By: Ed Creamer

I’ve found when you look back on certain events in history you will find individuals who could have served their county well. Well, they could have but didn’t. It seems one act they performed changed all that. An act even performed in our time in history.

The first that comes to mind for me is the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. While I feel certain an old SgtMaj I knew actually remembers this battle well and could tell the story first hand. Regardless, we all know the small group of Spartans held off a much larger group of Persians until one of their own, Ephialtes betrayed them. This betrayal eventually resulted in the loss of the city-state of Athens. One act of betrayal was all it took.

As we move closer to our time in history, we all know how Brutus betrayed Caesar which marked the very early start of the decline of the Roman Empire. Then there was our own Benedict Arnold. While his attempt to turn over the fort at West Point to the British did not succeed, history will always brand him a traitor. In the end, even the British didn’t want him.

One of the more famous traitors of World War II was a Norwegian General by the name of Vidkun Quisling. (Remember that name since there will be a test later and spelling counts.) Quisling turned over all of Norway’s defense secrets to Adolf Hitler. This provided Hitler all he needed to conquer and control Norway. In the end he was tried and executed by his own people.

As we move even closer to our time we see how the Resenbergs gave the Soviets our secrets to the atom bomb. And then there was FBI agent Robert Hanssen who turned over the names of all our double agents we had to the Soviets. It seems doing this for money excited him more than the sex pictures he took of himself and his wife to show to neighbors. No! I never saw them.

However, in my opinion, and those of most who served in Vietnam, Jane “Hanoi” Fonda will always be remembered as a traitor. If one should have ever been tried for aiding a abetting the enemy, she fits the bill. She played the role of both a fool and a pawn for the North Vietnamese when she visited our POW’s in prison and clamed they were fed and well treated even though she never understood either the questions or the answers their captors gave her. She, more than any other antiwar activist of that era, did as much harm to our POWs as the North Vietnamese did. I for one will always wonder why she was tried for treason.