Born on the Fourth of July

Chapter 4 contains seven sections. In the first, Kovic, now living at his parents’ house in Massapequa, New York, is picked up by two members of the local American Legion chapter to be featured in the town’s Memorial Day parade. One tells Kovic’s father the military is “gonna make certain that [Kovic’s] sacrifice and any of the others weren’t in vain,” adding that the United States is “still in that war to win” (111). Kovic is joined in the Cadillac by another wounded veteran, Eddie Dugan. He notes that he doesn’t usually “like telling people about how bad he had been hurt, but for some reason it was different with Eddie” (115). At the parade, Eddie and Kovic are announced as wounded veterans, but Kovic notices the townspeople don’t seem to care about him or the parade in general, that “it was different” from the parades he remembers as a child, and that the crowd “just seemed to be standing staring at Eddie Dugan and himself like they weren’t even there” (116).

After the parade, the mayor of the town and other dignitaries make speeches about the war and the sacrifices Kovic and Eddie made. At one point, a military commander points at both men and says, “We have to win [...] because of them!” (119). After the speech, Kovic runs into his old friend Tommy Law, who has also been wounded in Vietnam. Seeing Tommy “seemed to bring back something wonderfully happy in his past” even though Tommy clearly looks sad (122).

In the second section of the chapter, Kovic complains about his inability to have sex and laments that he has “given my dead swinging dick for America” (125). He describes the nights spent at Arthur’s Bar, where he would drink to excess before going home and wheeling himself up the ramp his father had built for him. The same familial tensions that existed in his childhood resurface. Kovic feels sorry that “the old man had worked hard on the ramp [...] like he had worked hard at everything he ever did in his life,” while his mother seems to be upset at him often and laments to her husband that “we’ve got a drunk for a son” (128). One night after Kovic has urinated on himself because the catheter falls out of his penis, his father cleans him up, while Kovic only wants “to explode, to get out of this crazy numb body and be a man again” (129). However, Kovic comes to realize his condition is permanent.

In the third section of chapter 4, Kovic recounts a trip to Mexico he takes to chase a “free feeling that he couldn’t get unless he was out of the chair” and to visit brothels (131). He stays at the Village of the Sun, a place for paralyzed veterans, and is happy to be with people who make him think “he might be able to feel human again” (132). He ventures to various brothels and feels the touch of women even though he cannot do anything sexual with them. He vows to “sleep with a different one every night” but gives up on his plan after a night out with another veteran named Charlie (138). Charlie gets very drunk, makes a speech complaining about his condition and the atrocities he was forced to commit during the war, and urinates in a Mexican truckdriver’s truck. The driver does not complain, but “somehow that was the end of it for” Kovic (139), who returns to New York.

In the fourth section, Kovic gets his own apartment and starts to attend college classes on Long Island. He is determined to learn to walk again but breaks his leg and is forced to stay in the V.A. hospital in the Bronx, which is even worse than it was the first time. There he almost loses his leg. He feels forgotten and tells the staff that he “fought in Vietnam” and has “a right to be treated decently” only to be told by one health aide that “Vietnam don’t mean nothing to me” and that he can “take [his] Vietnam and shove it up [his] ass” (143). Kovic tells his parents nothing about this nor that fact that the war and the wound and the hospital are “beginning to go round and round in [his] head,” since it would “only hurt them if they knew” (146).

The fifth section of the chapter opens with Kovic explaining that he was in Vietnam when he first heard about the people in the United States protesting the war. He hated them while he was in Vietnam and felt they were betraying him and his fellow soldiers, but after being in the hospital, he says, “I wanted to know what I had lost my legs for, why I and the others had gone at all” (146). Out of the hospital in 1970, he hears of the shooting at Kent State, where four antiwar protesters were shot by National Guardsmen, and observes a protest from his car before asking his cousin’s husband, Skip, to drive him to Washington, DC, to participate in an antiwar rally on the National Mall. Kovic states that he “gave up my tie and sweater for no shirt and a big red bandana” (149).

In Washington, he notices the barricades surrounding the White House and wonders why the government is so afraid of its citizens. He watches as Skip joins others in swimming naked in the Reflecting Pool; Kovic reflects that swimming presented “total freedom” even if it did not have much to do “with the invasion of Cambodia or the students slain at Kent State” (151). Finally, he watches police attack the protesters and announces to Skip that he will never be the same again. He has felt a “togetherness, just as there had been in Vietnam,” but one directed at healing people to “set them free” (153).

In the brief final section of the chapter, Kovic describes his first antiwar speech. He is waiting to speak in a school auditorium and is reminded of when marine recruiters came and spoke to his school. Kovic wonders if “things would have been different” for him if he’d seen a paralyzed combat veteran instead of the Marines he saw (154). Then, as he gets up to speak to the students, he begins “by telling them about the hospital” (155).