My Life So Far (44 page)

I will never forget it. The three-day march culminated as hundreds of the veterans swept up a hill, plastic AK-47 rifles held high, shouting, “Peace now!” Thousands of cheering people gathered to greet them. The most significant speaker that afternoon was a tall, handsome Silver Star winner, one Lieutenant John Kerry from Massachusetts. He had a charisma and an eloquence that immediately marked him as a natural leader. I was never introduced to him that day, although during the 2004 presidential campaign, photos doctored by George W. Bush supporters tried to malign Kerry by making it appear that he had stood next to me.

G
etting ready for the Winter Soldier investigation required some hard, fast fund-raising and, not surprisingly, I volunteered to take it on, for which Al Hubbard made me VVAW’s honorary national coordinator.

The moment we wrapped
Klute,
I hit the road running. I went to people who had contributed to the GI office. I got my friends David Crosby and Graham Nash to do a benefit concert. But most of the money came from a grueling six-week speaking tour that took me to fifty-four college campuses across the country.

Whatever controversy I had experienced until then was nothing compared with what ensued on November 2, 1970, after my first speech in Ontario, Canada. Back in the United States, at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, I was stopped by customs officials who, without explanation, demanded that my suitcase and purse be opened and searched. And what do you suppose they found? Little plastic bottles, 105 in all, each marked with “B,” “L,” or “D”: the bottles that contained my array of vitamins.

That did it. They seized the bottles, my address book, and all my books and papers. I was taken to a room, held for three hours, and not allowed to make a phone call to my lawyer. When I tried to stand up, two hulking FBI chaps would shove me back in the chair. I said to them, “If there is a law that allows you to hold me here for no reason, that permits you to keep me from calling my lawyer, please show it to me and I’ll be quiet.” One of the agents answered, “You shut up! You’re in my control. You take my word for it! I’m taking orders from Washington.” I didn’t yet know about COINTELPRO, but this news showed me that what was going on was serious.
Washington!

I had just gotten my period, so after several hours I desperately needed to go to the women’s room. When the agent blocked my way and was rude, I tried to push him aside. As a result I was arrested for assaulting an officer—as well as for drug smuggling—though I didn’t yet know the charges.

Early in the morning I was handcuffed and taken to the Cuyahoga County jail, where they fingerprinted me and took a mug shot. While I was being booked, a man who’d just been arrested asked me, “What are you in for?” I replied that I might be called a political prisoner.

“Well, they oughta throw you in jail,” said he. “We don’t want no Commies running around loose in this country.”

“What are
you
in for?” I asked.

“Murder,” he replied.

I was in a cell for ten hours. The next day I was brought from jail in handcuffs past a phalanx of TV cameras and photographers. As my hands are slender and double-jointed, I easily slipped out of one handcuff and threw a “power to the people” fist in the air, much to the chagrin of the guards. Leaving behind the cameras, I was taken to a courthouse, where I was surprised and relieved to see Mark Lane. He had heard the news of my arrest (TV was all over it and it had made the front page in many papers) and had flown in to defend me.

Arrested at the Cleveland airport for “smuggling drugs”—my vitamins.

(Reuters/Corbis)

I refused to face the presiding judge but turned my back instead, as I felt the “system” had turned its back on me. Mark pleaded with me to turn around, but I wouldn’t. I was released on $5,000 personal bond on the drug charge and then booked on the local charge of assaulting the airport official, released on that charge on a $500 surety bond, and then booked for a hearing the following week.

Headlines across the country screamed the news that I’d been arrested for drug smuggling and assaulting an officer. Several months later one article tucked away on the back pages of
The New York Times
noted, “It was determined the pills she brought into the country from Canada were really vitamins, just as she said they were,” and the charges of assault and drug smuggling were dropped. No headlines for
that.

The day after my court appearance, I was back on the lecture circuit. Everywhere I went the surveillance had increased. At every airport there were at least two spooks in dark suits and shades (do they always operate in twos?), not even trying to pretend they weren’t there to observe and intimidate me. Stress and fatigue began to get to me, but I was determined not to be cowed.

I was moving too fast. I was actively bulimic. I was depressed. I hadn’t seen Vanessa and I felt anguish about that. I wasn’t reading anymore. I was barely
thinking.
But I kept going. It never occurred to me not to. I was living in crisis mode. U.S. soldiers were willing to testify about the war—at potential personal risk—and I felt a responsibility to do everything I could to make that possible.

A few times the marquees announcing my appearances would say
COME HEAR BARBARELLA SPEAK.
I began to feel like a sideshow and wondered if what I had to say about the war was getting through all the hoopla.

Mostly I traveled by myself with one small bag. I would arrive at the local airport, where the student in charge of the speakers’ bureau would pick me up. En route to the campus, I’d try to get a sense from my host of what I needed to prepare myself for. Increasingly the atmosphere would be described as tense, which usually meant there would be a large turnout; most of the time the audience numbered in the many hundreds, if not thousands. I spoke about the war and the upcoming Winter Soldier hearings and said that I was contributing my speaker’s fees to enable more veterans to attend. When I finished my speech, I would invite any vets in the audience to come up and give me their names and addresses if they were interested in participating, and as soon as I could get to a phone I would follow up with the VVAW’s Detroit office.

R
ight up to the day the hearings began in January 1971, vets were showing up to see if they could testify, or at least attend. Most had never been part of any organized activity against the war; many had never before spoken to anyone about their war experiences.

It was critical for VVAW that all the men who were slated to testify were legitimate veterans with their DD-214 (discharge documents) in hand, and that they could prove they had been where they said they had been. The organizers did a remarkable job with this—which was fortunate, since the Nixon White House subsequently did all it could to prove the men weren’t really combat veterans; and when they failed, they did the men the disservice of calling them “alleged vets” anyway, in an effort to discredit them and their testimony.

O
n January 31, hundreds of people from all over the country crammed into the large conference room in a Howard Johnson motel to witness this unprecedented event. Barbara Dane and Ken Cloke were there, Ken to review veterans’ documents and offer legal help as it was needed. Another person who stopped by was Tom Hayden, author of the
Ramparts
article that had so influenced me.

I had never met him before, and he invited me to have coffee with him in the hotel’s coffee shop. He was a bona fide movement “heavy” of whom I was in awe, and I was nervous and intimidated. I remember him talking mostly about the Red Family collective in Berkeley, California, of which he was a member. These groupings were springing up all over the country in the seventies. They were a way for longtime activists to overcome the depersonalization of the mass movements by creating close-knit, supportive families, models of a new way of living.

In his eloquent opening remarks at the Winter Soldier investigation, Lieutenant William Crandell, Americal Division, an officer of VVAW, made it clear the investigation was not a mock trial. “There will be no phony indictments,” he said. Instead the men would give straightforward testimony about “acts which are war crimes under international law. Acts which these men have seen and participated in. . . .” Civilian experts testified about different aspects of the war. For the first time, Bert Pfeiffer, a doctor from the University of Montana, discussed the toxic effects of a dioxin-laden 2,4,5-T herbicide known as Agent Orange, which the United States was spraying on the forests of Vietnam to kill trees and deprive the guerrilla soldiers of their cover. A message of support from family members and spouses of American prisoners of war was read.

I want to mention the presence of Staff Sergeant George Smith, the first U.S. POW from Vietnam I had ever met. He had served with Fifth Special Forces and had been a prisoner of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam (Vietcong) from 1963 to 1965. George would later join me and others on a national tour.

The heart of the Winter Soldier investigation was the testimony from the veterans. They represented every branch of the U.S. military, officers as well as enlisted men. Sitting solemnly in front of microphones at a long table covered by white cloth, they made an unusual sight with their medals, uniforms, long hair, and beards. One by one they said who they were, where they had served, and what category of war crime they would testify about.

In voices sometimes choked with emotion, the men told how they and others had randomly killed Vietnamese civilians and tortured Vietnamese prisoners. They told of raping and mutilating women and girls; cutting off ears and heads; rounding up entire villages into concentration camps (called “new life hamlets” in the obscene war-speak that was being used to sugar-coat reality). They told of B-52 carpet bombing; throwing Vietcong suspects from helicopters; using white phosphorus (Willie Peter), which burned endlessly through a person’s body. One pilot said:

All this, the vets repeated, was done in the presence of officers who said nothing, did nothing, to stop it. Some of the vets talked about getting hooked on drugs to numb themselves to what they did.

One of the many lies promulgated by the U.S. government came out at the hearings when five veterans revealed that the Third Marine Division had been in secret combat in Laos in 1969. They said the U.S. military refused to evacuate out any wounded or dead for fear the press would find out about the operation.

I was numb as I listened to speaker after speaker describe these atrocities. I
heard
what was being said, but I couldn’t get my heart to grasp it. Partly it had to do with my own emotional state. My nerves were shot. I couldn’t sleep. Picketers outside the Howard Johnson hotel were brandishing signs saying I was a Communist. My father wasn’t speaking to me and, because of the news reports about my arrest, probably thought I was a drug smuggler. My Hollywood connections feared I’d never work again. I felt my life was spinning out of control.

One of the few times I cried was over the “rabbit story.” It was told by Sergeant Joe Bangert, First Marine Air Wing, about his last day at Camp Pendleton and reminded me of what I had heard about traumatic training from military psychologists:

Supporters of George W. Bush’s administration, like those of Nixon at the time, have tried to portray the winter soldiers as frauds. The fact is, those soldiers were telling the truth. There is
no accurate refutation of any of the testimony given during the Winter Soldier investigation.
Only one man (who did
not
testify) had falsified his military rank, and that was Al Hubbard himself. It turned out that Al had been not an air force captain, but an air force staff sergeant E-5. Al admitted on the
Today
show in 1971 that he had lied “because I recognize in this country that it’s very important that one has an image.”