42 pages • 1 hour read
Ron KovicBorn on the Fourth of July
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 7-Postscript
Chapter 7 Summary
Chapter 7’s first four sections take place entirely in Vietnam. The chapter opens with Kovic having just killed the corporal from Georgia he’s been alluding to throughout the book. He states that “all his life he’d wanted to be a winner” but that all his hopes and dreams “were gone forever” because he’d just killed a fellow American soldier (194). He explains that his outfit was retreating from enemy fire when he accidentally shot the corporal because, as he tells the lieutenant, “It was dark and I couldn’t tell” (195). Upon killing him, Kovic panics and turns his gun on himself but doesn’t pull the trigger because he begins “feeling the strange power of a man who had just killed someone” (197). He recognizes a change in himself and feels that being a Marine is “very different from what he had ever thought possible” (197).
Kovic tells a major about what happened the next day. His outfit had tied up a pregnant woman and then chaos had ensued as others attacked them before he accidentally shot the corporal. The major tells him that “it gets very hard out there” and that “it’s very hard to tell what’s happening” (201). The major even refuses to believe that Kovic shot the corporal, suggesting that anyone could have shot him. Kovic continues to dwell on the killing, though, recognizing that the realities of war do not comport to the games he’d played as a kid or the movies he’d seen. In those, there was always a clear demarcation between the good guys and the bad guys, and “the good guys weren’t supposed to kill the good guys” (203).
Kovic prays and writes to his parents that he wants to be a priest after conveying the story of the firefight that killed the corporal and convinces himself that everyone knows it was an accident. However, he also does not appear to be fully right in the head. He gets lost in his camp one night and ends up in his commanding officer’s tent by mistake, an event that reminds him of the time a few months earlier “when he had read the map wrong, when he had led the men in the wrong direction” (205). Still, the major gives him another chance to lead a scout team, which Kovic thinks of as his chance “to make everything good again” (206). He writes in his diary that he feels proud of being a Marine after being given the new assignment.
In the second section, Kovic describes the other great sin he’s alluded to throughout the book: a massacre of civilians. On a patrol at night, his squad thinks they find a group of enemy soldiers in a small village, but they can’t see through the rain. Pressed by the lieutenant to confirm that Kovic also sees that the people have rifles, Kovic says, “Yes, I see them,” and he adds that he “was very sure” (211). Someone starts firing on the village, and when the firing stops, they all realize they have killed civilians, including children, who are now “screaming and thrashing their arms back and forth, lying in pools of blood, crying wildly, screaming again and again” (213). Several of the soldiers start to cry, and the lieutenant yells at them to “stop crying like babies and start acting like marines!” (216), explaining that the murders they just committed were not their faults.
After that, Kovic just wants to go home and, as he describes in the third section, he “would go off alone sometimes on patrol looking for the traps, hoping I’d get blown up enough to be sent home, but not enough to be killed” (218). More members of his outfit die, and he hopes that “with all that blown away flesh the killing of the corporal from Georgia wouldn’t mean that much anymore” (222). The section ends with Kovic feeling better about everything as he resigns himself to all that death, the chaos of war, and the numbness that has taken over him. He only wishes that the other soldiers in his outfit would “get confused and forget in all the madness that he had murdered the kid from Georgia” (222).
In the fourth section of the chapter, Kovic describes his injury, as he does in the first chapter. He remembers feeling the morning of the wound that “something big was about to happen” and notes that other soldiers felt it, too (223). He is told that he and the men will “make a direct assault on the village” after “some kind of crazy tactical maneuver” (225). He imagines that this is his “chance to win a medal” (226). Kovic describes getting shot once in the foot and continuing to fire on the enemy until he is shot in the back. He thinks he’ll die when he recognizes that he cannot feel “everything from my chest down” (229). He ends the section by deciding to live, writing, “All I could feel was the worthlessness of dying right here in this place at this moment for nothing” (229).
In the brief final section of the chapter, Kovic reminisces about childhood and the games he would play, the songs on the radio, and the smell of fresh grass. He ends the book with a simple couplet: “It was all sort of easy./ It had all come and gone” (231).
Postscript Summary
The postscript is a letter written to Kovic’s parents by L.W. Walt, a lieutenant general in the U.S. Marine Corps, after Kovic is injured. Walt writes that he is inspired by Kovic’s heroism and is “extremely grateful” that the United States includes people like Kovic’s parents who could raise a man as fine as Kovic. He ends the letter by stating that Kovic “is the type of young man of which Americans and free men everywhere can be proud” (233).
Chapter 7-Postscript Analysis
Chapter 7 opens in the third person, with Kovic admitting to the actions he’s alluded to wrestling with throughout the book. He admits that he imagined he’d be a hero but sees nothing heroic in anything he did in the war. The first person he killed isn’t even an enemy but, rather, a fellow American. This detail is another indication in the book that the heroism Kovic associated with war from movies and propaganda is not rooted in reality. Even when Kovic sees action that is “beautiful” and looks “just like the movies” (227), it ends in tragedy for him, as he is wounded. Throughout his time in Vietnam, he seems pulled in two directions, with part of him still chasing that movie hero moment and the other part of him inuring himself to the realities of war, the constant fear of death mixed with the growing indifference toward the death that surrounds him. For instance, while he dwells on the death of the corporal from Georgia whom he killed, when another member of his outfit, MacCarthy, is killed, Kovic notes that the dead “looked kind of funny in a way, kind of ridiculous” (220).
Death is so prevalent that MacCarthy and another friend’s bodies are placed with other corpses “lined up in a neat long line” (221). After their deaths, Kovic himself recognizes that “he was just another body” (222). Even with this realization, however, he still rushes into his final action hoping that it is his “chance to win a medal” (226), in part because he seems unwilling to accept fully that the war is not like the war he imagined when he enlisted. As the reader already knows, his hospital experience will finally rid him of that notion.
There is an irony in his final wound, too. Disillusioned by the war, he notes that he wishes he’d “get blown up enough to be sent home, but not enough to get killed” (219). The day he is wounded, he and other soldiers have a premonition that something bad is going to happen but go along with the plans, as that is what they have been trained to do. Kovic sees the final attack as a “chance to fight against the real enemy” and “to make up for everything that had happened” with his killing of a fellow American and of innocent children (226), as he still is trying to make the war make sense or mean something.
Kovic switches from first person to third person for one sentence: “This was it, he thought, everything he had been praying for, the whole thing up for grabs” (226). At that moment, he was once again playing the role of the idealized Marine, and Kovic writes his thoughts in third person to convey that he was once again out of body and watching himself be a Marine. In his assault, he gets what both the idealized Marine Kovic and the real Kovic want: He gets to kill enemies and fire on them from an open field like an action hero, but he also gets wounded enough to be sent home. Once wounded, the real Kovic takes over fully, as he sees the “worthlessness of dying” in Vietnam “for nothing” (229).
Chapter 7 reminds the reader that Kovic’s memoir is a confessional. He admits to the sins he committed in the war, the ones he’s only mentioned obliquely throughout. He even accepts culpability for them, admitting that he shot the corporal, that he got his outfit lost, and even that he thought the villagers his outfit slaughtered had rifles. Telling the truth is particularly important to Kovic because of his religious upbringing as well as the military’s response to his actions. The major he confesses to does not let him admit to killing the corporal, telling Kovic that “it’s very hard to tell what’s happening” in the field (201). This makes Kovic feel better, as he even convinces himself that maybe “he had seen a man killed” rather than being the killer (204), or at least that’s what he writes to his parents. After the assault on the villagers, though, Kovic just feels awful. The military leaders again lie to the soldiers that their actions were not their fault.
In both cases, the military lies to Kovic and suggests that a real Marine would not dwell on killing, as all killing is justified in the fog of war. Kovic knows better, however, and he is further driven to tell the truth after returning home and hearing the lies that the government and the country care about their veterans. It is imperative that he tell the truth about what happened in Vietnam because no one else will. Additionally, telling the truth offers a sort of catharsis for Kovic, as he must admit that what he did was wrong, even if he knows his wound is not some kind of divine punishment.
Kovic also ends the book with the confession because it’s important to him not to end with a moment of triumph like his protest at the Republican National Convention. His project is to convey the horror and futility of war, not the triumph of man to find the will to survive. Though his book does both, he ends with the horrors of war to leave the reader not with a sense of pity for Kovic but rather feeling outraged about the war and what it does to those under attack and those forced to attack. Likewise, by ending with the confessions, Kovic further highlights the psychological trauma of the war rather than the physical trauma he dwells on throughout.
The ending also closes the book’s circular structure, as the book starts with the aftermath of the wound and ends with him getting the wound. This structure complicates the reader’s understanding of Kovic, since the reader has only known Kovic as a good man who helps other people see the injustice of a war he is the victim of and not as the man who participated in the massacre of innocent women and children (despite Kovic’s recurring oblique mentions of those events). The circular structure also creates more irony, as the reader knows the Kovic in Vietnam is not the Kovic narrating the book but rather Kovic playing the part he thinks he’s supposed to play, even after recognizing that the war he imagined is not the war as it actually was.
Finally, the postscript of the book offers the final word on Kovic. By including the general’s letter, Kovic reminds the reader that the same forces that now call him a traitor for speaking out against the war once called him the embodiment of American values. The values he embodied might be those of the America that has “come and gone” (231), but he wants the reader to know that his story is the story of America itself: that a boy born on the Fourth of July grew up to be and do exactly what the nation asked him to do before he and that America were betrayed by its leaders.
