Born on the Fourth of July

“The general is dressed in an immaculate uniform with shiny shoes. ‘Good afternoon, marine,’ the general says. ‘In the name of the President of the United States and the United States Marine Corps, I am proud to present you with the Purple Heart, and a picture,’ the general says. Just then the skinny man with the Polaroid camera jumps up, flashing a picture of the wounded man. ‘And a picture to send to your folks.’ He comes up to my bed and says exactly the same thing he has said to all the rest.” 

When Kovic receives his Purple Heart, his ceremony is not one of glory or even personalization. Instead, the general who visits him recites the same script for each person in the hospital ward. Kovic never feels like a hero in the book, even though he admits that he wanted to be a hero when he enlisted. The United States Marine Corps gives him a medal, but Kovic recognizes that it isn’t a great honor. Later in the book, he calls the actions of a group of veterans who threw away their medals “one of the most moving antiwar demonstrations there had been” (158), since the medal he received was devoid of meaning and even ceremony. Instead, the medal was just something given to everyone in his ward, while the real heroes—such as the black man who saved his life—go unrecognized. 

“This is a nightmare. This isn’t like the poster down by the post office where the guy stood with the shiny shoes; this is a concentration camp. It is like the pictures of all the Jews that I have seen. This is as horrible as that. I want to scream.” 

Kovic’s awakening to being against the war starts in the various hospitals he goes to when he gets home. In the hospital in the Bronx, the conditions are wretched, with rat infestations and unattended veterans who wreak of their own filth and overfilled urine bags. Kovic juxtaposes what he sees with the images that helped recruit him—those of the clean-cut Marines in immaculate uniforms and shoes. In bringing up the Holocaust, he also harkens to the images of a war most Americans celebrate, suggesting that something has changed since World War II. Where Americans once saved people from horror, now America is creating horror for those who serve it. 

“I find it easy to hide from most of them what I am going through. All of us are like this. No one wants too many people to know how much of him has really died in the war.” 

In the veterans’ hospital in the Bronx, Kovic is surrounded by people like himself who have lost the use of their legs and other parts of their bodies in Vietnam. While all of them learn to adjust to their new bodies, family members visit them. Kovic remarks that he, like others, could not tell his family about certain parts of his experience, including “the enema room” (53). He is willing to tell the reader about these experiences because he has found his voice as an activist and feels the need to share the truth he was unable to share when he still wanted to recover some of the life he’d lost.

“It never makes any sense to us how the government can keep asking money for weapons and leave us lying in our own filth.” 

A recurring message throughout the book is that the US government betrayed its veterans while continuing to propagate the war in Vietnam. The conditions in the hospital in the Bronx are disgusting. The government hypocritically continues to request funding for the war while apparently spending very little on those who served in the war, those who are, according to Kovic, people who “do not really count anymore” (52). It is this betrayal that stirs Kovic’s antiwar activism.

“I still tell people, whoever asks me, that I believe in the war. Didn’t I prove it by going back a second time? I look them all right in the eye and tell them that we are winning and the boys’ morale is high. But more and more what I tell them and what I am feeling are becoming two different things.”

Upon coming home from Vietnam, Kovic still feels the war in Vietnam is the right thing to do, but he knows he is being treated poorly as a veteran and is starting to wonder if the war was worth his own sacrifice. This quotation conveys his dual existence as a person who wants to be a symbol of a certain ideal Marine and a person who has undergone trauma and is starting to recognize that he cannot be that symbol anymore. This is the first time in the book Kovic sounds like the person he will become later: the antiwar activist trying to find his own voice. 

“The hospital is like the whole war all over again.” 

The hospital experience is what sets Kovic off on his journey of antiwar activism. In the V.A. hospital in the Bronx, Kovic confronts the demons of the war—the innocent people he killed and saw being killed—over and over again while being surrounded by “the living deaths that [he is] breathing and smelling now” (51). The hospital is not a place of healing but, instead, a place of recurring trauma. While he hopes to learn to live with his injury and to move past what he experienced in Vietnam, the war continues for him internally, as the hospitals do not help him heal physically or mentally. This quotation is also part of a larger theme in the book—that the war is permanent for the men who fought it.

“For me it began in 1946 when I was born on the Fourth of July.” 

Kovic attaches great significance to his birthday. For most of his childhood and teen years, Kovic embodied the ideal all-American boy: He played baseball, loved movies that celebrated American wars, and felt hurt when the Soviets beat America into space. Because of this pride and President Kennedy’s call to serve, Kovic always wanted to enlist in the Marines. The fact that he becomes an antiwar activist who is accused of being a traitor to the country he sacrificed is somewhat ironic given the significance of his birthday. This quotation and the title of the book thus serve as a shield from criticism that he is anti-American, as he makes clear that he loved the United States and was proud to share a birthday with it. 

“I couldn’t help but feel I was shaking hands with John Wayne and Audie Murphy.” 

Kovic is impressed by the Marines who speak at his school and especially at their sharp uniforms. When he shakes their hands, he sees them not as human Marines but as the embodiment of the ideal marines he’s envisioned since seeing war movies as a child. Though the reality of being a Marine will not live up to this image, he cannot see that and instead embraces the recruitment propaganda and Hollywood’s version of military life. 

“Many of the uniforms didn’t fit. He could feel his cap covering his face, he was almost swimming in it, and his enormous pants hung down below his boots that didn’t fit either. He felt like a ragamuffin doll. He thought he must look like some kind of painter, with his painting cap turned all sideways on his head. He felt so silly.” 

Especially compared with the spotless shoes of the men who speak at his school, Kovic’s reality of a military uniform looks nothing like what he has idealized for so long. The drill sergeant at basic training imbues these ill-fitting uniforms with import, calling the “enormous pants” trousers and noting that “pants are for little girls! Trousers are for marines!” (97). That Kovic uses the language of pants instead of trousers shows that he is disillusioned with the reality of the military, and putting on the ill-fitting uniform is one of the first moments in Kovic’s life when he recognizes that the image he painted in his head does not match reality, even while the military insists on telling him otherwise. The change in uniform also implies a change in Kovic. With the uniform, he is now a Marine, and just as the clothes do not fit, neither will military life fit him.

“Usually he didn’t like telling people about how bad he had been hurt, but for some reason it was different with Eddie.”

During the Memorial Day parade, Kovic meets two wounded veterans, Eddie Dugan and his old childhood friend Tommy Law. He admits how much easier it is to talk to them than to his family or others, implying that wounded veterans can best relate to other wounded veterans. They have a shared experience that they need to talk about, and they do not need to be someone else’s symbol for sacrifice or argument against the war. With other veterans, like the ones Kovic meets in Mexico, he can be himself.

“Even though it seemed very difficult acting like heroes, he and Eddie tried waving a couple of times, but after a while he realized that the staring faces weren’t going to change and he couldn’t help but feel like he was some kind of animal in a zoo or that he and Eddie were on display in some trophy case.” 

During the Memorial Day parade, Kovic and another wounded veteran, Eddie Dugan, are put on display. They ride in the back of a Cadillac and are announced as “OUR WOUNDED VETS” to an audience that is blasé at best toward them (116). Kovic remembers watching the parade he is now in but recognizes that it feels different now and that the crowd looked at him and Eddie “as if they were ghosts” (116). The speakers at the parade, however, use Eddie and Kovic for prowar propaganda. Thus, Kovic is made to feel that no one in the crowd cares about him while also being forced to sit as a symbol of sacrifice used to justify the war. He also is made once again to feel like an animal, just as he felt in the V.A. hospital.

“This end was no beginning. It was starting to become very clear that there would be no change in his condition, no reconciliation with the half of his body that seemed so utterly lost forever. He was in the rain, trapped, and there was no one. It was ugly and cold and final.” 

After returning from the V.A. hospital, Kovic lives at home and frequents Arthur’s Bar, where he gets drunk most nights. Following a particularly bad night out, he comes to the realization that he is not going to get his body back. This realization convinces him to move out of his parents’ house and leave his hometown in order not to relive the past every day. He sees the permanence of his situation and recognizes the need to move on with his new life.

“This place is more like a factory to break people than to mend them.” 

Kovic’s second stay in the V.A. hospital in the Bronx is more traumatic than his first. A doctor wants to amputate his leg, but Kovic insists on keeping it. The equipment in the hospital does not function, and he learns that the government does not give the hospital what it needs. He survives the ordeal but feels an anger that leads him to investigate the antiwar movement. Later, he opens his antiwar speeches by telling everyone about his treatment in the hospital, from which he came out more broken than fixed.

“I didn’t know what all of this had to do with the invasion of Cambodia or the students slain at Kent State, but it was total freedom.” 

When Kovic goes to his first major protest, he witnesses people skinny dipping in the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. He does not understand how that action will change people’s minds about the war, but he recognizes it for what it is: a liberating experience. He wishes he could join in but cannot because he is wheelchair bound. Still, the experience changes Kovic. He recognizes that the past he knew is gone and that there are other ways to live than to dwell on the past or try to become who he used to be. From that moment forward, he will be an activist, and what he witnesses in Washington allows him to find his voice and reclaim his life.

“There was a togetherness, just as there had been in Vietnam, but it was a togetherness of a different kind of people and for a much different reason. In the war we were killing and maiming people. In Washington on that Saturday afternoon in May we were trying to heal them and set them free.” 

Much of Born on the Fourth of July is about Kovic searching for community. He felt camaraderie with the men in Vietnam, and he feels community with the wounded who returned from Vietnam, but he did not find community at home, in the V.A. hospital, or back in his hometown. When he joins the protest in Washington, he finally feels that he belongs somewhere and that the people there are a community. Upon finding that togetherness, Kovic is changed and begins his life as an activist, during which “the loneliness seemed to vanish” (158).

“What if I had seen someone like me that day, a guy in a wheelchair, just sitting there in front of the senior class not saying a word? Maybe things would have been different. Maybe that’s all it would have taken.” 

At the end of Chapter 4, Kovic describes waiting to speak in front of a high school auditorium. He is reminded of the day at his own high school when he met the well-dressed Marines and wonders if he would have enlisted had he known he would not end up looking like them but instead would look like himself. Though his main focus is on finding his voice and speaking against the war, he suggests that simply being able to see a person who lost the use of his legs in the war would have a powerful effect on a high school student. He sees that he can be a symbol, but he is choosing to be a symbol not of sacrifice that must be rewarded with a win in Vietnam but as a reason not to continue the war. He wonders implicitly if he could be heroic in preventing other young men from joining the war effort.

“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.” 

When Kovic joins the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he finally finds the brotherhood he’s been searching for. He mentions how close he was to his childhood friends but implies that they are never able to regain that camaraderie after he returns home from Vietnam. Similarly, relationships with women do not work out because of his own demons. With the VVAW, he finds a community of men who can talk freely because they were all in Vietnam and all understand each other. That closeness reaffirms two of the book’s themes: that war is permanent for the men who fought it and that there is community to be found in that permanence.

“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 ever realized.” 

Throughout the book, Kovic makes several references to building up his body, and much of the book is spent with Kovic upset that he cannot use much of his body again. When he becomes an antiwar activist, he recognizes a power his body has as an “example of the war” (162). By realizing this, he finds a sense of purpose again: Kovic recognizes that his power is to save others from his fate. 

“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.”

Despite the connections Kovic makes with his fellow VVAW activists, he still cannot admit the truth of what he did in the war: the killing of the corporal from Georgia and the destruction of the civilian village. However, in Chapter 7 he shares these stories with the reader. In this way, the book is a confessional, with Kovic telling the reader the sins he hid from even those closest to him. However, in another sense, it seems he did not have the power to articulate the horrors of war until he recognized the power he had as a speaker and activist—in other words, until he found his full voice and humanity.

“What are they doing to me? I think. They have taken so much from me already and still they are not satisfied. What more will they take?” 

Kovic asks himself this question after he is arrested for protesting the war. The arrest is violent, with police beating him out of his wheelchair, but it is another moment of clarity for Kovic, in part because feels now that the forces that sent him to war want him to either die or give them “everything” (177). He realizes that no sacrifice he has made for them up to this point has been enough to satisfy them, even after he was put on display as the living exemplar of patriotic duty and sacrifice for the nation. However, he also realizes that he does not have anything else to offer besides his humanity and his mind, and he is determined not to let them take those. 

“He had to rise out of this deep dark prison. He had to come back. He knew the power he had. Maybe he had forgotten it for a while but it was still there and he could feel it growing in his mind, bigger and bigger—the power to make people remember, to make them as angry as he was every day of his life, every moment of his existence. He would come back very soon and he would make it like all the stories of the baseball players he had read when he was a kid.” 

After another bout of depression between his arrest and his climactic protest at Nixon’s convention, Kovic states that he was ready for his comeback. Here, he harkens to the heroes of his youth and, though he will never play baseball again, recognizes himself as heroic. Rather than trying to live up to the image of John Wayne or the Marines with their shiny shoes, Kovic has declared himself a hero, for he alone has the power to make people remember the realities of war. 

“It had been a long journey across America.” 

This is how Kovic sums up the trip he takes with the “caravan” of veterans who have traveled across the country for the Republican National Convention in 1972. While this quotation literally sums up his journey to protest Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech, it also serves as a metaphor for the book. Kovic’s story is one of an America forever altered by Vietnam, with the nation he lives in at the end of the book looking nothing like the nation in which he grew up. Where once young men wanted to give back to the country, now young men are betrayed by the country, a betrayal Kovic explores and outlines. The reader, in a sense, has been on a journey across the nation with Kovic serving in the role of tour guide.

“All I could feel was the worthlessness of dying right here in this place at this moment for nothing.”

At the end of the book, Kovic describes his tours of duty in Vietnam in more detail. He writes that the war was chaotic and tells of the deaths that piled up in his unit. After the massacre of children and civilians, all Kovic wants is to go home. Kovic seems to be pulled by two separate impulses while in Vietnam. On the one hand, he wants to be a hero and live out the fantasy of the Marines he’d built up in his head, but on the other hand he is distraught about the actions he’s committed and the horrors of reality. What pulls him fully toward realism is getting shot and not wanting to die in Vietnam “for nothing.” Though he still told people he supported the war during his first stay in the V.A. hospital, he admits to having had doubts about the war while he was there, and this quotation suggests that he came home already thinking the war was pointless or at least not worth dying for.