Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Born on the Fourth of July is Kovic's simple and moving account of his ten-year journey out of that bedridden impotence, towards a new reconciliation with life and an expiation of the Vietnam experience. In the telling, he leads us back through a Catholic working-class childhood in Massapequa, Long Island, his high school days and Marine boot camp. It is the story of the maturation of a young man who says his manhood has been "defiled." By the end, Ron Kovic is still paralyzed, but he is no cripple...
...Vietnam itself is sketched sparingly, a vivid and ugly flash of memory, yet it dominates all of Kovic's thoughts and emotions, like the residual traces of a nightmare. It is the point of reference around which all else in the book revolves. His life does not seem so much to progress linearly, as centrifugally, with the Vietnam experience in the center, prefigured by his patriotic upbringing and predestining his whole future...
Born on the Fourth of July begins and ends with those sketches of Vietnam. Kovic's simple, sparse style, together with a certain personal detachment in his narration, give a chilling precision to the horrors he describes...
Kovic returns from Vietnam with still another sort of wound, equally paralyzing--a festering guilt. Vietnam was an expeditionary war, where the fighting was as confused as the moral issues. The enemy was not easily seen. Kovic carries the knowledge that he killed, although unintentionally, an American corporal and a group of Vietnamese villagers. His own body had been destroyed, and yet he had destroyed others...
Unlike the men who chose to resist the fighting, Kovic can never be graced with amnesty. His exile is permanent; it is the physical isolation of his wheelchair. America's image was sullied in Vietnam; Kovic's ruined body is the crying proof of this. He had believed that there was honor in serving one's country, and there was. But the war taught him it was in vain. He recalls in the third person...