after the war had ended. One thing is certain that I know Vietnamese Communists better than you do. For you lived with Vietcong only one week; but I lived with them during the war, under their domination and in their prison. I came to the United States in 1993 and I graduated from CSU Long Beach, major in English to read your book and other authors’.

I enjoyed reading your life story, especially the three chapters: chapter 9 about Hanoi. I visited Hanoi in 1988 then in 2000. My uncle has a house in Hanoi downtown center. So I can compare what you had seen with what I saw. As a Vietnamese, I easily converse with who I want to and I can extract the real things without an interpreter. Your interpreter Quốc, a well-indoctrinated Communist Party member knew how to “frame” you as directed and you knew it right away. Chapter 10 talked about your journey in the North. Chapter 11 dealt with your frustration and your regret because you knew you were “used”.

Now in the year 2005, the war is far away. Our second generation of Vietnamese Americans, young Asians, White, Black and Hispanic will read your book and other authors’.  But your book and books written by American authors, all not impartial, did not present the war in Vietnam as it really had befallen. The Vietnam War was depicted wrongly, from the Liberal Americans’ viewpoint or from the anti-war activists’ angle.  There is a missing part in them. That missing part is the core, the essential of the war.

First, I want to clarify the word Vietcong. Việt means Vietnamese and Cộng means Communist. Vietcong means Vietnamese Communist. Either they were in the South or in the North, they were called Vietcong. Vietcong in the South were guerillas, but Vietcong in the North, regular units. The American Media made a big mistake when they called Vietcong in the South Vietnam the insurgents. Even Webster’s dictionary carries this error. It was very obvious that after the fall of Saigon, on May 1st, 1975, Nguyễn Hữư Thọ, President of Vietcong government in the South Vietnam, and his army disappeared without a short communiqué.

The three above chapters reflected your beliefs, your intention and your goal. Some parts in other chapters emphasized those ideas. You believe that the Vietnam War was the war between the Americans and the Vietcong in the North Vietnam. In a radio broadcast about what you saw, you asked, “Are these people (Vietcong) your (American pilots) enemy?” (Fonda 310). You wrote, “Given the things that America stands for, a war of aggression against the Vietnamese people is a betrayal of the American people (Fonda 321). You said, “War’s begun unnecessarily and for the wrong reasons…” (Fonda 332).

You also believe that Ho Chi Minh and Communist leaders were good men. You said, “Uncle Ho declared…all men are created equal. They are given…life, liberty, and happiness.” (Fonda 316).

Your intention was to fly to Hanoi to witness the destruction of Vietcong’s properties, dike damages and casualties in the North Vietnam. Your goal was to “help end the war” (Fonda 330).

As I said earlier, the war was over long time ago. The sufferings and the losses by the war still remain in the first generation of Vietnamese Americans’ memory. Just a fading memory. I do not blame or hate you and your friends. I just want to tell all of you the South Vietnamese’s side of the war. I hope that young Americans, Vietnamese, Asians, White, Black, Hispanic will know the real side of the Vietnam War, the really existing events of the war from the South Vietnamese’s scope.

What you have not known, heard, and seen about our life so far: (or you pretend to ignore and forget it because ignorance is bliss.)

The Vietnam War was not Johnson’s War, nor Nixon’s War. It was Vietcong’s War. It was the war between the South and the North Vietnam.  It was not the American War, either. It was Vietcong that invaded the South and it was the South that pushed them back north. The Vietcong’s goal was to replace the free and democratic regime in the South by a Communist rule. The American role was to help the South Vietnamese drive Vietcong back to the North like the Soviet Union and Red China, to supply weapons and food to the North to conquer the South. Yes, Vietcong was not the principal American enemies like Communist Chinese and Soviet, to the South Vietnamese’s foes.
Vietcong did start the war. We did not. How did they start? You and your friends did not know this issue, I am sure. According to the Geneva Accord, Vietcong units and political cadres had to regroup and retreat to the north of 17th parallel within three months. During 90 days, young and single Vietcong had a resting leave in homes having young and single girls in the Vietcong-controlled rural areas. When the South Vietnam government took over those areas, government officials were surprised to find out there were so many young pregnant women without husbands and single moms with missing husbands. Two years later, the Politburo in Hanoi started invading the South. They sent their husbands back to those areas to set up strongholds in the mountains or isolated areas, near the villages where their wives lived. So, Vietcong had good, secure intelligence information liaisons and women to enjoy. Vietcong leaders did not spend a dime for intelligence information.

This was Vietcong’s War. They started the war. We did not want the war.  But the war came to us like the 9-1-1, to the Americans. We defended our freedom. The American sacrifice was great and noble. However our casualties were 5 times greater.  We lost more than 300,000 men and we have hundred thousands disabled without pensions or any kind of aid for more than 30 years. The American Vietnam War Vets and disabled are taken care of by the American government. Have you ever seen a South Vietnamese vet disabled walking with two hands holding two sandals for 30 years? 

There were three parties in the Vietnam War: The South, the North, and the US.  To be fair, we had to include Koreans, Australians…helping the South and Soviet, Chinese, aiding the North. You visited Hanoi. You did not stop by Saigon. You made friend with the aggressors. But you did not have any little sympathy with victims of that invasion. The North Vietnam was bombed. However, Hanoi downtown center was not. I saw it intact in 1988. But the South Vietnam countryside was infested by Vietcong guerrillas. Vietcong shelled rockets into Bến Thành market, blew off Brink Hotel, and American Embassy in Võ Di Nguy Street, right in the center of Saigon. Have you ever heard that village government officials in the South, strung with grenades were blown off before the eyes of their appalled wives and frightened crying children in Bình Định province? Did anyone give you a report of Huế massacre? Vietcong buried alive more than 3,000 persons in 1968? You said you, Tom, John Kerry …are Việt Cộng’s friends.

In Nam Định, you saw that the dike was damaged by bombs. But did you see that anti-aircraft rockets had been set up along the dike?  And they had been removed before your arrival. You knew that you had been “framed” and you broadcast what you had witnessed.

You said the war began unnecessarily and for the wrong reason. The South Vietnamese people were living peacefully and happily after Geneva agreement from 1954 to 1960. I traveled safely by train from Saigon to Huế. After 1960, bridges were knocked down, roads mined, government officials kidnapped, mortars shelled to populated areas, occurring everywhere. Vietcong regular divisions infiltrated the South along Ho Chi Minh trail. Are those events wrong reasons? Vietcong crossed the 17th parallel to kill us in 1972 during their Nguyễn Huệ Offensive. We fought them back and you said the war was unnecessary. Yes, I totally agree with you that the Vietcong war was unnecessary. But the defense war of our freedom was needed and indispensable. 

Here are some more good reasons: Kangaroo court during 1954-1956 in the North Vietnam. All farmers having more than one acre of rice field were called “landlords.”  They were tried before Kangaroo court. They were insulted, beaten and buried alive, their properties confiscated and distributed to the poor. Their families were scattered: owning a piece of land is a crime. Now in any city, even in Huế and Hanoi, big Vietcong leaders rob private properties for their own profits.
People’s stomach was strung by land collective ownership, by food books, and household books. No one had land ownership. Land belonged to the State. So, land produce belonged to the community, and village committee had the right of food distribution. Each family had a household book of all members. A man had 9 kilos of rice and a woman, seven. Every year, each individual could buy 6 feet of fabric. If anyone did not work, he/she did not have food. There was no other job besides farming in the countryside. Everyone had to stick to the regime. If not, he/she died of hunger. If any bộ đội (Uncle Hồ’s foot soldier) deserted from his military unit, his parents’ food ration would be cut off. Communists controlled people by stomach. I don’t think you would like your stomach to be manipulated like that.  Neither do we.

Another good reason is that people did not have the right to move. Citizens were confined to their village. They had to get a moving permit from their own village committee and to report to the local policeman of the destination district. Coming back home, they surrendered that permit. Right now in the year 2005, you can ask any Vietnamese American about his/her trip to Vietnam to verify what I tell you. Did you ask permit from Nixon administration to go to Vietnam and surrender it when coming back to the US.  But you had to ask permission from Hanoi government and you were not free to travel around the North.

Here are the noble reasons. Freedom of speech. In Hanoi you were free to say what Communists loved to listen to and not what they hated to hear. You could read any book they published and not Time, Newsweek, Le Monde, Le Figaro… printed in the capitalist world. You could repeat thousand times Ho Chi Minh’s words or Communist leaders’. If by mistake, you repeated Nixon’s words, you’d get trouble right away. Here in the United States, you have the right to speak against Nixon, Bush…In Hanoi, all books, all newspapers, all TV stations have one job: repeating Communist leaders’ speeches. You don’t like it, right?  Neither do we.
Another noble reason is that you are free to produce film in Hollywood, but not in Vietnam. Vietnamese are free to worship God, Buddha…with one condition: they must have permission from Religion Department. Democracy advocates and freedom fighters expressing their ideas on internet ended up in prison.
The Vietcong War was a war of aggression against Vietnamese people and you, Tom, Kennedy, Kerry… were with them.  Our defense war of freedom had good and noble reasons. Nixon, US Army, and the free nations were with us. Who betrayed American Lady Liberty?

You believe that Ho Chi Minh and Communist leaders such as Lê Duẫn, Lê Đức Thọ… were good men.
You want to be their friends.  Frankly, I tell you they never want to be your friend because you are a capitalist. They would dump you when they think that you became useless. Do you know Madam Ngô Bá Thành, a well-known dissident in the South. After the fall of Saigon, she was elected as a National Assembly Representative for some years.  When she was kicked out of the National Assembly because she turned out to be valueless, she cried on the Liberated Saigon Radio. What a pity!
The Soviet Union and Red China supported strongly and fully Ho Chi Minh and his party until the whole Vietnam became red. They did not betray Vietcong. They did not say, “Viet f. Nam” (Forrest Gump film). During the war, by their orders tremendous atrocities were carried out from the North to the South. Suffering and death were immense. Vietcong divided Vietnam into two parts, and then they reunited by blood, suffering and death.  To the Vietnamese, the reunification war was unnecessary. But the Vietcong, dangerous killers wanted it. You, Tom, Kerry, and Ted Kennedy… praised and sided with them. Our defense of freedom was legitimate and noble.  So was the American aid.  

You helped end the Vietcong War. The consequences you have never thought of:
You’re American. You know how the Civil War ended between Generals Grant and Lee. They shook hand. General Grant ordered that General Lee’s soldiers be given food and horses to go home, rebuilding the South. Enemies then, now brothers and sisters. Noble deed!  

What did Ho Chi Minh and Communist leaders do to the Vietnamese people before and after they divided Vietnam?
First they set up Kangaroo to destroy landowners and Bourgeoisie class in the North. Terror and death panicked North Vietnamese. Land belonged to the State.  No one had a means of living. They implemented the stomach policy.
After Geneva Agreement in 1954, 800,000 people went down to the South, leaving their properties behind, families divided.
In 1960, they began a new, bloody war. They sent young Vietnamese, 16-year-old boys and girls alike to Laos, Cambodia and the South Vietnam, except some high-ranking Communist cadres’ children who had the privilege of studying in the Communist countries. In the South countryside, Vietcong controlled peasants by kidnapping, menace, “mò tôm” (drowning, hands and legs strung and a rock hanging to the neck), rockets fired to the cities, road mining, taxes and rice collection.  No more peace in the South Vietnam.
Tết Attack in 1968, Nguyễn Huệ Offensive in 1972, finally Hồ Chí Minh Offensive in 1975 wreaked havoc through out the South Vietnam. Compared to those VC military offensives in the South, bombing in the North was nothing. I don’t think you’ve ever made that kind of comparison.
During the months following the dreaded day, April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese found out that South Vietnamese are richer, that their houses, more beautiful and furnished with ceramic tiles, chinaware, TV sets, cars, motorbikes, that they owned orchards with irrigation system and generators, and that professionals such as medical doctors, engineers, professors…were better educated that those in Hanoi.
During this time, South Vietnamese army officers, government officials, political members, writers were concentrated or arrested to re-education prisons built in jungle, remote mountains. Some of their names inspire dread and death such as “Thanh Cẩm,” “Sky gate”.

How was the life in those fearful prisons?  Compared to VC prisons, Abu Graib was a filming studio with smiling actors, cigarette-smoking interrogator actresses, and inmates, naked and faces covered. We, Vietnamese Americans, ex-re-education prisoners, laughed at Senators Ed. Kennedy’s critics, Carl Levin’s, and Washington Post’s 140 issues’ about Abu Graib abuse. We were year long hungry, year long hard work.  Many of us died of beating, of diseases, of work accidents. Father Nguyễn Hữư Lễ in his book Tôi Phải Sống ( I Must Survive)wrote that he and two other inmates Đặng văn Tiếp and Nguyễn Sỹ Thuyên failed to escape from Thanh Cẩm prison. They were captured back and beaten severely. Tiếp and Thuyên died, but Father Lễ survived. He was then interned in a punishment cell, sleeping for two years on a cement platform, living with a mixture of feces and urine thrown all over the cell even in his meals and drink. There was no toilet paper. He tore his clothes into pieces for cleaning. He washed them in nearby river when prisoners were allowed to take a bath. His whole body was filthy, noisome, and nauseating. Prisoners’ food was made of rotten yam and putrid fish. Vũ Thư Hiên, son of Hồ Chi Minh’s personal secretary, in his book Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày (Night amid Daytime)saw his meals eaten by rats coming from the sewage pipes before handed to him. On the American TV channels, I saw the meals served with milk, steak, fresh bread to detainees in Guantánamo are tastier and more delicious than my current dinners. Vietcong’s Prisoners’ clothes were made of military burlap sand bags. Female inmates slept naked during the night while their clothes dried in the nightly wind. It was easy to deal with stubborn detainees. Just ordering them to run and shooting them at their back. The report was that one escapee had been killed. We worked hard. We cleared forest, burned downed trees, and plowed the land. Ten detainees pulled the plow against the rigid soil. In the evening, they were exhausted, joking, “We’re speaking water buffalo.” Jane, you are advised to read those “lives so far.”

How about their wives’ life? They started selling furniture, chinaware, clothes, shoes… House empty, they began to buy and sell in the black market. Their clothes were mended with so many pieces of different fabrics that no one could see the original stuff.  But life must go on. Political prisoners’ children could not go up to colleges and universities because of political discrimination.

Life was unbearable in the South. Vietnamese, men, women, children, even Bộ đội (Ho Chi Minh’s foot soldiers) set sail illegally to the Pacific Ocean in thirty-foot long boats. Two boat-persons going to the sea, one of them died. The sea and its storms did not love them, capsizing their boats and drowning them. Sea pirates did not like them, robbing them, extracting their gold teeth. Women did not like rape. But it came to them.    While you were enjoying making love, those desperate, miserable women had to endure several semen ejaculations. That was not individual rapes; it was collective rapes in many days. Women looked like passing balls in basketball games of two or three teams. The final ejaculation was a bullet to conclude their life. Every family has a tragedy. You can find the above books about Vietcong prisons, about the journey to freedom on the Southeast Asia Sea in any bookstore in Little Saigon, Orange County, California.

Our families were starving in the jungle and in the house. Your goal was well completed. You had the joy sitting at an anti-craft gun aiming at American jet pilots among smiling Vietcong. You amassed a lot of money by making movies. You got sex satisfaction with your husband. You enjoyed mother’s happiness, children’s love. You ignored Vietnamese women’s sufferings from their children’s death and their husbands’ on the sea, and from their being raped. You felt proud of their husbands’ hunger and physical internment in filthy, miserable condition in Vietcong prisons.

About your son, Troy.  Does he know whose name his was named after?  I think you have the obligation to tell it to your son.  Tell him who Nguyễn văn Trổi was.  Was Trổi an assassin, a freedom-fighter killer?

As I said, the South Vietnamese did not want Vietcong War. But it came to us; and you and your friends helped the Vietcong triumph in the South by lobbying Congress to cut off military and financial aid. Jane, you were born in democracy and grew up in freedom. You were against South Vietnamese and their freedom. Why did you dislike us?  Why did you help the Vietcong, the despots, the butchers? Why did you like Communist regime?  If you and your friends did, why didn’t you surrender your American citizenship and go live in Cuba or North Korea to experience Communist society? I cannot understand you and your friends. You have never thought about the consequences of your acts. Now Cindy Sheehan is doing what you did thirty years ago. The US could not overcome Vietcong guerrilla. How can terrorists’ new military tactic, a combination of guerrilla and suicide bombing be neutralized? Cindy would never think one day she’d have to wear a burka that Afghani women had worn.
One more thing, if you and your friends were afraid of death, you could have lived peacefully and happily in the United States and let the American brave help us.  We, the Southerners needed weapons and ammunition because the Communist Camp sent the Việt Cộng a lot of military equipment. We had man power. GIs could have gone home.
On April 30, 1975, the South Vietnam was defeated. How about the United States? Did they win the war? No. What did it mean? Except General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the Communist government members did not have a high school diploma. Vietcong told us they were a head smarter than the Americans. I did not believe Vietcong’s words. But the reality was that Francois Mitterrand, President of France visited Hanoi and that Bill Clinton, President of the United States shook hands with Americans’ killers: the defeated surrendered to the winner. Did you feel the American National Pride got hurt? I think you did not. Were you a heroine? No. Did you and your friends have honor? Certainly no.  What you and your friends did turned out to be worthless. Did Congressmen and Congresswomen keep their promises to the South Vietnam? No, they broke their words.  What did people in the World think about? The immediate sequel was the Iran hostage under President Jimmy Carter, an anti-war activist. Jane, you forget an ordinary and simple lesson: human being is surrounded by microbes and viruses. If the body is healthy, it is immune to diseases. It gets sick if it is weak. So is a nation’s life. There was a Latin saying two thousand years ago: Si vis pacem, para bellum. 

The last question to you: do you and your friends really love America? I am not sure.  I doubt it. Communists are America’s enemies. Why did you and your friends side with them? Why did you love America’s enemies more than defending America? The same sentiment is lingering around Washington D.C. and many state capitals: enemy prisoners are being more taken care of than beheaded Americans.

In the interview with Larry King live, you apologized to Vietnam War Veterans.  I sure think that you also owe us, the South Vietnamese, victims of your acts and your friends’, solemn and public apologies. That is the missing part in your book My Life So Far. 

Three months later, Jane Fonda's sent me this e-mail reply: