Born on the Fourth of July

Chapter 5’s four sections describe the fall of 1970. Kovic stops going to classes at college and starts to give more speeches after the first one at the high school. As fall turns to winter, Kovic feels restless and decides to move to California with his friend Kenny. He settles in an apartment by the beach near Los Angeles. There he is inspired by a protest he reads about in the Los Angeles Times: “A group of vets had gone to Washington and thrown away their medals. It was one of the most moving antiwar demonstrations there had been” (158). Kovic joins a meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) where “everything seemed to change—the loneliness seemed to vanish” (158). He feels closer camaraderie than he’s felt since Vietnam and recognizes that the men are his friends and peers, even though most of them served in Vietnam more recently than he did and dress differently, wearing their “floppy bush hats and jungle uniforms right here on the streets of America” (159).

The VVAW sends Kovic out to make various speeches, and he becomes an in-demand speaker with a mission that, he says, “meant much more to me than being an athlete or a marine” (161). Kovic notes that he “honestly believed that if only I could speak out to enough people I could stop the war” (161). He writes that some saw his existence as a paralyzed veteran as a reminder of the horror of war but notes that others would call him “a commie traitor” to his face (162). Still, he wants to continue speaking, even though each speech makes him relive his war experiences, including the “corporal from Georgia and the ambush in the village and the dead children lying on the ground” (162-63). He still tells no one the truth of those incidents, even his fellow VVAW members.

In the second section of Chapter 5, Kovic recounts a large protest outside President Richard Nixon’s re-election headquarters in Los Angeles. Kovic spins in his wheelchair and flips off the cops and FBI agents watching the protest and is then violently arrested. The officers kick and hit him, “tear the medals I have won in the war from my chest and throw me back into the chair, my hand still cuffed behind me (166-67). The officers call him a “fucking traitor,” but when they get him undressed at the police station, they realize they “have beaten up a half-dead man” and become “almost polite” to him (167). Kovic’s catheter has fallen out, and he wets himself in the prison cell as he wonders “what more will they take” from him than they already have (169).

In the final two sections of Chapter 5, Kovic describes a brief affair he has with a woman named Helen. He crosses the country, moving from California to New York and back, but breaks up with Helen because he knew he “had to be alone for a while” (173). After that, he ends up in a state of depression with fewer protests and speeches to make and less attention given to him. He feels lonely and separated from the world, as he alone has to “dig into his rear end to clean the brown chunks of shit out” while everyone else’s lives are “disgustingly easy” though everyone acts like they are all “equal” (176). Kovic recognizes that the government and many in the country were constantly demanding more from him, especially after he started speaking out against the war. He complains that “he had never been anything but a thing to them” but declares that they “were the little dots, the small cheap things, not him and the others they had sent to do their killing” (178-79). The chapter ends with Kovic fantasizing that he could be like the baseball players he admired as a child and make “a terrific comeback” (179).