More nonfiction by Paul Pekin

This piece was over twenty years in the writing.  It was rejected several times, and finally boiled down to what it is, a much better piece that it started out to be.  It finally got published but, alas, in a small magazine whose name I no longer recall.

Never mind that.  I like the story. A lot.

 
 
 

 The Sunshine Patriot
 

 Jane Fonda--American Bitch. Some people never forget, never forgive, never understand. Get this guy, forty-five, maybe fifty, with his American Bitch bumper sticker and his tattooed forearm resting on the open window--as if anyone really cared.  Jane Fonda?  She's an exercise video!

 It's going to happen at a red light.  I'm going to get out of my car, I'm going to walk up to his window, I'm going to say, Jane Fonda?  I was in the same room with her, once, on the same elevator, almost, I could have talked to her.  And listen, she would have talked to me.

 So why didn't you, he'll say, and I'll say, just shy I guess, and then the light will change and traffic will start with the horns.  Maybe that's why people buy bumper stickers.  Nobody has time to talk.

 Life is full of screw ups.  Jane Fonda was one of mine.  I screwed it up from the start to the finish, and now she's in Atlanta doing the tomahawk chop with Ted Turner and I'm trying to write about something that happened twenty years ago.

 There was a war on, a real shooting war with body bags and nothing even resembling euphoria.  People weren't out hanging yellow ribbons.  They were hanging their heads.  I had an assignment from a national magazine, the first, last, and only one I would ever get--cover this hearing The Vietnam Veterans Against the War were cooking up in Detroit, an investigation into American war crimes that was going to prove  "My Lai was no isolated incident but part of a general policy of genocide."  Do the job right, my career would be on the move, naturally, I screwed it up.

 I took the Greyhound. I do strange things like that.  Everybody else flew, I came in on a bus.  Got off downtown, took a cab, wound up somewhere out by the airport anyhow.  I checked into the Howard Johnson, and that was all I saw of Detroit for the next three days, as much as anyone saw, Jane Fonda included.

 The vets were walking around the lobby, wearing beards, long hair, and fatigues, giving people the power handshake.  The press was there, television too, Mark "Rush to Judgement" Lane was there and, of course, Jane Fonda.  People were carrying picket signs in sub-zero weather outside.  Hanoi Jane, they said.  Howard Johnson's Harbors Reds!  And here I came in my yellow sports jacket that made me look like a waiter.
 Did anyone, by chance, catch those Gulf War Victory Parades? Here in Chicago, they made arches of red, white, and blue balloons over Michigan Avenue; they lined up the the entire park side with yellow ribbon.  People packed the sidewalks waving little American flags and other stuff they bought from the vendors.  Even the poor old Art Institute lions wore yellow ribbons around their decaying necks.

 I saw Mayor Daley and his Maggie--she was in a bright red dress.  I saw Governor Edgar, Lynn Martin, and Edwin Derwinski.  I saw General Powell, a black man, cheered by skinheads from the southwest side.  I saw clenched fists when the loudspeaker played  "Stand up for America!"

 The troops marched down Michigan Avenue and an airplane circled overhead towing a banner that read,  "Thanks for making Saddam dance."   That night television compared it all with the celebration that broke out when the Japanese surrendered to end World War 2--but the people making the comparison could not have been on State Street when that happened or they never would have made the comparison.

 One of the things in this parade was a contingent of Vietnam veterans.  Several contingents.  You can always tell a Vietnam vet.   Unlike the World War One guys I used to see when I was a kid, these Vietnam vets march in fatigues and they hardly ever stay in step.  One group drove by on Harley Davidsons, beards, tattoos, pot bellies, the whole shot.  How can you not love a country that produces people like that?

 But vets, Vietnam, World War 2, and especially Korea, have always left me uncomfortable.  I was too young for one of these wars, too old for another, and conveniently on my honeymoon (in Detroit of all places) when the third broke out.  My entire high school class went to Korea, people I knew were injured and died.  I stayed home, deferred.  Of course I could have enlisted.  Of course I did not.

 So maybe I was the wrong guy to walk into Howard Johnson's and share power handshakes with young men who had been where I never dared go.  They called themselves Winter Soldiers, this from Thomas Paine who once spoke of "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots," and they declared themselves ready to serve in "this the winter of our service to our country."

 These winter soldiers kicked off the proceedings by dumping their medals into the waste basket.  For three days they told of pickled souvenir ears, phosphorous flares fired into women's vaginas, children stoned with c-ration cans, villages set on fire, graves desecrated, and prisoners tortured with electric shock, tossed from helicopters, even caged up with a eight foot python.  Nah, I don't think these were the same veterans I saw marching in the Gulf War parade, but then again, maybe some of them were.

 I'd like to say it was the sight of the Gulf War parade and all those shiny medals on the reviewing stand that sent me down into my basement looking for that old screwed up story I buried twenty years ago.  In a way it might even be true, but even truer would be to say I simply thought, as so many writers do, that I could salvage and recycle something I should have done right in the first place.

 I almost didn't find it.  Everything else, stuff I'd written when I was still trying to figure out the difference between lie and lay, emerged from the dust.   But no Detroit story.  I began to fear I had deliberately thrown it away.  When you write something so bad the editor coughs up the kill fee, you sometimes do that.  Then I found it.   "Alone on a Mountaintop"

 There was a woman in Detroit named Virginia Werner, a nice middle class middle aged lady whose son was in a Vietnam prison camp.  She'd been writing letters to Hanoi, putting up billboards, cooperating with the government, now she was on the other side, speaking to a bunch of hippies and anti-war zealots.  "I feel like I'm alone on a mountaintop,"  she said.  That was where I got my title.

 Well, there wasn't much in this story I could save.  A lot of description, Howard Johnsons, how plastic everything was, all that sterile nylon carpeting, the swimming pool across the hall, the bitter weather outside, the pickets chanting "Traitors must die!" the Winter Soldiers, their long hair, their beards, their long knit scarves, the press who kept asking for serial numbers, dates, locations, units, and kept getting told, nah, we don't play that establishment game.  I got in a lot of crazy little details, the guy who cried "Off Bob Hope" when someone asked about the USO, the young woman who scolded a panelist for using the word "girl," the people wandering around the lobby eating ice cream cones.  I got the guy selling the Worker and the Detroit church ladies giving out free coffee and the tv cameraman who said, "It's old stuff."  So why did I leave out Jane Fonda?
 Goodness, she was there, she really was, right in that overheated lobby, surrounded by press.  All I had to do was walk up and talk to her.  "Ms Fonda--"  That's all I had to say.  "Ms Fonda, how do you feel about those people out there with the picket signs?"  That would have broken the ice.  Then I could have gone home and told my son I had talked to Barberella.

 Sorry.  I couldn't do it.  And when I rode the same elevator with Mark Lane, I couldn't talk to him either.  Some of us are just not cut out to talk with strangers of any kind, let alone the great and famous.  I went home and wrote the thing my own way.  This celebrity thing was a side issue, wasn't it?  The real issue was ourselves and the way we always seem to justify everything our country does, from atomic bombs to free fire zones if "it saves one American life."  As if one American life were worth more than one any other kind of life.

 My heart was in the right place, but my pen turned out mush.  And  of course I didn't really believe that stuff about the eight foot python.  Which means I doubted the phosphorous flares too.  And was a little less than convinced about the scraps of human flesh people thrown out of helicopters were supposed to have left clinging to the doors.  But you couldn't doubt it all, not when you sat down and talked with these vets one on one, guys like Nathan Hale.

 His real name.  He had his birth certificate and discharge papers to prove it.  "I didn't come here for Mark Lane or Jane Fonda.  I came here for myself."  He had color slides which showed prisoners being tortured by our South Vietnamese allies.  One poor guy was being burned with a red hot spoon.

 But I wasn't a real reporter.  I was rubbing elbows with pros from the major papers.  These guys didn't believe anything and anyone.  They didn't believe Mark Lane, and they didn't believe the Pentagon.  They only believed what they could check out, and the rest they reported as uncorroborated evidence.   "I hope you won't feel contaminated sitting next to me,"  the man from the Detroit Daily News said.  His paper had run a headline calling Winter Soldier a "mock trial" and now he was a pariah.  "Well,"  he said.  "What would you call it?"

 So there wasn't much in my dusty old story, and what lies in the memory isn't too clear either.  Did Nathan Hale actually show me those slides, or did he only tell me about them?  Did those guys who dumped their medals in to the waste basket remove them from their shirts or their pockets?  Was Jane Fonda present all three days, or only the day I saw her?  If you don't put things down right away, how will you ever find them again?

 I took a trip down to the new Harold Washington library.  If  you want to find about the way we were twenty years ago, this is where you go.  The old soldiers have told the old stories too many times and every retelling inevitably becomes a rewrite.  History never changes on microfilm rolls even if it is just the media version.

 But Winter Soldier did not show up in Newsweek, did not appear in Time or Life, and could not be found in the New York Times index.  The entire week was missing from the Chicago Tribune records.  It took half the morning before I found a single photograph in the old Chicago Daily News (good lord, why did a fine paper like that have to die?).  There she was that angry woman who stood up and waved the American flag.  "Flag waver ignored"  the caption said.

 After that I found four separate stories in the Sun Times, and it was pretty much the same material that was in my own, but better organized, more comprehensible.  You can look this stuff up if you wish, February l971.  It's all there, Jane Fonda, the pickled ears, the phosphorous flares.  And if you really enjoyed Desert Storm you should keep turning the microfilm until you're reading about Lieutenant Calley and his court martial.  1971 was an interesting year. Suddenly I was into the Manson trial--remember that, Helter Skelter?  According to Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, Charlie "made a game out of everything."   A researcher could get sidetracked.  Chicken was 28 cents a pound and while geese were too smart to overeat, science was "fixing that."  In Detroit, one night, I sneaked out to a nearby theater, and took in Five Easy Pieces.  Here I was, in the Harold Washington Library, doing the same damn thing.

 But it's all there in the dust and the microfilm, the permanent records of what we said and did, of who and what we were, and probably still are.  We can ignore it if we like, we can rewrite it if we wish, we can exorcise those ghosts, we can march down Michigan Avenue with flags flying, we can lift up our heads and feel good about America, the only thing we cannot do is make it go away.

 Hello, Jane?  Do you think we could try this again?

 the end

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