Jane Fonda appeared at the Weinberg Center for the Arts in Frederick, Maryland, on Friday and was greeted by protestors. At least 50 Vietnam War veterans showed up outside the theater holding signs that read “Forgive? Maybe. Forget? Never.”
“Whenever possible I try to sit down with vets and talk with them, because I understand and it makes me sad,” the 77-year-old actress told her audience in Frederick, the Frederick News-Post reported. “It hurts me and it will to my grave that I made a huge, huge mistake that made a lot of people think I was against the soldiers.”
“But those people out there … I’m a lightning rod,” Ms. Fonda said Friday, the News-Post reported. “This famous person goes and does something that looks like I’m against the troops, which wasn’t true, but it looked that way, and I’m a convenient target. So I understand.”
Veterans disagreed with Fonda.
“She encouraged North Vietnam to pull away from the negotiations table,” one veteran told the News-Post. “She got Americans killed … and she went to Vietnam to advance her husband’s career.”
“We feel what she did was so egregious … (she) really cost lives,” Vietnam veteran Mike McGowan agreed.
Fonda came under fire in 1972 when she headed over to North Vietnam at he height of the war. A picture of her sitting on a tank earned her the name Hanoi Jane.
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