BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY
Ron Kovic served two tours of duty during the Vietnam War. He was paralysed from his chest down in combat in 1968 and has been in a wheelchair ever since. Kovic was the co-screenwriter of the 1989 Academy Award-winning film based on Born on the Fourth of July.
This Canons edition first published in Great Britain in 2019
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in the USA by McGraw-Hill Book Company in 1976
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Ron Kovic, 1976
Introduction © Ron Kovic, 2005
Foreword © Bruce Springsteen, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 745 9
eISBN 978 1 78689 776 3
Design by Akashic Books
CONTENTS
Introduction 2005 by Ron Kovic
For my countryand its people,
happy birthday
Ask not what your country can
do for you—ask what you can
do for your country.
—PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
January 20, 1961
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I’d like to thank my friend and editor, Joyce Johnson, for the countless hours, including much of her own time, spent helping construct this book, giving it the necessary shape and form. The book could not have been completed without her help and exceptional skills and talents.
Thanks also to Roger Steffens—actor, poetry-man, and friend—who gave freely of his time, effort, and energy, retyping almost the entire manuscript up in Mendocino. I’ll remember his patience and understanding, his generosity and love, his faith in me and the book.
I’d also like to thank Mary and Sheila and my friend Waldo—a child at sixty—who gave me courage with his eyes and love with his wisdom.
And finally, thanks to Connie Panzarino—beautiful, strong, and brave woman—who believed in me and the book years before it had been written. She stood by me like no one else, listening through nights and days, caring and loving, understanding and encouraging, wiping the tears from my eyes. She was like a light shining from the darkness of what seemed to be an endless storm.
I am the living deaththe memorial day on wheelsI am your yankee doodle dandyyour john wayne come homeyour fourth of july firecrackerexploding in the grave
FOREWORDby Bruce Springsteen
IN 1978 I was on a cross-country drive with a friend when we stopped at a small-town drugstore. There, in a book rack, I found Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July. I devoured it on the way to Los Angeles, caught in its unrelenting power, and was still under its spell when we pulled into the Sunset Marquis hotel, a rocker’s hideaway on Alta Loma Road.
Over the next few days I noticed a young man in a wheelchair sitting poolside. One afternoon he approached me and said, “Hi, I’m Ron Kovic. I wrote a book called Born on the Fourth of July.” I couldn’t believe it. I told him I’d just finished his book and felt it was one of the most powerful I’d ever read. We talked about the plight of Vietnam vets who’d returned stateside and he offered to take me to the Venice vet center.
A few days later we made the trip and I was introduced to many young men who were struggling with their own difficulties coming home. It was unforgettable and sparked my interest in veterans’ affairs that led to our concert in support of Vietnam veterans at the Memorial Sports Arena in Los Angeles in August 1981. Ron’s book, his passion, and his friendship have stayed with me to this day.
Here’s Born on the Fourth of July. Read it and rejoice. Read it and weep.
INTRODUCTION 2005by Ron Kovic
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 forty-two-dollar 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