Words to a Prisoner of Hatred

War is the ultimate experience from which few return.

Memories keep us on the front lines and in the jungles of old battles long after hostilities have ended and mandatory hatreds have simmered into silence.

The war in Korea is never far out of my mind and if I try I can almost re-create the sounds and sights of combat and feel the dread I felt then, so many years ago.

It was a war of inches for most of the time I was there, and each inch gained or lost was purchased at the cost of a young man’s blood on both sides of combat’s red and ragged line.

Many friends died in that long-ago war. I paid them homage once when I returned to the old battlefields a few years ago and I wanted to pay them homage again Friday in a large room at Westwood’s Veterans Hospital.

It was one of 172 federally mandated ceremonies in VA facilities across the country dedicated to the men

and women who had served time as prisoners of war and to those who disappeared in combat, never to be heard from again. They were honored with flags and symbols and children’s drawings and with speeches that generally glorified their deeds.

I expected the drum-beating and the flag-waving, but what I didn’t expect was the vitriol that laced the words of the main speaker.

He stirred old fires best left in embers.

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His name is George Maness, a former Air Force tail-gunner and, later, a high school teacher in Tulare. Today, at 64, he’s chairman of the California Veterans Board, a policymaking body for the state Department of Veterans Affairs.

For the most part his speech to 300 men and women was enribboned with platitudes and with the kinds of cliches that have come to characterize patriotic rituals.

These were followed by tirades that recalled Japanese atrocities committed against Allied prisoners during World War II and Communist brainwashing techniques applied to POWs in Korea.

And then he said, “The prisoners in Vietnam suffered all of the above plus Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.”

Not content with that, Maness went on to condemn the effort we put into rebuilding the “enemy” nations after World War II and then, as if she somehow represented the demon of every war’s calamity, returned again to Jane Fonda, whom he said he would never forgive.

His reference was to Fonda’s antiwar activities and, more specifically, to her visit to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, for which she later apologized on national television.

I know that among those who have never truly removed their uniforms the name Fonda still rankles. So does the name Hayden, a state senator, but not with the same emotional impact.

I was surprised, however, that a speaker would utilize this day to revive old hatreds toward the people we once fought in wars long ago and toward a woman who did what she felt she had to do at the time.

The references were, at best, inappropriate; at worst, rabble-rousing.

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If Maness’ intent was indeed to honor America’s fighting forces and not simply mount a political rostrum, he missed the point.

The best way to honor them is to damp the fires a combat veteran carries in the dark corners of his memory, not rekindle them. The best way to honor them is to still the rhetoric of ancient rages, not repeat it decades later.

History is replete with wars, both major and minor, that have at various times thrust just about every nation of the world against someone. Hatreds have existed on national, religious and cultural levels and continue to explode around the troubled globe.

The guilty are never adequately punished at war’s end because so many bear the guilt. Atrocities are never limited to one side because so many commit them in the name of combat.

In the final attribution of blame, Jane Fonda will emerge as a minor player. She didn’t start the war, she didn’t prolong the war, she didn’t fight the war and she didn’t lose the war.

What she did, due to her status as a celebrity, was to symbolize a massive protest to the conflict, and if elements of her action were clumsy and occasionally ill-considered, they were nonetheless valid.

To demonize her as a symbol of treason is to similarly condemn the millions of us who believed as she did that war is a lousy way to solve problems.

Maness served no one with his words except those to whom antipathy is a mantra and forgiveness a sin. It’s time we all took off our uniforms, boys. The war’s over. We’re home.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com