University of Virginia Library

POW Smokescreen

She continued, Nixon is using the POW
issue; there are prisoners in the South, but they
are not mentioned, She spoke of some prisoners
of the NLF, who did not like Vietnamese food,
so the guards gave them sardines, which they
did not like either. They did not like sleeping
on the straw, so the guards went to trouble to
get them foam rubber, she added.

Miss Fonda contrasted that to the American
treatment of prisoners: tossing examples out of
helicopters, wiring the current from field radios
to genitals, putting them in cages with boa
constrictors. Even in this country, there are
tiger cages at Fort Benning, Georgia, she stated.

She talked of casualty count manipulation,
general racism, sexism and its relation to the
war; "We're in Vietnam because we're in
California." There was no prostitution in
Vietnam before the Western influx. She said, as
the men in Detroit spoke, they dropped their
medals — purple hearts, bronze stars, etc. —
into a basket marked "Waste."