42 pages • 1 hour read
Ron KovicBorn on the Fourth of July
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2
Chapter 1 Summary
Born on the Fourth of July opens with Kovic in Vietnam, where he has just been shot in his shoulder. He can’t feel his legs and vows that he has “to get out of this place, make it out of here somewhere” (31). He hears voices asking if he needs help and then is dragged into a safe hole by a stranger whose face Kovic never sees. Kovic is loaded onto a helicopter that takes him to an army hospital in Vietnam, where he sees “a man without any legs screaming in pain […] bleeding terribly from the stumps that were once his legs” (34). Kovic, though, feels happy to be in the hospital because he will be operated on and because he has survived “not because of any god, or any religion, but because I want to make it” (35). He survives surgery but has lost feeling from the chest down and wonders if the wound is his “punishment for killing the corporal and the children” (37).
In and out of sleep, Kovic watches a doctor and a corpsman blithely talk about the Green Bay Packers while trying to save the life of a black pilot, and he sees others wounded by war, including a Green Beret calling for his mother, a baby damaged by napalm, and a Korean civilian who was gravely injured on a booby trap when he went out to buy a newspaper. At the end of the chapter, Kovic is awarded the Purple Heart in a ceremony that is repeated verbatim for every soldier in his ward at the hospital.
Chapter 2 Summary
Chapter 2 is broken up into two sections. In the first, Kovic writes in third person about his experience in the St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, New York. He and the other patients there are still enlisted, so each day begins with “reveille at six o’clock in the morning” (46), roll call, and cleaning duties. While “even the amputees had to do it,” Kovic never did and “usually slept through the whole thing” (46). Some days, members of the American Legion group from his hometown visit and tell he is a hero and that the town is proud of him. He watches his body weaken as he begins to understand that his injury is “the worst he could have received” aside from death or “becoming a vegetable” (47).
In the second section of Chapter 2, Kovic is in a different hospital, one in the Bronx that is quieter but also worse overall. He describes getting his daily enema in a room with other wounded veterans and the “nightmare” of seeing a ward full of “broken men.” He notes that the men on the ward do not look like the images of soldiers on the enlistment posters he used to see. Now they are treated like “a bunch of cattle” who “do not really count anymore” (52). The hospital is filthy; he describes overflowing urine bags, many of the men stinking from insufficient bathing, and men throwing “their breadcrumbs under the radiator to keep the rats from chewing on our numb legs” (55). The wretched conditions make all the men on the ward wonder “how the government can keep asking money for weapons” but leave them “lying in our own filth” (55).
Kovic stills tells anyone who asks him that he supports the war, but he mentions that what he says and who he is “are becoming two different things” (57). He also hides things from his family and other visitors. For instance, he does not tell his family about the “enema room” as “no one wants too many people to know how much of him has really died in the war” (53). The chapter ends with him learning to use his wheelchair but losing control of his body and throwing up all over himself in front of his mother and sister while the hospital worker tells them his chair is “really a great machine” (60).
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Kovic opens the book with two epigraphs. The first is 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.” The second is a poem by Kovic himself in which he describes himself as “the living death/ the memorial day on wheels.” These two epigraphs show who Kovic was before the war and who he is after. The first epigraph hints at the patriotic sense of duty that made Kovic want to enlist in the Marines. The second epigraph explains what that service led to. He has dead limbs and is confined to a wheelchair, which serves as a constant visual reminder of the sacrifices of war, sacrifices usually only remembered or celebrated on Memorial Day. These two themes—patriotism and sacrifice—ring throughout the book. In the first two chapters of Born on the Fourth of July, Kovic graphically shows the reader what that patriotism has wrought and what sacrifice looks like.
The first chapter starts in medias res, during the action in Vietnam. Kovic makes the reader experience the chaos of war to make it clear that his experience in Vietnam did not resemble a war movie. There were no clear lines of fire or clear lines of good and bad. He never sees who shoots him, nor does he see who saves his life. All he remembers is that “a tall black man with long skinny arms and enormous hands'' picks him up and carries him to safety while “bullets begin cracking over our heads like strings of firecrackers” (32). This incident is intense and sounds like a typical act of heroism shown in a war movie (especially the barrage of fire), but the man who saves his life, as far as Kovic knows, is never cited for his valor or even known. Thus, even a heroic action lacks the clarity it should.
Kovic juxtaposes this act of heroism with the ceremony he receives for winning the Purple Heart. He watches as a general walks from bed to bed in the hospital ward and gives each soldier a Purple Heart. When he gets to Kovic’s bed, Kovic notices the general’s “shiny shoes,” which contrast with the conditions of the war and are more reminiscent of the shoes he has seen on recruitment posters. There is no personalization for Kovic’s medal, and the general appears as invested in his life as the doctors Kovic watches in the hospital who talk about the Green Bay Packers while lackadaisically trying to save a dying soldier’s life. The experience of war is clearly chaotic and horrible, but in the hospital, the doctors, nurses, and generals go about their lives as though it’s a regular day at the office. Kovic bookends the first chapter with the actual heroism of the unknown soldier and the repetitious ceremony the clean general gives to every injured soldier in order to juxtapose them and point out the absurdity of winning a medal for being wounded.
Chapter 2 opens in third person. This is the first of several changes in voice Kovic uses throughout the book. Third-person narration is, by definition, more distant from the protagonist than first-person narration, and Kovic uses third person any time there seems to be a disconnect in his own life and the experiences he is conveying. In the beginning of Chapter 2, for instance, he seems to be almost out of body, witnessing his time in the first hospital in New York, where he is not yet familiar with his condition and also does not understand the men who come and tell him he is a hero. In other sections of the book, Kovic uses the third person to describe the times he acts like someone else’s idea of a marine (or his own idealized version of a marine) and not the times he remembers before he enlisted or while he was in Vietnam. He also does not use third person when he is describing his post-war activism. Thus, he seems to use the third person only when he’s acting as a symbol for someone else.
In Chapter 2, Kovic describes the wretched conditions of the hospitals he finds himself in after the war. He notes that the wounded veterans are treated like “a bunch of cattle” (56), and he calls the rat-infested hospital “a crazy house, a wild zoo” (58). The animalistic imagery of the rats and cattle suggests that the war cost Kovic and the other veterans their humanity. He may have come back alive, but he thinks “the war has made me a little mad” and that he is now surrounded by “living deaths” of the war (51)—men who exist in some sort of liminal space between human and corpse. While he recognizes that life is better than “dying or becoming a vegetable” (47), he also laments “how much of him has really died in the war” (53). Much of the book is about him trying to reclaim or find a new sense of humanity so he can get past this liminal reality.
The first two chapters are fairly short, but they are packed with most of the major themes of the book. Kovic brings up his will to live, the need to make sense of the war and have his injuries viewed as divine punishment for his sins during the war, the differences between propaganda and reality, and the treatment of veterans. Though he does not foreshadow his future as an antiwar activist, he mentions a moment of change as what he tells others about the war and what he is “feeling are becoming two different things” (57).
