42 pages • 1 hour read
Born on the Fourth of July
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Themes
Protest as Patriotism
Throughout Born on the Fourth of July, Kovic explores what it means to be a patriot. The book’s first epigraph includes a quote from President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Kovic’s story is that of a man answering that call. Kovic, who shares a birthday with the United States, grew up loving America and wanting to serve: “Being born on the exact same day as my country I thought was really great,” he writes; “I was so proud” (64). As a child, he would pray to be “a good American” (65), and he was a member of the cub scouts and marched in Memorial Day parades. He even writes of feeling upset when America failed to launch the satellite Vanguard: “We had failed in our first attempt to put a satellite into orbit [...] and America wasn’t first anymore” (74).
Kovic becomes enamored of joining the Marines and becoming a hero for his country, and he lights up when the Marines who speak in school tell him and his classmates that by enlisting they “could serve our country like the young president had asked us to do” (89). The night before he leaves for basic training, he is overcome with patriotism as he listens to the national anthem play on TV. He is even proud to be a Marine and serve his country while he is in Vietnam.
The war changes him, though, and as an antiwar activist, he is often told that he is a “a commie traitor” or that he has betrayed his country (162). Kovic himself used to think that antiwar protesters were bad people who were protesting the soldiers “putting [their] lives on the line for our country” (147). After seeing the horrors of war and the horrors of being a veteran, however, and after he has sacrificed so much for the country and been abused in return, he recognizes that protesting the war is patriotic. In fact, he argues that his veteran status gives him even more right to protest because he’s already proven his patriotism. For example, Kovic tells the guards at the Republican National Convention that he has the right to sit in the front row of the convention—he “fought for that right” and that he “was born on the Fourth of July” (187). Kovic’s antiwar protests, then, are themselves a form of patriotism for him. He tells the truth and recognizes that he can serve as a living embodiment of what’s wrong with the war, an example to warn parents of what their “sons” might “look like” if the war continues (162).
At no point in the book does Kovic provide a reason for the United States not to be involved in Vietnam or even really mention the fate of the Vietnamese people, but he makes it clear that the war was not worth the sacrifice he and other have made and, more importantly, that veterans deserve better than they’ve gotten. He also sees something truly patriotic in exercising his right to protest and sacrificing himself not just for the country but for the truth, even if doing so cannot undo the past.
Kovic makes it clear he loved the America he grew up in but that it no longer exists because of the lies and hypocrisy of America’s leaders, a “government and leaders who could care less about the same boys they sent over [to Vietnam]” (187-88). The America he loved has “come and gone” (231), but he still is proud to have been born on the Fourth of July and proud to have served the version of America that used to exist when he was the nation’s “all-American boy” (177).
The Value of Sacrifice
Kovic sacrifices the use of three-fourths of his body for the United States, and much of Born on the Fourth of July explores that sacrifice. From a young age, he seems to have romanticized the experience of sacrifice. He includes among his heroes John Wayne as he appeared in The Sands of Iwo Jima, in which Wayne plays a Marine who is killed in World War II so that other Marines can raise the American flag. As a high school student, he dreams of being a “hero,” and while serving, he writes in his diary that being in Vietnam “just like President Kennedy had talked about” is important because he is sacrificing himself for democracy (206-07). While he does win medals and is told he is a hero, however, he does not feel that the sacrifice was worth it. Even immediately after getting wounded in Vietnam, he senses the “worthlessness of dying right here in this place at this moment for nothing” (229).
Kovic is also uneasy about the way others use his sacrifice as an argument for the war. At a Memorial Day speech, a military commander points at him and another wounded veteran and says, “We have to win [...] because of them!” (119). He becomes a symbol of sacrifice for the wrong reasons. Later, Kovic recognizes that he can become a different type of symbol for sacrifice—that his condition offers a visual manifestation of the need to end the war. He recognizes that the mere presence of a veteran who has lost so much in the war can encourage others not to enlist. His presence and his truth telling about the hospital experience serve as powerful antiwar messages, as he can ask parents, “Do you want your sons to look like this?” (162).
Kovic’s sacrifice also has religious overtones. Throughout the book, Kovic describes his Catholic upbringing, and he even says he dreamed of becoming a priest someday. He looks for his sacrifice to mean something, as that meaning would confirm his faith. Upon getting injured, he thinks that maybe the wounds are “punishment for killing the corporal and the children” (37). The world of Catholicism has clear lines of good and evil, of just actions and sins, but the war does not. Instead, the war takes its toll on Kovic’s soul. He psychically dies during the war and feels he is “dead like all the rest” (223). He then sacrifices himself in battle and is surrounded by “the living deaths” of the other wounded at the hospital (51). The book is about him discovering his voice and resurrecting himself after he has sacrificed so much for his country only to be betrayed by it. Like Christ, he has died so that America can live, but unlike Christ, Kovic does not disappear upon his resurrection. Instead, he continues to sacrifice himself so that he can get the truth out, help end the war, and attempt to free America from the lies and hypocrisies of its leaders.
The Reality of War
Kovic argues throughout the book that the experience of war does not comport to the idealized versions he sees on recruitment posters and in war movies. As a child, he plays war games and go to see films such as To Hell and Back and The Sands of Iwo Jima, movies that glorified war and made heroes out of their stars, Audie Murphy and John Wayne. These men would die heroically in battle, sacrificing themselves for their fellow soldiers and their nation. Kovic becomes obsessed with being like them when he gets older and grows enamored with the “sharp-looking marines” he sees on the covers of recruitment pamphlets (71). When he sees real-life marines at his high school, he thinks of them as “statues and not like real men” but notes that “it was like all the movies and all the books and all the dreams of becoming a hero come true” (88). In fact, the Marines he meets blend in his head with his film heroes so that, when he shakes hands with them, he feels he is “shaking hands with John Wayne and Audie Murphy” (89).
The war, however, does not resemble the movies, and as a soldier he ends up not looking like the statuesque Marines but instead confined to a wheelchair. For one thing, in the movies, there were clear lines: “there was always the enemy and the good guys and each of them killed the other” (203). In Vietnam, Kovic kills another American and a number of civilians because the lines between good and bad are not discernible. It is hard to know who is firing on whom and equally hard “to tell the villagers from the enemy” (209). Kovic only gets one chance to kill the “bad guys,” and it comes the day he is injured. On that day, despite the realities of war he has learned—that it is messy, chaotic, terrifying, and spiritually numbing—he still hopes to live out his war movie hero fantasy. He even writes of the attack he participates in that “it was beautiful, just like the movies” (227). However, by that point, the reader already knows that nothing else about his experience will be like the movies. Instead, he’ll lose the use of his legs and be subject to mistreatment at the V.A. hospitals.
Years after leaving the war, Kovic will feel that he can serve as a different type of propaganda. At a high school auditorium, he sits waiting to speak and wonders about the day he met the Marines at his school: “What if I had seen someone like me that day, a guy in a wheelchair, just sitting there in front of the senior class not saying a word?” (154). He wonders if that presence would have made him realize the cost of war and the realities of it instead of being blinded by the idealized version of war embodied by the well-dressed Marines.
Finally, unlike the movie wars Kovic admired, the real war has a permanence. John Wayne dies, and the movie ends, but Kovic and others experience the war every day. They live with the horrors they saw and the realities of their wounds. They wrestle the demons of post-traumatic stress disorder and of their own guilt. They are, as Kovic writes in the second epigraph of the book, “the living death” and the permanent “memorial day on wheels.”
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