Born on the Fourth of July

Kovic is haunted by two actions throughout the text: the massacre of Vietnamese civilians and the killing of the corporal from Georgia. In nearly every chapter, he mentions one or both of these actions as things about which he feels overwhelmingly guilty. At points in the text, he tries to make sense of the actions or to make them mean something. He seems, for instance, to want to accept his wounds as “punishment for killing the corporal and the children” (37). Later, while traveling to protest the Republican National Convention, he tries to justify the killing of the corporal by suggesting the corporal was a “fuckin’ southern bigot” (182), making his death not as bad. Both trying to have the killing mean something and trying to justify the killing are attempts at bargaining (to use the Kübler-Ross stages of grief framework) over the actions Kovic committed in the war. He has also tried denying his actions, which the military leadership seems to have encouraged during the war, and is depressed about what he did throughout the text.

However, in the final chapter, as Kovic provides the details of the killing, he seems to finally accept his culpability. By admitting the truth of what happened, Kovic articulates the horrors of war and what it does to the individuals who fight it. The corporal from Georgia thus becomes a stand-in for the horrors of war that Kovic continues to experience each day. In sharing the truth, Kovic can hope to reach some kind of catharsis.

The corporal from Georgia also represents the reality of the war as opposed to the ideal war Kovic imagined based on war movies and propaganda posters. Where Kovic imagined he would kill enemy soldiers to serve his country, he ends up accidentally killing another American because of the chaos of the war.

At several points in the book, Kovic dwells on clothing, suggesting that what people wear says a lot about who they are or how they can be interpreted. He especially dwells on the Marine uniforms, obsessing over the “shiny shoes” he sees on recruitment posters, the Marines who speak to his school, and the general who awards him his Purple Heart. These shoes represent the vision he has of the Marines before he enlists. He sees the shoes as representative of heroes and some sort of higher patriotic calling. When he is in the Marines, though, his first experience with clothing is an ill-fitting uniform he is forced to put on during basic training even while the drill sergeant pretends the uniform has the same significance as the dress blues and shiny shoes Kovic admires.

After returning home, Kovic discusses the clothes he wears to protests. Before going to the large protest in Washington, DC, Kovic writes that he “gave up my tie and sweater for no shirt and a big red bandana” (149). This change implies that he had some idea of how to dress as an antiwar advocate, but this uniform, too, changes when he meets the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a group of veterans who wear their “floppy bush hats and jungle uniforms right here on the streets of America” (159). Because the VVAW want others to know they are veterans, the military uniform is part of their dress code. The uniform they wear is not the idealized dress uniform Kovic obsesses over but, rather, the fatigues they wore in battle in Vietnam. Clothes, therefore, represent both the reality of war and the fiction of it. Kovic also notes the way the dead in Vietnam were “stripped of their clothes” and left “staring at the sky” (221). He implies that without clothes, soldiers are not soldiers, whether the clothes are the uniform of the imagined soldier or the actual soldier.