While Ronnie Kovic was fighting in Vietnam I was in college playing football and baseball on scholarship. All expenses paid. People told me that I was extraordinary while Ronnie was suffering in a squalid Veterans hospital. And while he was being spit on at the Republican National convention I was learning to believe that I deserved an exceptional life and that I was better than guys like him who had somehow believed the lies our government told about how the communists were going to take over the world unless young men stopped them the way our fathers and uncles had stopped the Nazis and the lunatic Japanese.
I was too cool to believe any of that, and guys like Ronnie were unenlightened. I felt sorry for them.
I have become an old man now and these days I am trying for all I am worth to be a good father to my son who is Ronnie's age. When he began telling me that he was thinking about joining the Marines, I began reading to him from Ron's book. Reading to him at night while he lay in his bed as I had when he was a small boy. I wanted him to know that if he went to war in Iraq and was wounded horribly there, his government and his country would not care about him. I wanted him to know that the same people who were in power in America and who sent Ron off to war, were in power once again. The same pathetic collection of clowns and liars eager to have wars so long as they and their children don't have to fight them. Cowards, really. I told my son that he would be fighting for a commander in cheif and a vice president and a secretary of state who are cowards. I told my son that the same conservative republicans who spit on Ron Kovic after he gave his body for America were in power once again and that he could expect them to spit upon him when he came home from war if he opposed them. Ron Kovic's magnificent book persuaded my son not to fight for his country in Iraq. I am forever in the author's debt.

Ron Kovic is one of society's worst nightmares: the unquestioning youth who believed every war movie, signed up for the Marines on his 18th birthday, fully committed to combat and sacrifice...only to turn his shattered back on those same indoctrinated values, speaking out against them with rage and bitterness as he saw himself, post-injury, shoved into a corner like an embarassing mutant.

Kovic's memoir is inelegant, repetitive, self-centered; it is, simply put, not well-written. (The stream-of-consciousness recreation of Marine boot camp on Parris Island is especially clumsy.) Still I would recommend it to any young person, as I would recommend a trip to an open blast furnace, so that the same young person could see life as it sometimes horribly is, to know what war actually does to those who fight on the front. Kovic does not pretend to be writing great literature, but he is presenting the raw case of his life.

The original memoir is also a good antidote (I believe) to its lurid movie adaptation by Oliver Stone. For reasons I do not understand, the movie completely omits the pivotal moment, at a rally just after the Kent State shootings, when Kovic decided to stop simply feeling sorry for himself, and to use his status as a badly crippled Vietnam vet to protest the War. This is the core of the man's story, and still deserves to be read.

Ron Kovic is a Marine whose life was blasted and changed forever by the paralyzing wound he received in Vietnam. Confined permanently to a wheelchair, without mobility or feeling below his chest, Kovic successfully turned his enormous inner rage to a public purpose in opposing the continuation of the Vietnam War and telling his story to a new generation of impressionable kids likely to think that war is cool.

Kids, whatever else it is, war ain't cool. Believe Ron Kovic.

But this a book review, not a personal tribute to a man who channeled his victimhood into political activism. In book form, Kovic's rage makes for a tedious, repetitive read. All Kovic wanted to do was to serve his country, fight communism, and be "like John Wayne" (who, unknown to young Kovic, never served in the military in any capacity). And look what happened. Yet despite the terrible personal cost the war laid on him and so many others, the Washington politicians waging the war paid no attention. They believed the national interest as they undrestood it took precedence over personal disasters like Ron Kovic's. One of the problems with Born on the Fourth of July is that the author can hardly believe that, or that Marines are expendable. But what else should a young Marine expect?

Older readers may prefer the late Lewis B. Puller, Jr's autobiography, Fortunate Son. Puller's father was "Chesty" Puller, a legendary Commandant of the Corps, and young Puller wound up a quadriplegic after just a few days in country. Like Ron Kovic he came to oppose the war. I found his book to be a more satisfying reading experience than Born on the Fourth of July.