In the fall of 1964, the eighteen-year-old Ron Kovic (b. 1946) left suburban Massapequa, New York, proudly enlisting in the Marines. Ten years later—a veteran not only of two tours of combat duty in Vietnam but of hospital wards, protest rallies, police beatings, and a hunger strike—he began the memoir that would become Born on the Fourth of July (1976), finishing a draft in a fevered seven weeks. “Convinced,” he later wrote, “that I was destined to die young,” he “struggled to leave something of meaning behind, to rise above the darkness and despair.”
Indeed he has risen above despair, though his war wounds have left him paralyzed from the chest down and in ongoing pain. Born on the Fourth of July was made into a movie in 1989, winning two Academy Awards (he cowrote the screenplay with fellow veteran Oliver Stone). Now one of the country’s most recognizable antiwar activists, Kovic has spoken out against the Gulf War and the Iraq War, fought for better care for returning soldiers, and offered himself as a living example of the human costs of war. (“There are the bedsores and the catheters, the urinary tract infections and high fevers, the lack of sexual function, spasms, and terrible insomnia that torments you in the night,” he wrote President Obama in 2010, then considering a request to send more troops to Afghanistan.)
In the excerpt that follows, Kovic recounts a protest by Vietnam Veterans Against the War during the election of 1972.
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 red-headed 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 doing to me? I think. They have taken so much from me already and still they are not satisfied. What more will they take?