HANOI JANE

Believe me there weren't many pieces of good advice my father ever gave me, but one thing I remember as a teenager was, "If you expect to get any action, don't go out with a group of your buddy's, go out by yourself."
Another thing was when I was eight, or nine and we lived in that house in Merced, California. My brother and I were only two years apart, he was younger and when we weren't fighting with one another it seems we were always getting into fights with our best friends, boys and girls alike.
Other parents would come up to our door knocking, and yelling, threatening, and making total horses asses of themselves over real or imagined slights against their children. My mother would get into it with other parents once in a while, she used to love a good fight, but my father never said much of anything. I once asked him why other parents took up for their kids, but he never took up for us? He said, "Because you kids will be over it by tomorrow, playing together and will be best friends again, the parents will still be mad at each other."
Once in 1970 when I asked him to drive a group of my fifteen year old friends to a place just outside the gates of Fort. Bragg, North Carolina to protest her for protesting the Viet Nam war he refused. At the time I was only fifteen, so I had to rely on my dad to drive my friends and me over there. And par for the course as any normal fifteen year old I accused him of being lazy. It was 1970 and he had a red 1969 Mustang and my mother had a green 1969 Mercury Monterey it was huge car that could have taken all of us. When I asked him why? He said something I'll never forget. "Son I may not agree with what that woman has to say, but I fought in two wars for her right to say it." I've always admired him for that.

As time has gone by, he turned 79 last January, he has said something he never would have said when he was in the Army. That America should not have been in Viet Nam. It was a "Conflict" that we withdrew from and didn't win.
He cried when he visited the Viet Nam Memorial, for all the men who lost their lives and he believes to this day that if JFK hadn't been killed America wouldn't have been so involved in a war we couldn't win. JFK was the reason he wanted to get into the Special Forces, he did it in 1965 at the age of thirty five something that is impossible today.

I worry that Iraq is the same thing. Thank God we haven't lost fifty eight thousand young people and I pray that it never comes to that. I also see the young men and women in uniform and I have the utmost respect for them and I pray for their safe return. I only hope this war isn't as pointless as Viet Nam and that one day we will look back on this as something necessary. Iraq and Saddam Hussein didn't destroy the Twin Towers. My heart goes out to the young people and all people who've died in this war.
Please God save them a special place in Heaven. And that they all return to their loved ones safe and sound.
As Christians, or any other religions I believe forgiveness is essential to life here after and as hard as it is sometimes we must forgive to be forgiven. And believe you me that's a hard pill for me to swallow I've got a lot of forgiving to do.

So if forgiving Jane Fonda is a small step let's remember she's human like the rest of us and sometimes we need people to forgive us for the stupid, thoughtless things we do. The Bible says all we have to do is ask for forgiveness and we shall be forgiven that isn't verbatim. God doesn't speak to me directly, but let's start by trying to forgive others and as hard as it is to do. Didn't she apologize? Sometimes you do stupid things and later realize you were wrong. I hated her at the time myself she appeared two doors down from the Carolina Theater where I worked when I was seventeen and I wouldn't go over there to see her then, but now I'd love to meet her.

“I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did," Fonda said.
"I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm . . . very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families."
Jane Fonda

A miserable piece of human garbage, deranged man, spit tobacco in a ladies face! What a pig, how disgusting!
Only in this crazy O.J Simpson, Scott Peterson, kind of world we live in today that decent people wouldn't be shocked and appalled that a man in 2005 could do something that disgusting to a woman.
Tell me? What did you people think about the man who threw a pie in Anita Bryant's face in 1977 when she openly expressed her hatred of gays? Do you think he's a hero too? She was expressing her freedom of speech, however misguided it was, just because she decided she wanted to rid the world of homosexuals? Was what she did OK? Acceptable? No, it wasn't then and it isn't now, but
gentlemen don’t treat ladies like that.

I just finished watching the last 30 minutes of the interview between Tim Russard and Jane Fonda. I must tell you that even though I've taken up for her in recent years because of things I've read in print nothing I've read has ever made me believe from the bottom of my heart that she was really sorry for what she did during the Viet Nam War.
Seeing and hearing her tonight made a true believer out of me. She didn't back down from any questions, or make excuses for her self and admitted when she'd done something entirely stupid and wrong, including posing on the anti-aircraft guns. This woman has come clean to her wrong doings and apologized for what she did point blank without any excuses or beating around the bush. She has said that what she did was wrong, but it may have brought an end of the War in Viet Nam sooner and saved lives.
There's something about hearing her explanations coming from her own mouth and not the press that actually make me truly believe what she has to say with one hundred percent sincerity. She's not a young “Barbarella” bombshell any more, but she's still very pretty and very much a mature woman. I have no doubt that she's a "Born Again Christian" no matter what my own feelings are about such things.

I can't help but remember when the press interviewed the mother of one of Jeffery Dahmer's murder victims when he was killed in prison. They told her about his acceptance of the Christian faith and asked her if she thought the man who'd murdered her son had gone to Heaven? That little old lady said, "If he repented for his sins and accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior, then yes, I believe he is in Heaven.” I remember thinking what a true Christian that woman was. More of us need to be that way when it comes to forgiving others.