Updating Ron Kovic: Rolling Thunder from a Wheelchair

 

 

 

"There is nothing in the lives of human beings more brutal and terrifying than war, and nothing more important than for those of us who have experienced it to share its awful truth."

 

--Ron Kovic

Ron Kovic’s 1976 memoir, Born on the Fourth of July inspired the 1989 Academy-Award winning film of the same name, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Tom Cruise as Kovic. I have written about Kovic, about the book, and about the film.

Still, every Memorial Day I think about him and his experiences before, during, and after the Vietnam War. As a youth of the 1960s, the complexity of the lessons Kovic teaches about Vietnam and war are part of my being. My strong connection with him is something I am still exploring.

I thought it was time to update my blog and tell you a little more about this man.

Ron Kovic is an incredible patriot and a distinguished veteran. Kovic, now 66 years old, lives in Redondo Beach, California, where he writes, paints, plays the piano, and gardens. He says he would like to get married someday, but he has never married. And, he has never stopped his efforts to eradicate war.

On January 20, 2008, Kovic observed his 40th anniversary of having been shot and paralyzed in the Vietnam War. In March 2005, he said...

 "The scar will always be there, a living reminder of that war, but it has also become something beautiful now, something of faith and hope and love. I have been given the opportunity to move through that dark night of the soul to a new shore, to gain an understanding, a knowledge, and entirely different vision. I now believe I have suffered for a reason and in many ways I have found that reason in my commitment to peace and nonviolence. My life has been a blessing in disguise, even with the pain and great difficulty that my physical disability continues to bring. It is a blessing to speak on behalf of peace, to be able to reach such a great number of people.

“I saw firsthand what our government’s terrible policy had wrought,” he continues. “I endured; I survived and understood. The one gift I was given in that war was an awakening. I became a messenger, a living symbol, an example, a man who learned that love and forgiveness are more powerful than hatred, who has learned to embrace all men and women as my brothers and sisters. No one will ever again be my enemy, no matter how hard they try to frighten and intimidate me. No government will ever teach me to hate another human being. I have been given the task of lighting a lantern, ringing a bell, shouting from the highest rooftops, warning the American people and citizens everywhere of the deep immorality and utter wrongness of this approach to solving our problems, pleading for an alternative to this chaos and madness, this insanity and brutality. We must change course.”

 (Jeff Severns Guntze, "It's Veterans Day: Meet Ron Kovic All Over Again, http://theforestofthings.tumblr.com/post/1543748672/its-veterans-day-meet-ron-kovic-all-over-again#footer)

Kovic On the U.S. Fighting in Iraq


Kovic was in the thick of Iraq anti-war demonstrations before that start of the actual fighting. Then, just days before the war began, he vowed: "We will do everything we can in the streets of this country to bring the troops back immediately. We have much respect for them, and we don't want them to be used the way my generation was."

With the war in full swing, Kovic told a Los Angeles crowd of protesters: "Many of the people who are architects of the war haven't experienced war as I did. They're ... risking the lives of the beautiful men and women that are our troops. It's shameful."

The war raged on, and the day Baghdad fell, Ron Kovic, then 56, was back in the Veterans Affairs hospital for a checkup at the spinal cord injury outpatient clinic, only to find his doctor expressing worry over potential cutbacks, a situation reminiscent of spending priorities at the close of the Vietnam War. Kovic said...

"We're putting all of these millions of dollars into warfare when the disabled of our country, disabled veterans and disabled citizens, are in need. Many of them live below the poverty level. This policy of aggression, this policy of arrogance, of blindness, of recklessness, I don't think this is going to help America. I think that this behavior, which I abhor, this policy, which I strongly disagree with, is leading this country in the wrong direction."

Through all the operation in Iraq, Kovic remained a man of ideals. He confessed, "I believe in democracy an authentic democracy where all the people are represented and I want to be a part of that, I want to be a part of the continuation of that great democratic experiment. I want to expand our democracy, I want to make it more and more authentic, I want people to be encouraged to speak their minds and not to be afraid or be intimidated."

So, feeling that way, why didn't he support the military's mission to free Iraq from decades of fear and oppression by Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party? Didn't he see the inconsistency in opposing a war to "free the Iraqi people" while campaigning for a "true" democracy here in America? Here is Kovic's reply:

 "No, I don't at all. I think what the military has done is sow the seeds of discontent all throughout the Middle East. I think that we really were denied a lot of what was happening during that war by our media. We weren't able to see all of the civilian wounded, the many casualties that occurred, and most of the Arab world was seeing that. This war has caused a tremendous amount of anger, a tremendous amount of rage against this country. And I'm offended by that. I'm offended by what this administration and this president have done to our name. Now they may be telling us that we're freeing the Iraqis, but I truly believe in my heart that President Bush has established with the use of brutality and force and violence a colony, an American colony in the Middle East. I think it's shameful."

  (Tim Gilmer, "Ron Kovic Reborn, New Mobility,

 http://archive.truthout.org/article/ron-kovic-reborn, June 23 2003)

Kovic's assessment of the Bush administration's motives did not stop with allegations of colonialism. The real prize, he said, lay beneath the desert sands. "I don't think that they will ever allow a democratic government, because a democratic government would be a direct threat to the very reason they went over there to begin with, and that is to dominate the oil, to control that region, and to literally steal the resources of that region for this administration, for the corporations and the businesses of our country. That is a crime."


Kovic On the U.S. Involvement in Afghanistan

What about Kovic's views on the continued efforts in Afghanistan?  He wrote a letter to President Obama in 2009 stating the following:

"We are at a crucial turning point Mr. President and the decision you are about to make in the coming days and weeks may very well be the most important decision of your presidency... In your book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream you spoke of that time, the Sixties, admitting that you were, 'to young to fully grasp the nature of those changes, too removed to see the fallout on Americas psyche.' I write this letter to you Mr. President as both a survivor and witness to that time and someone who must live with the consequences of a decision made by our government and it's leaders four long decades ago.

"In your recent address to the VFW on August, 17, 2009 in Phoenix, Arizona, you stated that the war in Afghanistan was a "war of necessity." I remember as I watched and listened to you that day wondering if you had any idea what you were getting us into, if you knew anything of Vietnam and the painful lessons I and others of my generation had learned from that war. You were three years old when I joined the Marine Corps out of high school in 1964, seven when I was shot and paralyzed in 1968, ten when I joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and began to protest against that war.

(Ron Kovic, "A Letter to the President," The Huffington Post, October 28 2009)

Kovic continued his active efforts to stop the war in Afghanistan. At 10 a.m. on Thursday, Dec. 16, 2010, he led veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, including troops now serving in the armed forces of the United States, in a dramatic act of nonviolent civil disobedience in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., along with other brave veterans and citizens, protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, calling for all troops to be brought home immediately and without delay.

(Ron Kovic, "Raise Your Voices, Protest, Stop These Wars," http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/raise_your_voices_protest_stop_these_wars_20101231/, December 31 2010)

Ron Kovic's Continued Efforts For Peace

On April 8, 2009, Kovic joined British MP and activist George Galloway to launch Viva Palestina USA, an American branch of Viva Palestina. He co-lead with Mr. Galloway a humanitarian relief convoy to the Gaza Strip in early July 2009.

In April 2010, Kovic traveled to Rome, Italy, as a member of the Council for Dignity, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation. Between April 19-26, he attended meetings at Rome's City Hall with other international peace activists, diplomats and academics, to discuss the need for conflict resolution and other more peaceful, nonviolent alternatives to war as a way of solving the worlds many conflicts.

On April 21, 2010, Kovic spoke of his journey from war to peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation before Rome's mayor Gianni Alemanno, and other civic leaders at Rome's Ara Pacis  (Altar of Augustan Peace), commissioned by the Roman Senate 4 July- 13 BC.

Today Kovic, 59, lives alone in his modest Redondo Beach apartment a short distance from the Pacific Ocean -- and a couple of towns away from another apartment in Santa Monica where a young Kovic pounded furiously through many nights at a $42 dollar typewriter he had picked up at a Sears and Roebuck.

He has plans to return to what launched his career as a public figure: "I have to remind you that I'm also an author and a writer and I have a love of the language. There are many ways to communicate my politics, whether it's a motion picture or the writing of a book or speaking behind a microphone in a rally. I want to move into writing another book, a book that I actually was beginning just before September 11 happened."


My Take

I defer my understandings of the logic of war to Ron Kovic. His honest words breathe with wrenching candor. To end this entry, I will let Kovic relate his experience at a Bronx veteran’s hospital after he returned to the States with the devastating wounds in suffered in Vietnam.

"I feel like a big clumsy puppet with all his strings cut.  I learn to balance and twist in the chair so no one can tell how much of me does not feel or move anymore.  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.

"At first I felt that the wound was very interesting.  I saw it almost as an adventure.  But now it is not an adventure any longer.  I see it more and more as a terrible thing that I will have to live with for the rest of my life.  Nobody wants to know that I can’t fuck anymore.  I will never go up to them and tell them I have this big yellow rubber thing sticking into my penis, attached to the rubber bag on the side of my leg.  I am afraid of letting them know how lonely and scared I have become thinking about this wound.  It is like some kind of numb twilight zone to me.  I am angry and want to kill everyone—all the volunteers and the priests and the pretty girls with the tight short skirts.  I am twenty-one and the whole thing is shot, done forever.  There is no real healing left anymore, everything that is going to heal is healed already and now I am left with the corpse, the living dead man, the man with numb legs, the man in the wheelchair, the Easter Seal boy, the cripple, the sexlessman, the sexlessman, the man with the numb dick, the man who can’t make children, the man who can’t stand, the man who can’t walk, the angry lonely man, the bitter man with the nightmares, the murder man, the man who cries in the shower… 

"It is okay now.  It is all right. Yes it is all right.  I have given my dead swinging dick for America.  I have given my numb young dick for democracy.  It is gone and numb, lost somewhere out there by the river where the artillery is screaming in.  Oh God oh God I want it back! I gave it for the whole country. I gave it for every one of them.  Yes, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne and Howdy Doody … and Sparky the barber.  Nobody ever told me I was going to come back from this war without a penis.  But I am back and my head is screaming now and I don’t know what to do."

(Ron Kovic, Born On the Fourth of July, 1976)

Kovic has mellowed in many respects since those days. Now, his rhetoric is polished and less direct, yet he has never wavered from his opposition to war. His voice is so important to the spirit of America. Ron Kovic reminds us of the true meaning of observing Memorial Day. That is, we must work to prevent war -- all deadly conflict. We must refrain from glorifying its greedy, gory presence and past. And, we must find a way to stop waging war no matter the political powers that prevail.

Ron Kovic reports he is happy to be alive, and he recently bought a piano. He says, "I love to play the high notes; they are gentle and soothing to me, almost like the sound of raindrops on my window when I was a boy. Just to touch the keys from time to time helps me to forget the war. The music of the piano fills the air with healing. The past recedes. And sometimes even the nightmares disappear for a while. The sound of a single note gives hope. Somehow we must begin to find the courage to create a better world even if it is with one note or one step."

Ron, keep playing that gentle piano. You are a musician whose "music" makes a huge difference in the way we Americans view patriotism, aggression, and war. And, to me, the notes you play ring so very true.

Ron Kovic: Considering "Memorial Day on Wheels"

"I am the living death
the memorial day on wheels
I am your Yankee Doodle Dandy
your John Wayne come home
your fourth of July firecracker
exploding in the grave"


-Ron Kovic

I have read Ron Kovic's best-selling autobiography Born of the Fourth of July and watched the movie of the same name many times. Kovic was a gung-ho patriot who was eager to answer his  country's call to arms. He served two tours of duty as a U.S. Marine in the Vietnam War and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. In combat on January 20, 1968, he suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the chest down.

When he came back home, he was still a patriot, yet very hurt and offended by the hostility he experienced from the anti-war movement. Before long, his attitude about patriotism and the Vietnam War changed, and Kovic became a leading anti-war activist.

"Maybe instead of anybody getting up in Congress

and apologizing for the Vietnam War,

 they could simply hold a screening of this movie

on Capitol Hill and call it a day.

-Roger Ebert in his review of Born of the Fourth of July   

Kovic and My Feelings

Ron Kovic's life has made such an impression on me, a person who was drafted a low number 104 in 1969 and who entered college with a II-S deferment.

Later, in 1971, the government reclassified me I-A because I attended college part time. After passing the physical and readying myself to go to basic, I received yet another classification, and due to Nixon's policy of increased Vietnamization, I didn't have to report for duty.

Reading and viewing the life of Kovic, I feel the entire range of sentiment present during the Vietnam War, and I find myself reliving my own young life in that time when an unpopular war so divided an entire country.

Since I had many classmates and friends serve, I have always felt a hole concerning my lack of participation. That is to say, I feel guilty for not serving with other American youth my age during Vietnam.

What was my stance on the war as a young man? As far as politics, I did not really know how I felt about the war then because the conflict to me seemed pretty distant: I was busy with college classes, chasing girls, and working. Until I was classified I-A, I was just "flowing with" the simple plan of my life, and I kept very busy living the "college life" on the home front. When I received my greetings from the President, I actually felt both relief and nervous anticipation.

Information about Vietnam filtered into my small hometown through the nightly news, the college press, and talks with my friends who returned from the conflict. At Ohio University a huge anti-war movement was in full swing, so I was surrounded by talk of moratoriums and burning draft cards.   Of course, many of my friends had already been drafted and had served. After returning home, most wouldn't talk about their experiences in the war although I was shocked when one of my closest friends, a high school fullback and combat veteran, came home addicted to heroin and was forced to spend time in rehab.

My father and seven of my uncles had served in World War II.  And, my only brother and another uncle had served shortly after the close of that war. In fact, I was raised to be respectful of the military -- my family, church, cub scouts, and boy scouts had all reinforced that attitude. Yet, learning of my low draft number, my own father told me he did not want me to go to Vietnam. I did not really understand my allegiance to family or to my country then.

Ron Kovic's book brought many issues of my own life together. Unlike Kovic, I did not serve my country in Vietnam. But, like him, I found some values and "John Wayne hero" mentality challenged and severely shaken.

I saw people in my own community come home from the war in unrecognizable states. I remember watching Walter Cronkite tell the American people in his February 1968 news telecast: "It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." And I heard that President Lyndon Johnson was reputed to have said when he saw Cronkite give that report, "I've lost middle America." Indeed, Johnson did not seek re-election.

"We have been too often disappointed by the optimism

of the American leaders both in Vietnam and Washington

to have faith any longer in the silver linings

 they find in the darkest clouds."

-Walter Cronkite

But, Kovic does not editorialize in Born on the Fourth of July. He relives his young American life: the innocence and the cruel reality are on full display. Through his autobiography, he puts the reader into the all-too-familiar situation of growing up with strong patriotic and family beliefs, giving service to those convictions he holds most dear, and then finding corruption and deceit in the governmental system endangering those it is meant to protect. Kovic is forced to question and face sacred, programmed concepts of heroism, patriotism, and the immorality of killing in war.

 Ron Kovic's Life


In Born on the Fourth of July, the reader gets to know Kovic as a child with patriotic dreams that blossom early in his mind and heart -- dreams that lead him to join the U.S. Marine Corps and then to the jungles, rice fields and beaches of Vietnam. Ron Kovic retells his childhood, high school years as a competitive wrestler, his dreams and hopes of becoming a great Marine.

Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" speech, Kovic joins the United States Marine Corps after high school in September 1964.

Kovic volunteers for his first tour of duty and is deployed to Vietnam in December 1965 as a member of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines H&S Company. He returns home on January 15, 1967 after a 13 month tour of duty, and was assigned to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing at Cherry Point, North Carolina. Several months later he volunteers to return to Vietnam a second time.

In October 1967, Kovic accidentally shoots and kills one of his Marines when a NVA unit ambushed him and his men near a village along the Cua Viet River. Kovic claims it was an accident and no one has ever disputed his claim.

On January 20, 1968, while leading an attack on a village just north of the Cua Viet River in the Demilitarized Zone, he is shot while leading his squad across an open area. He is shot first in the right foot, which blew out the back of his heel, then again through the right shoulder, suffering a collapsed lung and a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the chest down. The first Marine that tried to save him is shot through the heart and killed, then a second Marine carries Kovic to safety through heavy enemy fire (Kovic learns years later that this second Marine was killed later that afternoon).


In a military hospital in the U.S., Kovac enters a military care system that is hopelessly overburdened. At one point, Kovic screams out for a suction pump that would drain a wound that might cost him his leg. Although he knew he would never have feeling in the leg, he wants to keep it all the same. Then, a distracted doctor absent-mindedly explains about equipment shortages and "budget cutbacks" in care for the wounded vets.

Kovic recalls the VA hospitals:

"The walls are almost as dirty as the floors and I cannot even see out of the window... I push the call button again and again. No one comes. I am lying in my own excrement and no one comes. I begin shouting and screaming..I have been screaming for almost an hour when one of the aides walks by."

Kovic recalls the American Legion:

"They (Kovic and another disabled vet named Ed) sat together watching the big crowd and listening to one speaker after another, including the town dignitaries; each one spoke very beautiful words about sacrifice and patriotism and God...but he kept thinking of all the things that had happened to him and now he wondered why he and Eddie hadn't even been given the chance to speak."

It took a couple of years for the damage of the war to spread to Kovic's mind and spirit. Back in civilian life, he is the hero of a Fourth of July parade, but there are peaceniks on the sidewalks, some of them giving him the finger. He feels more rage. But then his emotional tide turns one night in the backyard of his parents' home, when he gets drunk with a fellow veteran, and he finds they can talk about things nobody else really understands.

Kovic's life becomes a series of confusions: bar brawls, self-pity and angry confrontations with women he will never be able to make love with in the ordinary way. His parents love him but are frightened by his rage. Eventually it is suggested that he leave home.

Kovic travels to Mexico, where other crippled veterans have sought escape in booze and drugs and Mexican whorehouses. By the time Kovic hits bottom, he is a demoralized, spiteful man.

Afterward, the book shifts, first to Kovic's purifying confession of his sins to the parents of the boy he killed, and then to his transformation into an anti-war activist. This metamorphosis culminates in his speech before the 1980 Democratic National Convention.

Ron Kovic became one of the best known peace activists among the veterans of the war. He has been arrested for political protest twelve times.

On January 20, 2008, Kovic observed his 40th anniversary of having been shot and paralyzed in the Vietnam War.

Kovic, in March 2005, said:

"The scar will always be there, a living reminder of that war, but it has also become something beautiful now, something of faith and hope and love. I have been given the opportunity to move through that dark night of the soul to a new shore, to gain an understanding, a knowledge, and entirely different vision. I now believe I have suffered for a reason and in many ways I have found that reason in my commitment to peace and nonviolence. My life has been a blessing in disguise, even with the pain and great difficulty that my physical disability continues to bring. It is a blessing to speak on behalf of peace, to be able to reach such a great number of people."

The Film


Born on the Fourth of July was made into a 1989 Academy Award-winning movie directed by Oliver Stone (also a veteran of Vietnam) with Tom Cruise playing Kovic.

Kovic received the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay on January 20, 1990, exactly twenty-two years to the day that he was shot and paralyzed in the Vietnam War. He was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. (Ron Kovic and Oliver Stone co-wrote the screenplay for Born on the Fourth of July).

I will never forget the life of Ron Kovik. I highly recommend the book and the movie. Even though the film has some raw, vulgar language, the history department and the English department of the high school where I taught (with the grace of parental permission slips) offered an after-school viewing during our study of history and literature related to the Vietnam War. I believe the movie made quite an impact on the students.

Each time something makes me remember the book, I think about a man's most basic and tragic physical loss and how it relates to Ron Kovic, once a strong, virile young man. Consider the loss on the observance of this Memorial Day. You may understand the line above: "I am the living death."

“I want a woman, Dad.
I want somebody to love me.
I wanna to be free again.
I wanna walk in the backyard on the grass.
 I wanna put my bare feet in the ocean.
I wanna run along the sand and feel it on my feet.
I wanna stand up in the shower with the hot water
streaming down my legs, in the morning...
I wanna explode, Dad.
I wanna get out of this fucking body I'm in.
I wanna be a man again...
I just wanna be a man again.”

Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July