Kovic, Ron

views updated

Ron Kovic

Born July 4, 1946
Ladysmith, Wisconsin

American Vietnam War veteran
and antiwar activist

Ron Kovic volunteered to serve with the U.S. Marines in Vietnam because he loved his country and wanted to be a hero. But his wartime service—which ended when he received a severe wound that left him paralyzed from the chest down—taught him the cruel reality of war. After returning to the United States and facing life in a wheelchair, he joined the antiwar movement. Kovic wrote about his journey from patriotic soldier to disabled veteran to antiwar activist in a critically acclaimed 1976 autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July. In 1989, Kovic's book was made into a popular movie of the same name.

Eager to serve his country

Ron Kovic was born July 4, 1946, in Ladysmith, Wisconsin. He was the second of six children in a patriotic, working-class, Catholic family. When Kovic was a boy, his family moved to Massapequa, Long Island, New York. He loved spending time outdoors, playing baseball or staging mock battles in the woods with his friends. In high school Kovic joined the wrestling team and became a pole-vaulter on the track team. He was also invited to try out for the New York Yankees. "I was a natural athlete," he recalled in Born on the Fourth of July, "and there wasn't much of anything I wasn't able to do with my body back then."

Throughout his childhood, Kovic viewed war as an exciting way for young American men to prove their courage. His father had served proudly in World War II (1939–1945). Kovic had attended holiday parades and cheered for the passing veterans. He had also grown up watching patriotic movies starring John Wayne, which had made war seem glamorous to him. As a result, he often dreamed of escaping from the routine of small-town life by serving his country and becoming a war hero.

When a group of recruiters from the U.S. Marine Corps gave a presentation at his high school, Kovic was deeply impressed. In 1964 he enlisted in the Marines to serve in the Vietnam War. "I stayed up most of the night before I left, watching the late movie," he recalled in his memoir. "Then 'The Star-Spangled Banner' played. I remember standing up and feeling very patriotic, chills running up and down my spine. I put my hand over my heart and stood rigid at attention until the screen went black."

Experiences tragedy in combat

The Vietnam War pitted the Communist nation of North Vietnam against the U.S.-supported nation of South Vietnam. North Vietnam wanted to overthrow the South Vietnamese government and reunite the two countries under one Communist government. But U.S. government officials felt that a Communist government in Vietnam would increase the power of the Soviet Union and threaten the security of the United States. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the U.S. government sent money, weapons, and military advisors to help South Vietnam defend itself. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson (see entry) sent American combat troops to join the fight on the side of South Vietnam.

Kovic went to Vietnam with one of these early shipments of American troops. Within a short time, he began to realize that war was very different than he thought it would be. In his book Kovic recalled two experiences that fundamentally changed the way he viewed the war and his service in it. First, he accidentally shot and killed one of his own men in the confusion of a battle. When he tried to admit his tragic mistake to a superior officer, the officer refused to believe him and promoted him to lead a combat patrol.

The second incident occurred a few weeks later, when Kovic's patrol tracked a group of enemy soldiers to a Vietnamese village. They thought they saw rifles pointing through the window of a small hut. Kovic's men began shooting without a formal order to fire and then continued firing until they had destroyed the hut. Afterward, Kovic went inside to count how many enemy soldiers had been killed. But instead of enemy soldiers, he found that the hut had contained Vietnamese women, children, and old men. "The floor of the small hut was covered with them, screaming and thrashing their arms back and forth, lying in pools of blood, crying wildly," he recalled.

After these two incidents, Kovic was desperate to escape his feelings of guilt and horror. He began volunteering for dangerous duty and taking foolish chances in hopes of being wounded and sent home. During one battle against enemy forces, he remembered thinking: "Here was my chance to win a medal, here was my chance to fight against the real enemy, to make up for everything that had happened."

On January 20, 1968, Kovic was wounded in battle. First, a bullet hit his foot and blew off most of his heel. Still, he continued firing until his rifle locked. Then another bullet went through his shoulder and lung and shattered his spinal cord. As he lay on the battlefield, waiting to be evacuated to a hospital, he recalled, "All I could feel was cheated. All I could feel was the worthlessness of dying right here in this place at this moment for nothing."

Returns from Vietnam in a wheelchair

The second bullet left Kovic paralyzed from the mid-chest down. He returned to the United States as a paraplegic in a wheelchair. He spent the next several months recovering in a New York hospital run by the Veterans Administration (a U.S. government agency responsible for providing medical care and other benefits to former soldiers). Unfortunately, Kovic and the other patients received very poor care in the VA hospital. The facility was dirty, understaffed, and lacking in basic medical supplies and equipment. It was also infested with rats. While there, Kovic grew angry and disgusted at the way the U.S. government was treating its veterans.

"I realized in Vietnam that the real experience of war was nothing like the comic books or movies I had watched as a kid," Kovic told Robert Seidenberg in an interview for American Film. "I realized when the war was over and I had come home in a wheelchair that . . . the whole . . . thing was a sham. My best intentions, my innocence, my youth, my beautiful young spirit had been desecrated [violated] by men who never went where I went, men who would never have to go through what I was about to endure."

Upon returning home from the hospital, Kovic received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star in recognition of his service. He expected his family and his community to greet him as a hero. But as the Vietnam War dragged on, the American people had become bitterly divided over U.S. involvement. Antiwar demonstrations were taking place across the country. Some people viewed Vietnam veterans as symbols of an increasingly unpopular war. Kovic found that most people seemed to treat him with disinterest or even hostility. When he rode in a Fourth of July parade in Massapequa, people just stared at him instead of cheering.

"It was the end of whatever belief I'd still had in what I'd done in Vietnam," he recalled in his book. "Now I wanted to know what I had lost my legs for, why I and the others had gone at all. But it was still very hard for me to think of speaking out against the war, to think of joining those [antiwar protestors] I'd once called traitors." As time passed, Kovic grew increasingly angry, depressed, and bitter about his military service and the treatment he received when he returned home. He spent the summer of 1969 in Mexico with a group of other disabled veterans, drinking, doing drugs, and visiting prostitutes in order to ease his physical and emotional pain.

Begins speaking out against the war

In 1970 events at home convinced Kovic to begin speaking out against the war. That May, four unarmed student protestors were shot and killed by Ohio National Guard troops on the campus of Kent State University. A few days later, Kovic attended a peace rally in Washington, D.C. He found that he identified with members of the antiwar movement. "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," he noted in Born on the Fourth of July. "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."

In 1971 Kovic joined an antiwar group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). He began speaking out about a variety of issues, including U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the poor treatment of veterans in VA hospitals. In 1972 he joined several other VVAW members in a protest at the Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida. As the Republican political party officially nominated Richard Nixon (see entry) to run for a second term as president, Kovic and his friends disrupted Nixon's acceptance speech by repeatedly shouting "Stop the bombing, stop the war." When a reporter interviewed Kovic live on television, he used the opportunity to present his views about the war. "What's happening in Vietnam is a crime against humanity," he stated. "If you can't believe the veteran who fought in the war and was wounded in the war, who can you believe?"

Tells his story in a book and a movie

In 1976 Kovic published his autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July, in which he discussed his childhood, his decision to join the Marines, his experiences in Vietnam, his struggles to recover from his war wounds, and his transformation into an antiwar activist. Kovic's memoir received a great deal of critical praise upon its publication. In the New York Times Book Review, C. D. B. Bryan called it "the most personal and honest testament published thus far by any young man who fought in the Vietnam War." Kovic noted that writing the book also helped him come to terms with his military service. "My book is a miracle," he told Philip A. McCombs of the Washington Post. "It was written because I decided not to hate anymore."

Following the success of his book, Kovic was invited to speak at the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York City. He gave a moving speech before the Democratic party formally nominated Jimmy Carter as their presidential candidate. It was a completely different experience than his uninvited appearance at the Republican convention four years earlier. In fact, in the interview with McCombs, Kovic called it "the biggest moment in my life, the vindication [reward for being proven right] of all the years that the government had tried to shut me up, to spit in my face. I was addressing the whole U.S.A."

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Kovic continued writing and published a novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. He also acted as a consultant for the film Coming Home, which starred Jon Voight as a disabled Vietnam veteran struggling to cope with his feelings about the war. In 1987 Kovic received word that Born on the Fourth of July was going to be turned into a movie. It would be directed by Oliver Stone (see entry), a Vietnam veteran who had recently won an Academy Award for his Vietnam War movie Platoon.

Kovic spent the next two years working on the film version of his life story. He helped Stone write the screenplay, and he helped actor Tom Cruise prepare to play the leading role. Cruise spent several weeks in a wheelchair and visited VA hospitals in order to get a feel for Kovic's life. "Tom Cruise was agonizing over this part, and he didn't know if he could go on, either," Kovic recalled in American Film. "All of a sudden, I realized that Cruise understood, that I had a brother, I had a friend." When the filming was completed, Kovic presented Cruise with the Bronze Star he had earned in Vietnam.

The movie Born on the Fourth of July became a big success upon its release in 1989. It was popular at the box office, and it also received strong critical reviews. In fact, it won four Golden Globes and two Academy Awards. Kovic hoped that seeing the film would teach young people about the reality of war. "My sacrifice, my paralysis, the difficulties, the frustrations, the impossibilities of each and every day would now be for something very valuable, something that would help protect the young people of this country from having to go through what I went through," he told Seidenberg.

Since completing work on the film, Kovic has lived in Redondo Beach, California. He spends his time gardening, painting, and playing the piano. "I never thought I would say this, but I believe that my wound has become a blessing in disguise," he told Jon Kalish in New York Newsday. "It's enabled me to reach millions of people with a message of peace and a message of hope."