The Beat Patrol

Ron Kovic – “Breaking the Silence of the Night” (2006)

August 2, 2008 at 7:28 pm (Life & Politics, Reviews & Articles)

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

I can still remember marching on Memorial Day, our parents on the sidewalks waving their American flags proudly. There were the war movies and the Sergeant Rock comic books, the toy guns that we got for Christmas, and the little plastic green soldiers that I played with in my backyard, fighting the Japs and the Germans, attacking the imaginary bunkers with our bazookas and flamethrowers, dreaming that someday like our fathers before us we would become men.

I volunteered for my first tour of duty in Vietnam in 1965, only to return to a country deeply divided. I remember tears coming to my eyes when I saw a photograph in the newspaper of the American flag being burned at an antiwar rally in New York City. I was outraged and became determined to set my own example of patriotism and volunteered to go to Vietnam a second time, ready to die for my country if need be. Before leaving I purchased a diary that I promised to keep during my second tour of duty. I still have that diary today, and though it is a bit worn and frayed, the words that I wrote nearly four decades ago are still there. On January 18th, 1968, two days before I was shot and paralyzed, I wrote, “Time is going fast in a way, while in other ways it seems I’ve been here 100 years. I love my great nation and am ready to die for freedom.” Just below I had written the quote,

“Fear not that ye have died for naught
The torch ye threw to us we caught.
Ten million hands will hold it high,
And Freedom’s light shall never die!
We’ve learned the lesson that ye taught
In Flanders fields.”

—R.W. Lillard

Like many Americans who served in Vietnam and those now serving in Iraq, and countless other human beings throughout history, I had been willing to give my life for my country with little knowledge or awareness of what that really meant. I trusted and believed and had no reason to doubt the sincerity or motives of my government. It would not be until many months later at the Bronx Veterans Hospital in New York that I would begin to question whether I and the others who had gone to that war had gone for nothing.

It was a violent spring. Martin Luther King had been killed in Memphis and I had just begun reading Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s book “To Seek a Newer World” at the Bronx VA when Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy had been the antiwar candidate, and I remember picking up his book with hesitation at first, his views seeming so very different from my own back then, but there was something that drew me toward him and his call to end the war that spring. Maybe it was the wounded all around me on the paraplegic ward, or the hundreds of Americans who continued to die each week, but I remember feeling deeply saddened when he died, just as I had when his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had been killed in Dallas in 1963.

I had been so certain of victory, but each day now I began to realize more and more that we were not going to win in Vietnam, and that realization was painful and devastating. I felt betrayed and could not understand why my government had not done all that it could to win the war. Did they have any idea how much we had sacrificed, how many had already died and been maimed like myself? I felt sad and depressed and would often go down to the hospital library on the first floor, where I would read for hours at a time trying to forget the war. The first book that I read was about the life of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and I remember listening to his voice on the Armed Forces Radio during my second tour of duty and writing in my diary how much hearing him and his determination to stay the course and not give up in Vietnam had inspired me. Several days later I discovered the diary of Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary who had gone to Bolivia and was later killed there while attempting to inspire a revolution. I felt uneasy at first holding the book in my hands as I sat paralyzed in my wheelchair, afraid that someone might come up to me and catch me reading about the “enemy,” but I now wanted to know who this enemy was, who were these people I had been taught to hate and sent to fight and kill.

I remember watching the 1968 Chicago Republican National Convention on TV with other paralyzed veterans in their wheelchairs, the crowds in the streets outside the convention hall chanting, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” as antiwar demonstrators were beaten and bloodied by police and dragged into waiting paddy wagons. Most of my fellow veterans were angry at the protesters, cursing them and calling them traitors, but I remember feeling very differently that night. What the police had done was wrong, and for the first time, though I did not share it with anyone yet, I began to sympathize with the demonstrators.

It was not long after that that I left the hospital and began attending classes at Hofstra University on Long Island, determined to rise above what had happened to me and begin a new life after the war. It was a quiet and peaceful campus, so different from Vietnam and the hospital, and it was at the university that I was to first hear the passionate exchange of ideas and different points of view. Many of the discussions had to do with the war and why it had to end. There were the lit candles and the moratoriums, the John Lennon song “Give Peace a Chance,” and I remember listening to the Woodstock album and hearing Jimi Hendrix’s wild rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” for the first time. There was the infamous My Lai massacre poster, “And babies too?” It was shocking and I could not help but think back to that night during my second tour of duty when we shot those women and children by mistake, all those bloody bodies, the old man with his brains hanging out and that Vietnamese child whose foot had nearly been shot off, dangling by a thread.

I continued to attend classes, still keeping my thoughts and feelings about the war deep inside of me and sharing them with no one.

It was during this period that I read Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” and was immediately struck by the concept of “resistance to civil government and non cooperation with evil” seeming to directly contradict what I had once believed in as a boy—that my country was always right and could do no wrong. The whole idea that we as citizens had a right to follow our conscience and resist laws that were unjust and immoral had a powerful effect on me. I was later to learn that Senator Joseph McCarthy had attempted to ban Thoreau’s essay  and that both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King’s philosophy of creative nonviolence as a tactic for social change had been strongly influenced by their reading of “Civil Disobedience.”

There was “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Nigger: An Autobiography” by Dick Gregory and Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” which exposed the brutality and horror of colonialism. I remember reading Jerry Rubin’s “Do It” and Abbie Hoffman’s “Revolution for the Hell of It,” astounded at the sheer audacity of these two “Yippie” (Youth International Party) radicals and their willingness to stand up to the most powerful government in the world and its policy in Vietnam. They were wild and outrageous, and believed in revolution and were not afraid to say it or write about it and act it out. There was the article in Ramparts magazine by the Army Green Beret Sergeant Donald Duncan, who had turned against the war, and I remember someone from the university mentioning that a Vietnam veteran from Suffolk Community College was now heading the S.D.S. (Students for a Democratic Society) on his campus.

There were the Columbia University sit-ins and Woodstock and the alternative radio station WBAI, which I listened to in my room late at night, deeply moved by talk of protest and revolution, power to the people and provocative antiwar songs that brought tears to my eyes, giving me an entirely different perspective on what was happening in Vietnam and here at home.

America seemed to be tearing itself apart; never before had the nation been so polarized, not since the Civil War had we as a people been so divided. Everything was being questioned, nothing was sacred, even the existence of God was now suspect. The very earth beneath my feet seemed to be shifting, and there no longer seemed to be any guarantees, or anything that could be trusted or believed in anymore. Many of the students had become so angry and frustrated with the war and what was going on that they had begun to give up on America. Many wondered if we were ever really a “democracy” to begin with, while still others spoke openly of leaving the country and abandoning America forever. I continued attending my classes, trying to be a good student, but I could not help but be affected by all the things that were happening around me. Several weeks later while sitting in the back of a crowded auditorium I remember listening to the impassioned words of the late Congressman Allard Lowenstein, who had come to speak at our campus that day, fiercely condemning the war and telling us all to not give up and that it was “better to reclaim the country than abandon it!”

It was about that time I received a call from my friend Bobby Muller, whom I had first met at the Bronx Veterans Hospital only a few months before and who had also been paralyzed in Vietnam, asking me if I would join him at Levittown Memorial High School on Long Island later that week to speak against the war. I remember being hesitant at first, telling him I wasn’t sure. I had never spoken in public before and the thought of giving my first speech against the war frightened me. When I got off the phone I felt an uncomfortable burning in my stomach. A part of me wanted to speak for all I had seen in Vietnam and the hospital and for all the thoughts and feelings I had been having ever since I had begun attending classes at the university, while another part could not help but think of what might happen to me if I did. Would I be called a traitor? Would I end up in some FBI file, no longer the quiet student sitting in his wheelchair alone on the outskirts of the demonstrations but now a direct participant, a radical, a demonstrator? I would be stepping over the line and joining with the very people I had once thought of as traitors. What would my mother and father think if they found out? And the veterans at the university—what would they say? Would they feel that I had betrayed them? Bobby called me several times that week, sounding a bit impatient, but again I hesitated, telling him that I hadn’t made up my mind yet. I asked him if he would call me the following morning, which was the day of the speech, saying I would let him know for sure. I could hardly sleep that night, tossing and turning, tormented by fear and doubt, trapped between the awful twilight of what might happen to me if I did speak and what I knew would continue to happen if I remained silent.

The phone rang early the next morning and I remember picking it up, telling Bobby in a voice that was still only half awake that I had decided to join him that day. It was nearly forty years ago but I can still remember driving down to the high school in my hand-controlled car thinking of all the things I wanted to say to the students. When I arrived I parked the car, transferred into my wheelchair and pushed over to the entrance of the school and into the auditorium, where Bobby was already sitting on the stage in his wheelchair talking to one of the teachers. I was carried up a few steps, where I joined him, and for a moment I remember turning my head and looking out at all the students, thinking how much they reminded me of myself only a few years before, so young and innocent, so trusting and willing to believe without question. Bobby spoke first and a few minutes later it was my turn. I approached the microphone slowly, pushing my wheelchair to the very center of the stage, and in a voice that I can still remember being a bit anxious I began to speak. I told them about the hospital first, the overcrowded conditions, the rats on the ward, and just as I began to speak about how I had been shot and paralyzed in Vietnam the fire bell rang. The auditorium quickly cleared after that, one of the teachers telling us that someone had just called in a bomb threat. I didn’t know what to think at first. I remember feeling frightened, angry and outraged all at the same time! Why would anyone want to stop me from speaking? Who could that voice on the other end of the phone have been? Was it another boy, a student, a teacher, an angry parent? What could they have possibly been thinking? I would never know for sure, only that someone had made an effort to stop me from speaking that day, and that affected me deeply. We all went outside and after a brief discussion decided to go over to the high school football field, where we assembled all the students in the grandstands and I continued speaking, more determined than ever to not be silenced.

There would be Kent State and my first demonstration against the war in Washington, D.C, the VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War), arrests, tapped phones, undercover agents, and many more speeches in the months and years that were to follow as my political awakening continued and I began to discover an America far different than the one I had once believed in as a boy. There were the trials and days and nights I spent in jail in my wheelchair feeling more like a criminal than someone who had risked his life for his country, but I continued to speak.

Perhaps it was survivor’s guilt, or my own desperate need to be forgiven and keep others from having to come back like me, but as I sat before those crowds I began to open up my heart in a way that I had never done before, sharing everything, all the horrors and nightmares, all the things I had locked deep inside of me and had for so long been afraid to say. In many ways I was confessing the sins of America. I remember many nights driving home to my apartment after those speeches feeling exhausted and deeply troubled, unable to sleep, knowing that if I did, the nightmares would return and I would be back in Vietnam all over again; only to awaken a few hours later with my heart pounding in my chest, feeling terribly alone and wondering why I was putting myself through all this pain and agony.

It had only been a few years before that I had sat in the living room of my house in Massapequa, Long Island, with tears in my eyes listening to the words of President John F. Kennedy call my generation to “A New Frontier,” urging us all to be ready to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to insure the success and survival of liberty,” but those words seemed hollow to me now. Somewhere along the way we had taken the wrong turn, somewhere through it all America had veered tragically off course, leaving behind our sacred ideals and betraying the very roots of our revolutionary past. Instead of the great champion of liberty we had emerged the imposter, a fraud, a dangerous, corrupt frightening monstrosity of what we had first set out to be. America had lived a terrible lie. We had been on the wrong side of history. The great defender of liberty had become the tyrant, the arrogant bully, the cruel exploiter of “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breath free.” Wearing the deceitful mask of the great liberator and promising freedom and democracy, we had robbed and raped, blackmailed and perverted our way around the world, supporting the most despicable tyrants and despots as we expanded our bloody empire, causing the death and suffering of countless human beings. I now understood what Martin Luther King had meant when he had called America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world….”

I remember reading “State and Revolution” by Lenin and “The Prison Poems of Ho Chi Minh.” There was George Jackson’s “Prison Letters” and a powerful book by Felix Green called “The Enemy: What Every American Should Know About Imperialism.” There was the documentary “Hearts and Minds,” and the agonizing scene of the grief-stricken Vietnamese woman being held back by family members as she tried to crawl into the grave of her husband, who had just been killed in an American air strike, and the haunting scene of a terrified Vietnamese child screaming and running naked from her village after being severely burned in a napalm attack as the war raged on, and my speeches grew angry and bitter at a government I could no longer trust or believe in anymore. There were the body counts and booby traps, body bags, “light at the end of the tunnel” and Vietnam veterans throwing their ribbons and medals away at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., outraged with a government and a war they had now come to see as unjust and immoral.

The Vietnam War finally ended in the spring of 1975 and with its end came the hope that America might change and begin to confront the painful legacy of its past. I will always remember the words of Vietnam Veteran Against the War John Kerry as he spoke before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the spring of 1971:

“And so when thirty years from now a brother goes down the street without an arm, without a leg or a face and small boys ask why, we can say, Vietnam, and not mean a desert or some filthy obscene memory, but instead mean the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped in that turning.”

But tragically that “turning” was not to be, and the dream of a more peaceful and nonviolent America was put on hold by a government that continued to refuse to face the reality of the terrible crimes it had committed in our name.

For the past three and a half years I have watched in horror the mirror image of another Vietnam unfolding in Iraq. As of this writing over 2,700 Americans have died and nearly 20,000 have been wounded while tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, have been killed. Refusing to learn from the lessons of Vietnam, our government continues to pursue a policy of deception, distortion, manipulation and denial, doing everything it can to hide from the American people its true intentions in Iraq. Sadly, the “War on Terror” has become a war of terror. Never before has this government, through its outrageous provocations and violent aggressions, placed the citizens of this country in such grave danger. Never have the people of this country been so threatened, never before has life and liberty been in such great peril; not in the two hundred and thirty years since our revolution have we as a people and a nation been at such a crucial turning point. These are dangerous times. A century of arrogance, brutality and aggression has come back to haunt us all. September 11th has happened. The mask has been ripped away. The lie has been exposed and this criminal government now stands naked before the world! These are provocative words, and the truth may be deeply unsettling but when will we speak the truth? When will we end this silence? How much longer will we wait before we are ready to finally admit that the murderer lives in our own house, that this government that we entrusted long ago with the sacred task of protecting life and liberty now, by it’s every reckless, unjust and immoral action threatens the lives and liberty of us all?

Have we become so complacent, so coward and intimidated by this government that we have forgotten our own revolutionary birthright of rebellion and dissent? Have we become so paralyzed by the eleventh of September that we would give up our liberty and freedom for the promise of a security that does not exist by a government that now threatens our very lives? What will it take before we finally realize the true reality of this crisis? How many more terrorist attacks, senseless wars, flag draped caskets, grieving mothers, paraplegics, amputees, stressed out sons and daughters before we finally begin to break the silence of this shameful night? Let us open up our hearts and speak in a way we have never spoken before knowing that lives now depend on it, and the very survival of our nation is now at stake. Let not our silence in this crucial moment betray us from our destiny.

Ron Kovic

October 10, 2006

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Ron Kovic – “The Forgotten Wounded of Iraq” (2006)

August 2, 2008 at 7:21 pm (Life & Politics, Reviews & Articles)

Another article he wrote about our current war situation…

Thirty-eight years ago, on Jan. 20, 1968, I was shot and paralyzed from my mid-chest down during my second tour of duty in Vietnam. It is a date that I can never forget, a day that was to change my life forever. Each year as the anniversary of my wounding in the war approached I would become extremely restless, experiencing terrible bouts of insomnia, depression, anxiety attacks and horrifying nightmares. I dreaded that day and what it represented, always fearing that the terrible trauma of my wounding might repeat itself all over again. It was a difficult day for me for decades and it remained that way until the anxieties and nightmares finally began to subside.

As I now contemplate another January 20th I cannot help but think of the young men and women who have been wounded in the war in Iraq. They have been coming home now for almost three years, flooding Walter Reed, Bethesda, Brooke Army Medical Center and veterans hospitals all across the country. Paraplegics, amputees, burn victims, the blinded and maimed, shocked and stunned, brain-damaged and psychologically stressed, over 16,000 of them, a whole new generation of severely maimed is returning from Iraq, young men and women who were not even born when I came home wounded to the Bronx veterans hospital in 1968.

I, like most other Americans, have occasionally seen them on TV or at the local veterans hospital, but for the most part they remain hidden, like the flag-draped caskets of our dead, returned to Dover Air Force Base in the darkness of night as this administration continues to pursue a policy of censorship, tightly controlling the images coming out of that war and rarely ever allowing the human cost of its policy to be seen.

Mosul, Fallouja, Basra, Baghdad, a roadside bomb, an RPG, an ambush, the bullets cracking all around them, the reality that they are in a war, that they have suddenly been hit. No more John Wayne-Audie Murphy movie fantasies. No more false bravado, stirring words of patriotism, romantic notions of war or what it might really mean to be in combat, to sacrifice for one’s country. All that means nothing now. The reality has struck, the awful, shocking and frightening truth of what it really means to be hit by a bullet, an RPG, an improvised explosive device, shrapnel, a booby trap, friendly fire. They are now in a life-and-death situation and they have suddenly come face to face with the foreign policy of their own nation. The initial shock is wearing off; the painful reality is beginning to sink in, clearly something terrible has happened, something awful and inexplicable.

All the conditioning, all the discipline, shouting, screaming, bullying and threatening verbal abuse of their boot camp drill instructors have now disappeared in this one instant, in this one damaging blow. All they want to do now is stay alive, keep breathing, somehow get out of this place anyway they can. People are dying all around them, someone has been shot and killed right next to them and behind them but all they can really think of at this moment is staying alive.

You don’t think of God, or praying, or even your mother or your father. There is no time for that. Your heart is pounding. Blood is seeping out. You will always go back to that day, that moment you got hit, the day you nearly died yet somehow survived. It will be a day you will never forget—when you were trapped in that open area and could not move, when bullets were cracking all around you, when the first Marine tried to save you and was shot dead at your feet and the second, a black Marine—whom you would never see again and who would be killed later that afternoon—would carry you back under heavy fire.

You are now with other wounded all around you heading to a place where there will be help. There are people in pain and great distress, shocked and stunned, frightened beyond anything you can imagine. You are afraid to close your eyes. To close your eyes now means that you may die and never wake up. You toss and turn, your heart pounding, racked with insomnia … and for many this will go on for months, years after they return home.

They are being put on a helicopter, with the wounded all around them. They try to stay calm. Some are amazed that they are still alive. You just have to keep trying to stay awake, make it to the next stage, keep moving toward the rear, toward another aid station, a corpsman, a doctor, a nurse, someone who can help you, someone who will operate and keep you alive so you can make it home, home to your backyard and your neighbors and your mother and father. To where it all began, to where it was once peaceful and safe. They just try to keep breathing because they have got to get back.

They are in the intensive-care ward now, the place where they will be operated on, and where in Vietnam a Catholic priest gave me the Last Rites. Someone is putting a mask over their faces just as they put one over mine in Da Nang in 1968. There is the swirl of darkness and soon they awaken to screams all around them. The dead and dying are everywhere. There are things here you can never forget, images and sounds and smells that you will never see on TV or read about in the newspapers. The black pilot dying next to me as the corpsman and nurse tried furiously to save him, pounding on his chest with their fists as they laughed and joked trying to keep from going insane. The Green Beret who died of spinal meningitis, the tiny Vietnamese nun handing out apples and rosary beads to the wounded, the dead being carted in and out like clockwork,19- and 20-year-olds.

There is the long flight home packed with the wounded all around you, every conceivable and horrifying wound you could imagine. Even the unconscious and brain-dead whose minds have been blown apart by bullets and shrapnel make that ride with you, because we are all going home now, back to our country. And this is only the beginning.

The frustrations, anger and rage, insomnia, nightmares, anxiety attacks, terrible restlessness and desperate need to keep moving will come later, but for now we are so thankful to have just made it out of that place, so grateful to be alive even with these grievous wounds.

I cannot help but wonder what it will be like for the young men and women wounded in Iraq. What will their homecoming be like? I feel close to them. Though many years separate us we are brothers and sisters. We have all been to the same place. For us in 1968 it was the Bronx veterans hospital paraplegic ward, overcrowded, understaffed, rats on the ward, a flood of memories and images, I can never forget; urine bags overflowing onto the floor. It seemed more like a slum than a hospital. Paralyzed men lying in their own excrement, pushing call buttons for aides who never came, wondering how our government could spend so much money (billions of dollars) on the most lethal, technologically advanced weaponry to kill and maim human beings but not be able to take care of its own wounded when they came home.

Will it be the same for them? Will they have to return to these same unspeakable conditions? Has any of it changed? I have heard that our government has already attempted to cut back millions in much needed funds for veterans hospitals—and this when thousands of wounded soldiers are returning from Iraq. Will they too be left abandoned and forgotten by a president and administration whose patriotic rhetoric does not match the needs of our wounded troops now returning? Do the American people, the president, the politicians, senators and congressmen who sent us to this war have any idea what it really means to lose an arm or a leg, to be paralyzed, to begin to cope with the psychological wounds of that war? Do they have any concept of the long-term effects of these injuries, how the struggles of the wounded are only now just beginning? How many will die young and never live out their lives because of all the stress and myriad of problems that come with sending young men and women into combat?

It is so difficult at first. You return home and both physically and emotionally don’t know how you are going to live with this wound, but you just keep trying, just keep waking up to this frightening reality every morning. “My God, what has happened to me?” But you somehow get up, you somehow go on and find a way to move through each day. Even though it is impossible, you go on. Maybe there will be a day years from now, if you are lucky to live that long, when it will get better and you will not feel so overwhelmed. You must have something to hope for, some way to believe it will not always be this way. This is exactly what many of them are going through right now.

They are alone in their rooms all over this country, right now. Just as I was alone in my room in Massapequa. I know they’re there—just as I was. This is the part you never see. The part that is never reported in the news. The part that the president and vice president never mention. This is the agonizing part, the lonely part, when you have to awake to the wound each morning and suddenly realize what you’ve lost, what is gone forever. They’re out there and they have mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives and children. And they’re not saying much right now. Just like me they’re just trying to get through each day. Trying to be brave and not cry. They still are extremely grateful to be alive, but slowly, agonizingly they are beginning to think about what has really happened to them.

What will it be like for them when one morning they suddenly find themselves naked sitting before that mirror in their room and must come face to face with their injury? I want to reach out to them. I want them to know that I’ve been there too. I want to just sit with them in their room and tell them that they must not give up. They must try to be patient, try to just get through each day, each morning, each afternoon any way they can. That no matter how impossible and frustrating it may seem, how painful, regardless of the anxiety attacks and nightmares and thoughts of suicide, they must not quit. Somewhere out there, there will be a turning point, somewhere through this all they will find a reason to keep on living.

In the months and years that are to follow, others will be less fortunate. Young men and women who survived the battlefield, the intensive-care ward, veterans hospitals and initial homecoming will be unable to make the difficult and often agonizing adjustment.

Is this what is awaiting all of them? Is this the nightmare no one ever told them about, the part no one now wants to talk about or has the time to deal with? The car accidents, and drinking and drug overdoses, the depression, anger and rage, spousal abuse, bedsores and breakdowns, prison, homelessness, sleeping under the piers and bridges. The ones who never leave the hospital, the ones who can’t hold a job, can’t keep a relationship together, can’t love or feel any emotions anymore, the brutal insomnia that leaves you exhausted and practically unable to function, the frightening anxiety attacks that come upon you when you least expect them, and always the dread that each day may be your last.

Marty, Billy, Bobby, Max, Tom, Washington, Pat, Joe? I knew them all. It’s a long list. It’s amazing that you’re still alive when so many others you knew are dead, and at such a young age. Isn’t all this dying supposed to happen when you’re much older? Not now, not while we’re so young. How come the recruiters never mentioned these things? This was never in the slick pamphlets they showed us! This should be a time of innocence, a time of joy and happiness, no cares and youthful dreams—not all these friends dying so young, all this grief and numbness, emptiness and feelings of being so lost.

The physical and psychological battles from the war in Iraq will rage on for decades, deeply impacting the lives of citizens in both our countries.

As this, the 38th anniversary of my wounding in Vietnam approaches, in many ways I feel my injury in that war has been a blessing in disguise. 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, an entirely different vision. I now believe that I have suffered for a reason and in many ways I have found that reason in my commitment to peace and nonviolence. We who have witnessed the obscenity of war and experienced its horror and terrible consequences have an obligation to rise above our pain and suffering and turn the tragedy of our lives into a triumph. I have come to believe that there is nothing in the lives of human beings more terrifying than war and nothing more important than for those of us who have experienced it to share its awful truth.

We must break this cycle of violence and begin to move in a different direction; war is not the answer, violence is not the solution. A more peaceful world is possible.

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

January 18, 2006

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Ron Kovic – “Born on the Fourth of July: The Long Journey Home” (2005)

August 2, 2008 at 7:14 pm (Life & Politics, Reviews & Articles)

The respected Vietnam veteran and author of Born on the Fourth of July, which was made into the acclaimed Oliver Stone film starring Tom Cruise.

This is an article he wrote a few years ago…

It was exactly forty years ago this past September that I left my house in Massapequa, New York to join the United States Marine Corps and begin an extraordinary journey that was to lead me into a disastrous war which would change my life, and others of my generation, profoundly and forever. There are times in the lives of both individuals and nations when we cross certain thresholds where there is no going back, no return to the innocence we once knew; the change is utter and irreconcilable. We often sense these moments. I know I did that day.

I can still remember leaving my house that morning, saying goodbye to my mother, my father driving me down to the Long Island Railroad station with only a few words being said between us–Dad was always that way–and then that long and contemplative ride into the city, being sworn in at Whitehall Street, holding my right hand up proudly with all the other young men, taking the oath of enlistment, and swearing our allegiance to the Constitution of the United States.

The fall of 1964, September 2, a lifetime ago. That last bright and beautiful morning when everything was to change forever, that last moment of lighthearted innocence and youth, of Massapequa and the backyard before the shock, the chaos, and the deluge. I had just turned eighteen that summer, and there are some old black-and-white photographs of me from those days. It’s amazing that I still have them, considering I have misplaced them many times over the years, thinking them lost forever, only to later find them in some unexpected place, like a deeply disturbing dream that I have been trying to repress.

I remember seeing those photos on several occasions after I came home from Vietnam and each time having terrible nightmares that shook me badly. I couldn’t look at them, could not face that young man I had been before the war and my injury. I would always promise myself to never look at them again. My trauma was still very deep, and that beautiful boy, that body, had been destroyed, defiled, and savaged. My wounding in Vietnam both physically and emotionally haunted me, pursued me, and threatened to overwhelm me.

I wrote Born on the Fourth of July in the fall of 1974 in one month, three weeks, and two days, on a $42 manual typewriter I had bought at Sears & Roebuck in Santa Monica, California. It was like an explosion, a dam bursting, everything flowed beautifully, just kept pouring out, almost effortlessly, passionately, desperately. I worked with an intensity and fury as if it was my last will and testament, and in many ways I felt it was. I continued to suffer from nightmares, constant anxiety attacks, severe heart palpitations, and a powerful, almost obsessive feeling that I would not live past my thirtieth birthday. I was living each day as if it were my last, as if everything had been compressed together by the war, and now every second counted.

I wrote all night long, seven days a week, single space, no paragraphs, front and back of the pages, pounding the keys so hard the tips of my fingers would hurt. I couldn’t stop writing, and I remember feeling more alive than I had ever felt. Convinced that I was destined to die young, I struggled to leave something of meaning behind, to rise above the darkness and despair.

I wanted people to understand. I wanted to share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to be in a war–to be shot and wounded, to be fighting for my life on the intensive care ward–not the myth we had grown up believing. I wanted people to know about the hospitals and the enema room, about why I had become opposed to the war, why I had grown more and more committed to peace and nonviolence.

I had been beaten by the police and arrested twelve times for protesting the war, and I had spent many nights in jail in my wheelchair. I had been called a Communist and a traitor, simply for trying to tell the truth about what had happened in that war, but I refused to be intimidated. I loved the night and I would write for hours as if no time had passed at all. I was exhausted and my back ached, but none of that seemed to matter. I felt wonderful inside, tired but completely consumed by my writing.

I would drink a couple cups of coffee and then with a new surge of energy work for another hour or so as the bright lights of the morning began to fill the room. I’d neatly stack all the pages next to the typewriter after holding them proudly in my hands, then go to my bedroom and transfer out of my wheelchair onto a mattress on the floor. I remember thinking to myself one morning that if I died in my sleep, someone would come into the apartment and find those pages next to the typewriter and know that I was not a victim, but someone who had been trying to move beyond his terrible tragedy and the terrible injustice of that war.

With the exception of that initial burst of writing and rare moment of stability in Santa Monica in the fall of 1974, I continued to be extremely restless back then, frantically moving from one place to the next, living on the edge, racing in cabs to the airport, flying from city to city on my monthly compensation check, suddenly showing up at friends’ houses in the middle of the night and sleeping on their couches–always carrying the manuscript with me and always frightened, desperately needing to escape the demons that were closing in on me.

Over the next year and a half I wrote several additional chapters of Born on the Fourth of July. Some of the stories were ones I had told my mother when I first came home from the hospital and would lay on our couch in the living room when I couldn’t sleep, which was often back then. Night after night I would repeat the story of how I was wounded that day in Vietnam, describing every single detail. My dear mother would sit patiently in her chair, listening to her son who had come home paralyzed from the war, trying her best to understand.

I attempted to write at my friends Skip and Ginny’s place on Mohegan Lake, in their laundry room, but couldn’t seem to get started. I wrote most of the chapter about my childhood at a little hotel not far from Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, and the ambush chapter, the most painful but one of the best, at Connie’s apartment in L.A. I wrote the Memorial Day chapter one afternoon in San Francisco at the Sam Wong Hotel on Broadway, just down the street from Enricos Café in North Beach. I can still remember the open window of my hotel room and the noise of passing cars and trucks in the street below, the fumes, the honking horns, but that became a very beautiful chapter and I still enjoy reading it to this day.

I dictated the very first page of the first chapter to my friend Roger at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood, and the remainder of the chapter up in Mendocino where he and Mary were living at the time. I had driven all the way up in a used car I had just bought in L.A. and later abandoned in their driveway. It was deep in the woods, quiet and peaceful, so very different from the war and the hospitals and all that I had been through. The air was fresh and there was a pond behind their cottage where I dictated to Roger, and I remember feeling exhausted as he held me in his arms and I began to cry in the midst of all that stillness. It was a painful but beautiful birth.

I am extremely grateful to Akashic Books and its publisher, Johnny Temple, for bringing out this new edition of Born on the Fourth of July at such a crucial moment in our nation’s history. For the past two years we have been involved in a tragic and senseless war in Iraq. As of this writing, over 1,500 Americans have died and more than 11,000 have been wounded, while tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, have been killed.

I have watched in horror the mirror image of another Vietnam unfolding. So many similarities, so many things said that remind me of that war thirty years ago which left me paralyzed for the rest of my life. Refusing to learn from our experiences in Vietnam, our government continues to pursue a policy of deception, distortion, manipulation, and denial, doing everything it can to hide from the American people their true intentions and agenda in Iraq. The flag-draped caskets of our dead begin their long and sorrowful journeys home hidden from public view, while the Iraqi casualties are not even considered worth counting–some estimate as many as 100,000 have been killed so far.

The paraplegics, amputees, burn victims, the blinded and maimed, shocked and stunned, brain damaged and psychologically stressed, now fill our veterans hospitals. Most of them were not even born when I came home wounded to the Bronx V.A. in 1968. The same lifesaving medical-evacuation procedures that kept me alive in Vietnam are bringing home a whole new generation of severely maimed from Iraq.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which afflicted so many of us after Vietnam, is just now beginning to appear among soldiers recently returned from the current war. For some, the agony and suffering, the sleepless nights, anxiety attacks, and awful bouts of insomnia, loneliness, alienation, anger, and rage, will last for decades, if not their whole lives. They will be trapped in a permanent nightmare of that war, of killing another man, a child, watching a friend die … fighting against an enemy that can never be seen, while at any moment someone–a child, a woman, an old man, anyone–might kill you. These traumas return home with us and we carry them, sometimes hidden, for agonizing decades. They deeply impact our daily lives, and the lives of those closest to us.

To kill another human being, to take another life out of this world with one pull of a trigger, is something that never leaves you. It is as if a part of you dies with them. If you choose to keep on living, there may be a healing, and even hope and happiness again–but that scar and memory and sorrow will be with you forever.

Some of these veterans are showing up at homeless shelters around our country, while others have begun to courageously speak out against the senselessness and insanity of this war and the leaders who sent them there. During the 2004 Democratic Convention, returning soldiers formed a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War, just as we marched in Miami in August of 1972 as Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Still others have refused deployment to Iraq, gone to Canada, and begun resisting this immoral and illegal war.

For months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, citizens here in the United States and around the world marched and demonstrated in growing opposition to our government’s reckless plan to launch an attack. I proudly participated in protests in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., doing countless interviews and speaking out wherever people would listen to me. Many prominent world leaders, including Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II, began to raise their voices against the terrible and ill-fated foreign policy. This extraordinary opposition culminated on February, 15, 2003, when more than 30 million citizens in over 100 nations participated in the most massive demonstration on behalf of peace in the history of the world. Never before had so many human beings come together before a war had even begun to say no to the insanity and madness.

Many of us promised ourselves long ago that we would never allow what happened to us in Vietnam to happen again. We had an obligation, a responsibility as citizens, as Americans, as human beings, to raise our voices in protest. We could never forget the hospitals, the intensive care wards, the wounded all around us fighting for their lives, those long and painful years after we came home, those lonely nights. There were lives to save on both sides, young men and women who would be disfigured and maimed, mothers and fathers who would lose their sons and daughters, wives and loved ones who would suffer for decades to come if we did not do everything we could to stop the forward momentum of this madness. We sensed it very early and very quickly. We saw the same destructive patterns reasserting themselves all over again as our leaders spoke of “bad guys” and “evil-doers,” “imminent threats” and “mushroom clouds,” attempting to frighten and intimidate the American people into supporting their agenda.

The Bush administration seems to have learned some very different lessons than we did from Vietnam. Where we learned of the deep immorality and obscenity of that war, they learned to be even more brutal, more violent and ruthless, i.e., “shock and awe.” Sadly, the war on terror has become a war of terror. Where we learned to be more open and honest, to be more truthful, to expose, to express, to shatter the myths of the past, they seem to have learned the exact opposite–to hide, to censor, to fabricate, to mislead and deceive–to perpetuate those myths.

Instead of being intimidated or frightened, many of us became more outraged and more determined than ever to stop these ignorant, arrogant men and women who never saw the things we saw, never had to grieve over the loss of their bodies or the bodies of their sons and daughters, never had to watch as so many friends and fellow veterans were destroyed by alcoholism and drugs, homelessness, imprisonment, neglect and rejection, torture, abandonment and betrayal, in the painful aftermath of the war. These leaders have never experienced the tears, the dread and rage, the feeling that there is no God, no country, nothing but the wound, the horrifying memories, the shock, the guilt, the shame, the terrible injustice that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and over two million Vietnamese.

We had to act. We had to speak.

I am no longer the 28-year-old man, six years returned from the war in Vietnam, who sat behind that typewriter in Santa Monica in the fall of 1974. I am nearly 60 now. My hair and beard are almost completely white. The nightmares and anxiety attacks have all but disappeared, but I still do not sleep well at night. I toss and turn in increasing physical pain. But I remain very positive and optimistic. I am still determined to rise above all of this. I know my pain and the horrors of my past will always be with me, but perhaps not with the same force and fury of those early years after the war.

I have learned to forgive my enemies and forgive myself. It has been very difficult to heal from the war while living in America, and I have often dreamed of moving to neutral ground, another country. Yet I have somehow made a certain peace, even in a nation that so often still seems to believe in war and the use of violence as a solution to its problems. There has been a reckoning, a renewal. 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 an opportunity to move through that dark night of the soul to a new shore, to gain an understanding, a knowledge, an 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 be able 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. 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.

I truly feel that this beautiful world has given me back so much more than it has taken from me. So many others that I knew are gone, and gone way too young. I am grateful to be alive after all these years and all that I’ve been through. I am thankful for every day. Life is so precious.

Ron Kovic
Redondo Beach, California
March 2005

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