Born on the Fourth of July Read online

  Three days later we’d gotten all the way to Texas. It was New Year’s Eve. We celebrated it in a bar in Longview shooting a game of pool. The next day we got up early and drove straight through to Las Cruces, New Mexico. I remember big bramble bushes blowing in front of the car and dust all over everything. I wanted to push straight on to L.A., but Kenny and I hadn’t eaten more than a few sandwiches in the last few days and we needed a good night’s sleep. We stopped at a motel overnight and had a big breakfast of hot coffee and scrambled eggs before we started driving again. Even Kenny got excited later that afternoon when we passed the Great Salt Lake. He took the car the rest of the way in and I sat by the open window watching the orange groves and green trees begin to appear as we came out of the desert. It’s California, I kept saying to myself, it’s California. It got dark just as we came into L.A. and the lights went on all over the sprawling city like flickering little candles. No matter what Kenny or anybody said to me, this was Paradise, and like the pioneers before me I was going to make it my home. We got to Heliotrope Avenue and parked the car in front of Kenny’s house. We went into his tiny apartment, turned the air conditioner on and fell asleep exhausted.

  We rented a larger apartment down by the ocean later that week, and after a while Kenny quit school. We hung out together all the time. It was so good to be with someone who’d known me all my life. Every day we went swimming with two girls who lived next door and Kenny bought himself a brand-new motorcycle. He strapped me on the back and took me riding on it the first day he brought it home.

  I had been in California for about a month when one day there was a big photo on the front page of the L.A. Times—a group of vets had gone to Washington and thrown away their medals. It was one of the most moving antiwar demonstrations there had been. I would have given anything to have been there with them. I read about it sitting by the pool of the Santa Monica Bay Club, wearing a ridiculous Mickey Mouse shirt. Suddenly I knew my easy life could never be enough for me. The war had not ended. It was time for me to join forces with other vets.

  I went home and called a couple of people I knew. One of them told me there was going to be a meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War that night in an apartment in L.A. I was still a bit unsure of myself but I couldn’t wait to get into my car and drive over.

  I remember how kind they were to me from the moment I arrived. When I got there, a bunch of vets were in front of the house waiting to carry me up the stairs in my chair. “Hi brother,” they said to me warmly. “Can we help you brother? Is there anything we can do?”

  All of a sudden everything seemed to change—the loneliness seemed to vanish. I was surrounded by friends. They were the new veterans, the new soldiers with floppy bush hats and jungle uniforms right here on the streets of America. I began to feel closer to them than I ever had to the people at the university and at the hospital and all the people who had welcomed me back to Massapequa. It had a lot to do with what we had all been through. We could talk and laugh once again. We could be honest about the war and ourselves. Before each meeting there was the thumb-and-fist handshake—it meant you cared about your brother.

  We were men who had gone to war. Each of us had his story to tell, his own nightmare. Each of us had been made cold by this thing. We wore ribbons and uniforms. We talked of death and atrocity to each other with unaccustomed gentleness.

  I remember being very nervous and anxious at that first meeting. I told them, Give me a speech, give me a place to show this wheelchair. I really wanted to get going immediately. The brothers told me to calm down and not to worry, there would be plenty of chances to speak, it was time to get the organization together.

  Afterward I went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and one of the guys came up to me and gave me a big hug. He held me for a long time and when he let go there were tears streaming down his face. “I love you, brother,” he said, wiping his eyes. And then he said, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry I did that.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I love you too. Now when’s my first speaking gig?”

  They told me to go to a rally in Pasadena the next day. I would be speaking at noon with a couple of other people.

  The VVAW sent me to do a lot of speeches after that and soon I was on television all the time. On one network there was a big argument with a producer who didn’t want a disfigured veteran on her show. “We’ve seen enough of that,” she told me over the phone. “Every night for the last couple of years people have seen it on the six o’clock news and they’re tired of it.” She tried to be nice and told me that she had read a book called Johnny Got His Gun, so she knew what I was all about, but she didn’t think it would be tasteful at all to let the people of L.A. see a crippled kid on a Sunday morning.

  I was at a rally a few weeks later when Donald Sutherland began to read the last couple of pages of the book the woman had talked to me about, the one about the kid in World War I who gets blown to hell like myself and loses almost everything, he’s just a hulk, a slab of meat. Sutherland began to read the passage and something I will never forget swept over me. It was as if someone was speaking for everything I ever went through in the hospital. It was as if the book was speaking about me, my wound and the hell it had been coming back and learning to live with it. I began to shake and I remember there were tears in my eyes. Just before Sutherland was finished I found myself pushing my chair toward the stage and telling them that I wanted to be lifted up the steps. “I have a poem,” I told them. “I have a poem I wrote about the vets who threw their medals away and I want to read it.”

  They broke all the rules and hoisted my chair up on the stage. I went up to the microphone and started reading. The crowd cheered when I was finished and again I had tears in my eyes. I said a couple of words I can’t remember.

  For the next couple of weeks the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. There were all sorts of clubs and schools wanting to hear me speak. I wrote the names and addresses down on pieces of paper and all over the walls of the apartment.

  I went totally into speaking out against the war after that. I went into it the same way I’d gone into everything else I’d wanted to do in my life—the way I’d gone into pole vaulting or baseball or the marines. But this was something that meant much more than being an athlete or a marine. I could see that this thing—this body I had trained so hard to be strong and quick, this body I now dragged around with me like an empty corpse—was to mean much more than I had ever realized. Much more than I’d known the night I cried into my pillow in Massapequa because my youth had been desecrated, my physical humanity defiled. I think I honestly believed that if only I could speak out to enough people I could stop the war myself. I honestly believed people would listen to me because of who I was, a wounded American veteran. They would have to listen. Every chance I had to get my broken body on the tube or in front of an audience I went hog wild. Yes, let them get a look at me. Let them be reminded of what they’d done when they’d sent my generation off to war. One look would be enough—worth more than a thousand speeches. But if they wanted speeches I could give them speeches too. There was no end to what I had to tell them.

  “I’m the example of the war,” I would say. “Look at me. Do you want your sons to look like this? Do you want to put on the uniform and come home like me?” Some people could not believe the conditions I told them about in the hospitals. Others could not believe anything at all. After one of the TV shows a cameraman called me a commie traitor to my face. He was pushing me down the studio steps in my chair and I wondered if he was going to drop me. I kept receiving letters from people calling me names and telling me what they would do if I didn’t stop aiding the enemy.

  The speaking went on and on, and so did the war, and after a while it all began to seem endless. My friends told me I was starting to sound like a broken record. Even Kenny got disgusted with my new role of activist and antiwar veteran and left for New York. I went a little crazy staying alone in the apartment, answering the phone that nev
er stopped ringing and scrawling more names all over the walls. One night I tore the place apart.

  I thought of stopping but I was afraid of the loneliness. The speaking had brought back everything—the hospital, Vietnam. Each time I spoke about an experience it was just like reliving it. And there were some things I never talked about—like the corporal from Georgia and the ambush in the village and the dead children lying on the ground.

  I can’t remember one time when I even came close to telling anyone exactly what had happened over there. Back then it was still deep inside of me and I shared it with no one—not even the men I had come to know as my brothers.

  THE NOON TRAFFIC is moving along Wilshire Boulevard just as if the line of veterans and ordinary citizens picketing Nixon’s campaign headquarters were not there. “Join us!” we cry. “Stop the war!” Heavy curtains are drawn over the windows of the campaign headquarters where volunteers are working for the reelection of the president. We have been there for two days and not one of the volunteers has ever looked out. The people in their cars pass us quickly, intent on their steering wheels. Who are these people going to work, going to lunch, as if nothing is more important than that? “Here!” I scream. “Look at the war!” They never so much as turn their heads. I wheel out into the traffic, pushing myself in front of cars. “Take a good look at the war!” I cry, racing with my wheelchair in front of a truck. I do not think—or even care—about getting killed. I am screaming at them to look at me. Up on the rooftop of the headquarters the hidden police cameras are taking pictures, and I know that all by myself I have at least succeeded in stopping traffic.

  One by one the other demonstrators are breaking from the line. They sit down among the cars, banging their picket sticks and yelling, their voices hoarse—“One, two, three, four. We don’t want your fucking war”—tying up the traffic for blocks. We have taken the streets. People are honking their horns now, workers and secretaries hanging out their windows, busdrivers shouting their approval. Some of the demonstrators are dancing and I grab both wheels of my chair, then let go with one hand and raise my middle finger in the air as a salute to the cops and the FBI. I spin on my two wheels in front of everyone, as the shouting goes on for the war to end, for the killing to be stopped forever. I keep doing my wheelies as the police look on with envy and utter contempt, frozen on their side of the street. They seem torn between wanting to kill us and wanting to tear off their uniforms and throw away their guns. “Come join us!” we shout to them, but they do not take us up on our invitation.

  Finally a tall lieutenant announces over a bullhorn that the demonstration has ended and that everyone is to clear out immediately. “How are you doing, brother?” says a man with long red hair in back of me. “Is everything okay?” He is someone I have seen at other demonstrations, but I do not know his name. “You look like you could use some help,” he says, and offers to push me for a while.

  The police are moving now, closing in on us. I can hear sirens in the distance. I begin yelling and screaming directions to the people around me. “Get back on the sidewalk into the line! Come on now!” I try to wheel my chair forward, but it will not move. I try again.

  Suddenly the man with the red hair is leaning over from behind me, grabbing my hands. “You’re under arrest.” Another man whom I recognize from the picket line runs up to help him. “Come on you bastard. You’re going to jail!”

  I am fighting to keep them from handcuffing me, screaming for the other demonstrators to help me.

  The red-headed man lifts up the handles of my chair and dumps me into the street. I fall forward on my face, my legs twisted under me.

  “Get your fucking hands behind you!” The redheaded man jabs his knee into my back.

  There is a tremendous commotion all around me. Someone is kicking the dead part of my body that can’t feel anymore. People are yelling and screaming and clubs are flying everywhere.

  “I’m a Vietnam veteran! Don’t you know what you’re doing to me? Oh God, what’s happening.” They are holding my arms. They twist them behind my back, clamp handcuffs around my wrists.

  “Don’t you understand? My body’s paralyzed. I can’t move my body, I can’t feel my body.”

  “Get him the fuck out of here!” yells someone.

  Kicking me and hitting me with their fists, they begin dragging me along. They tear the medals I have won in the war from my chest and throw me back into the chair, my hands still cuffed behind me. I feel myself falling forward because I cannot balance and the red-headed man keeps pushing me back against the chair, yelling and cursing at me to stay put.

  “I have no stomach muscles, don’t you understand?”

  “Shut up you sonofabitch!”

  There are women standing on the sidewalk nearby crying, and all around me people are being beaten and handcuffed. The two men begin dragging me in the chair to an unmarked car on the other side of the street.

  The red-headed man throws my body into the back seat, my dead limbs flopping underneath me. “Get in there you fucking traitor!”

  I am feeling hurt all over and I can hardly breathe. I lie bleeding in the back seat as a discussion goes on between the two of them about whether or not they have broken any of my bones. I hear them say they are going to take me to the county jail hospital for x-rays.

  Something happens to them when I take my clothes off in the admitting room. They stand there looking at me. They see my scars and the rubber catheter tube going into my penis and they begin to think they have made a mistake. I can see the fear in their faces. They have just beaten up a half-dead man, and they know it. They are very careful now, almost polite. They help me put my clothes back on when the doctor is through with me. “I was in Vietnam too,” the red-headed man says, hesitating.

  “We don’t want the war either,” says the other cop. “No one wants war.”

  They help me back into the chair and take me to another part of the prison building to be booked.

  “What’s your name?” the officer behind the desk says.

  “Ron Kovic,” I say. “Occupation, Vietnam veteran against the war.”

  “What?” he says sarcastically, looking down at me.

  “I’m a Vietnam veteran against the war,” I almost shout back.

  “You should have died over there,” he says. He turns to his assistant. “I’d like to take this guy and throw him off the roof.”

  They fingerprint me and take my picture and put me in a cell. I have begun to wet my pants like a little baby. The tube has slipped out during my examination by the doctor. I try to fall asleep but even though I am exhausted, the anger is alive in me like a huge hot stone in my chest. I lean my head up against the wall and listen to the toilets flush again and again.

  They lead me out of the cell the next morning around ten o’clock. I am to be moved to another part of the prison until someone comes to bail me out. They have arrested seventeen other vets at the demonstration. They take them out of the cells one by one, handcuffing and chaining them together in a long line like a chain gang. I look at their faces and wonder which one of them is like the guy with long red hair and the other cop who’d pretended to be veterans the day before. Which one is the informer now? I think to myself.

  They tell me to move out of the way. They cannot fit me into the line with the others. “It’s too difficult with that chair of yours,” one of the cops complains.

  “Don’t you want to put the cuffs on me again?” I say. “Don’t you think I need leg chains like the others?”

  He looks at me surprised, then turns away and screams, “Let’s go!”

  The veterans clank their chains against the cold cement floor as they file past me out of the cellblock. Seventeen of America’s veterans dragging those chains, handcuffed together—America’s children. I cry because I want to be walking with them and because I want so much to trust them. But after what has happened I don’t know whether I will be able to trust anyone, even my closest friends now. What are they doin
g to me? I think. They have taken so much from me already and still they are not satisfied. What more will they take?

  AFTER A SPEECH in a church in Compton I met a woman. I had the whole congregation in tears and a pretty woman in a long dress came up to me afterward and we started talking. We went outside and we kept talking until late that night. She gave me her phone number and told me she had two kids and if I wasn’t doing anything the next week to drop by. She was a schoolteacher and her name was Helen. We called each other every day that week and one night I went over to her house. I kissed her in her driveway with the motor still running in my fancy Oldsmobile. It was the first time I had been close to a woman since Mexico. She called me the next day and told me she loved me. I thought it was pretty silly at first.

  I went up to the mountains with a group of Quakers soon after that. I remember staying up all night at a house near their training school. It was a house that belonged to this crippled guy—I think he’d had polio. His wife had divorced him, but she was up there that weekend in his house with her boyfriend, making it on the couch. The guy in the wheelchair wasn’t there, but even if he had been, they said he wouldn’t have minded. I remember they gave me his room to stay in, and there were shelves in it with hundreds of books. I stayed awake all night and when I finally got up the next morning I threw up in the toilet bowl. I was thinking about the guy’s wife on the couch with her boyfriend, and about Helen who said she loved me.