World History 2014-15: Born on the Fourth of July.....

¢Born on the Fourth of July Analysis

¢.

¢Kovic really was born on July 4, 1946. He grew up in a suburban housing development, with happy memories of friends. Little League, games in the street and woods; school seems unimportant. His heroes were Mickey Mantle and John Wayne, especially Wayne in the role of a Marine. High school sports were important to Kovic, and the death and funeral of President Kennedy traumatic. At eighteen, after high school, he joined the Marines.

We know Kovic was a sergeant in Vietnam. The Film shares three episodes in Vietnam. The first occurred early in his tour, when Kovic by mistake shot and killed a corporal in his own outfit. Though officers tried to reassure him—it was an accident, it may even have been someone else’s shot—the guilt was a heavy weight. In The second, an over-eager officer led Kovic and his outfit in an attack on a town. Too late, they found their “enemy” had been children, now dead and wounded.

¢Kovic’s grief and sense of guilt are personal, for he has been responsible. There is not the slightest suggestion that he blamed the war itself, or those who brought on the war. He was still trying to live up to his ideals, to be a good Marine. When he heard about protests, he says revealingly, he did not understand how Americans could do such things.

¢. In the third crucial incident in the movie Kovic is shot leading his group against a Vietnamese hill, not once but several times. The bullet that counted paralyzed him from the chest down. He was rescued and flown home, to care in first one, then another veterans’ hospital. Pain and helplessness, but even more indignity and the feeling of isolation from the ordinary world, filled his life. He condemns the conditions in the hospital and the treatment of the veterans. The film shows the callous indifference on the part of attendants; inadequate care—the machine that is needed to keep blood flowing has a pump that does not always work.