-40%
Vintage Zippo Lighter Snoopy Pilot Vietnam Screw Jane Fonda Hanoi DUI Crest
$ 16.36
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Description
This listing is for a Vietnam War vintage Zippo lighter featuring an applied enamel crest of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts character Snoopy in his famous WWI Pilot outfit striking the classic “Curse You, Red Baron’ pose but with substituted text that reads ‘Screw Jane Fonda’ (a reference to her anti-warstance). This lighter is in very nice condition with some surface wear.
Starting around May, 1970, as the Vietnam war raged, the one-time blonde bombshell cut her naturally brown hair short, trading sex appeal for liberal activism and rebranding herself as a political crusader against the war. On campus, she was pushing her movement to turn U.S. soldiers into pacifists. “The Army builds a tolerance for violence,” she shouted at the crowd. “I find that intolerable.” Fonda made talking to GIs her full-time job. She was arrested numerous times for attempting to hand out antiwar leaflets to soldiers at Fort Meade in Md., Fort Lewis, Wash., Fort Hood, Tex., and Fort Bragg, N.C.
For the next several years, Fonda would continue as one of the most prominent public faces in the antiwar movement. But it wasn’t until she traveled to Hanoi in July 1972 that she really enraged critics and fundamentally altered how the world viewed her for decades to come.
She and actor Donald Sutherland started an “anti-USO” troupe to counter Bob Hope’s famous shows for the troops. They called it FTA, which they said stood for Free the Army, but it was also a not-so-subtle nod to the expression “f— the Army.”
By July 1972, when Fonda accepted an invitation to visit North Vietnam, America had been at war overseas and with itself for years. She went to tour the country’s dike system, which was rumored to have been intentionally bombed by American forces — something the U.S. government to this day forcefully denies. During her two-week stay, Fonda concluded that America was unjustly bombing farmland and areas far flung from military targets. North Vietnamese press reported — and Fonda later confirmed — that she made several radio announcements over the Voice of Vietnam radio to implore U.S. pilots to stop the bombings.
“I appealed to them to please consider what you are doing. I don’t think they know,” Fonda said in a news conference when she returned home. “The people who are speaking out against the war are the patriots.” She said the radio addresses were the only way to get access to American soldiers, because she was barred from meeting them at their bases in South Vietnam.
In Hanoi, Fonda also met with seven American POWs and later said they asked her to tell their friends and family to support presidential candidate George McGovern; they feared they’d never be freed during a Richard Nixon administration. Rumors spread and still persist that she betrayed them by accepting secret notes and then turning them over to the North Vietnamese. The POWs who were there have denied that this ever occurred.
But the action that still enrages veterans most was that photograph of her with North Vietnamese troops on an antiaircraft gun that would have been used to shoot down American planes. This, probably more than anything, earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane.”
Over the years, she apologized many times for the antiaircraft gun photo. She maintains she was not a traitor by speaking out against the war or trying to turn soldiers against it, because she still believes the U.S. government was lying to them.
Additionally, she was active in the Black Panthers and marched for the rights of American Indians, soldiers and working mothers.