Born on the Fourth of July (15 page)

Finally a tall lieutenant announces over a bullhorn that the demonstration has ended and that everyone is to clear out immediately. “How are you doing, brother?” says a man with long red hair in back of me. “Is everything okay?” He is someone I have seen at other demonstrations, but I do not know his name. “You look like you could use some help,” he says, and offers to push me for a while.

The police are moving now, closing in on us. I can hear sirens in the distance. I begin yelling and screaming directions to the people around me. “Get back on the sidewalk into the line! Come on now!” I try to wheel my chair forward, but it will not move. I try again.

Suddenly the man with the red hair is leaning over from behind me, grabbing my hands. “You're under arrest.” Another man whom I recognize from the picket line runs up to help him. “Come on you bastard. You're going to jail!”

I am fighting to keep them from handcuffing me, screaming for the other demonstrators to help me.

The red-headed man lifts up the handles of my chair and dumps me into the street. I fall forward on my face, my legs twisted under me.

“Get your fucking hands behind you!” The redheaded man jabs his knee into my back.

There is a tremendous commotion all around me. Someone is kicking the dead part of my body that can't feel anymore. People are yelling and screaming and clubs are flying everywhere.

“I'm a Vietnam veteran! Don't you know what you're doing to me? Oh God, what's happening.” They are holding my arms. They twist them behind my back, clamp handcuffs around my wrists.

“Don't you understand? My body's paralyzed. I can't move my body, I can't feel my body.”

“Get him the fuck out of here!” yells someone.

Kicking me and hitting me with their fists, they begin dragging me along. They tear the medals I have won in the war from my chest and throw me back into the chair, my hands still cuffed behind me. I feel myself falling forward because I cannot balance and the red-headed man keeps pushing me back against the chair, yelling and cursing at me to stay put.

“I have no stomach muscles, don't you understand?”

“Shut up you sonofabitch!”

There are women standing on the sidewalk nearby crying, and all around me people are being beaten and handcuffed. The two men begin dragging me in the chair to an unmarked car on the other side of the street.

The red-headed man throws my body into the back seat, my dead limbs flopping underneath me. “Get in there you fucking traitor!”

I am feeling hurt all over and I can hardly breathe. I lie bleeding in the back seat as a discussion goes on between the two of them about whether or not they have broken any of my bones. I hear them say they are going to take me to the county jail hospital for x-rays.

Something happens to them when I take my clothes off in the admitting room. They stand there looking at me. They see my scars and the rubber catheter tube going into my penis and they begin to think they have made a mistake. I can see the fear in their faces. They have just beaten up a half-dead man, and they know it. They are very careful now, almost polite. They help me put my clothes back on when the doctor is through with me. “I was in Vietnam too,” the red-headed man says, hesitating.

“We don't want the war either,” says the other cop. “No one wants war.”

They help me back into the chair and take me to another part of the prison building to be booked.

“What's your name?” the officer behind the desk says.

“Ron Kovic,” I say. “Occupation, Vietnam veteran against the war.”

“What?” he says sarcastically, looking down at me.

“I'm a Vietnam veteran against the war,” I almost shout back.

“You should have died over there,” he says. He turns to his assistant. “I'd like to take this guy and throw him off the roof.”

They fingerprint me and take my picture and put me in a cell. I have begun to wet my pants like a little baby. The tube has slipped out during my examination by the doctor. I try to fall asleep but even though I am exhausted, the anger is alive in me like a huge hot stone in my chest. I lean my head up against the wall and listen to the toilets flush again and again.

They lead me out of the cell the next morning around ten o'clock. I am to be moved to another part of the prison until someone comes to bail me out. They have arrested seventeen other vets at the demonstration. They take them out of the cells one by one, handcuffing and chaining them together in a long line like a chain gang. I look at their faces and wonder which one of them is like the guy with long red hair and the other cop who'd pretended to be veterans the day before. Which one is the informer now? I think to myself.

They tell me to move out of the way. They cannot fit me into the line with the others. “It's too difficult with that chair of yours,” one of the cops complains.

“Don't you want to put the cuffs on me again?” I say. “Don't you think I need leg chains like the others?”

He looks at me surprised, then turns away and screams, “Let's go!”

The veterans clank their chains against the cold cement floor as they file past me out of the cellblock. Seventeen of America's veterans dragging those chains, handcuffed together—America's children. I cry because I want to be walking with them and because I want so much to trust them. But after what has happened I don't know whether I will be able to trust anyone, even my closest friends now. What are they doing to me? I think. They have taken so much from me already and still they are not satisfied. What more will they take?

A
FTER A SPEECH
in a church in Compton I met a woman. I had the whole congregation in tears and a pretty woman in a long dress came up to me afterward and we started talking. We went outside and we kept talking until late that night. She gave me her phone number and told me she had two kids and if I wasn't doing anything the next week to drop by. She was a schoolteacher and her name was Helen. We called each other every day that week and one night I went over to her house. I kissed her in her driveway with the motor still running in my fancy Oldsmobile. It was the first time I had been close to a woman since Mexico. She called me the next day and told me she loved me. I thought it was pretty silly at first.

I went up to the mountains with a group of Quakers soon after that. I remember staying up all night at a house near their training school. It was a house that belonged to this crippled guy—I think he'd had polio. His wife had divorced him, but she was up there that weekend in his house with her boyfriend, making it on the couch. The guy in the wheelchair wasn't there, but even if he had been, they said he wouldn't have minded. I remember they gave me his room to stay in, and there were shelves in it with hundreds of books. I stayed awake all night and when I finally got up the next morning I threw up in the toilet bowl. I was thinking about the guy's wife on the couch with her boyfriend, and about Helen who said she loved me.

I called her up as soon as I got back. It was really nice to have someone love me, I said, and I listened to her tell it to me again. I went over to her house that night and slept with her in her bed. She had this little room that was near the kitchen and she had a photograph in it, a wedding photograph of herself and her ex–old man all dressed up in the finest things. She said he was a drifter but she still cared about him. He just wasn't responsible enough to take care of her and the two kids. I remember she played soft music on the radio. The whole thing gave me a funny empty feeling. I slept with her the second time just before I went back to New York. I told her I was leaving and that I would see her in a month or two. I didn't tell her it bothered me that she was calling me all the time now telling me she loved me. I said I'd had enough of California.

I remember freaking out a couple of times when I got home, crying in front of my mother, telling her about the babies I had killed. I thought I was losing my mind. The dead corporal from Georgia was finally catching up with me and hanging me in almost all my dreams. Every day I woke up with a pain in my chest. I felt scared and shaky. I broke down one night and called Helen. “I think I want to marry you,” I remember saying.

“Are you sure?” I heard her say over and over on the phone. “Are you sure you want to marry me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I love you baby and I want to marry you.”

Next thing I knew she was flying across the country with two screaming kids to meet my family.

I met her at the airport. She was wearing red tights and I remember she had cut her hair. I'd really liked her hair long but when I went to the airport her hair was short and the kids looked terrible too. I didn't know how to tell her about her hair.

I remember she wanted to go to church that day to say a few prayers for something or other. I drove her over there but I wouldn't go in. I sat in the car and turned up the radio. A song was playing called “Bye-Bye Miss American Pie” and I remember listening to it and feeling real sad inside, real low like I wanted to cry or kill someone.

She came back into the car and we drove all over the neighborhood. I kept stopping and introducing her to people I knew. “Helen and I are getting married,” I said. I even introduced her to Castiglia, who was visiting his folks that weekend, pushing away from him in the wheelchair after I told him I was going to marry her.

By the time we left Massapequa we were fighting about everything all the time and I was getting sick of the whole thing. She was always talking to me about going back to church and meeting married couples and building a strong family for the future. We hadn't even been able to sleep together much. I'd had to stay on the couch on the porch and she was down in Sue's room with the kids. My mother and dad never wanted a man and woman that weren't married sleeping together even if the woman was divorced and had two kids.

We tried living together for a while when we got back to California, first at my house and then at hers. I don't know why I ever did it or why I ever asked her to marry me, but back then it seemed really important to have someone like Helen to hold on to. I even ended up going down to the V.A. hospital in Long Beach and seeing a marriage counselor for paralyzed men. The counselor and I sat out in the sun a lot and fed birds and shouted at each other but it never worked. Every time I came home from the sessions I threw up and finally I couldn't even sleep near Helen anymore. I knew I had to be alone for a while. I found a small house on Hurricane Street in Santa Monica and moved into it.

W
HEN I FIRST MOVED
to Hurricane Street it was quiet. I wanted to get away not only from Helen but from everything that reminded me of the war. I was going to grow plants and cook my own food. I had a lot of dreams about how it was going to be. I even wanted to write a book. I bought an old rolltop desk and spent an afternoon with a couple of friends going to pick it up and moving it into the house.

It was a beautiful little house a block from the ocean—more a small neat shack tucked into an alleyway. The windows were wooden hurricane slats, which gave the place the appearance of always being ready for a hurricane or a big storm. There was a shower that had been adjusted for me so I could fit the wheelchair in comfortably, and I loved being so close to the ocean. I went out one afternoon and bought a big waterbed, the first one I'd ever had.

I never talked too much to my neighbors, except when I was emptying garbage or something. I used to sit at the window and stare at a dog that was always on the roof of the house in front of me. After the first couple of days I gave up cooking and started eating out at the Jack-in-the-Box hamburger stands. The food was awful, but it was better to be out in the car than stuck alone in the house all the time.

Sometimes I'd have terrible nightmares about the war. I'd wake up scared in my room in the middle of the night. There was no one to hold on to, just myself there inside my frozen body. I remember watching flowers bloom outside my window and feeling good when the ants would come into the house. Well, at least I've got some company, I thought.

I wrote a poem once at my rolltop desk. It was called “Hurricanes/in the eye of the hurricane.” I wrote about the loneliness and the silence of my house, how being there was like a sudden pause in the middle of a wild swirling storm. A lot of times I couldn't take it. I'd get into my car and drive as far and fast as I could. But after a while I learned to stay by myself for a long time.

The time since the war was passing so fast now and he wasn't in the hospital anymore and they weren't smiling down by his bedside and the priests weren't there and he wasn't in the streets speaking out against the men who had made all the terrible things that happened to him possible. They weren't cheering and clapping or even putting the handcuffs on him anymore. He wasn't in jail and in jail at least he knew there were other people around to talk to but now there was no one and all the cheering and all the clapping had stopped and now he was more alone than he had ever been in his life.

What kind of miserable life was this, no friends, no legs, people staring at him wherever he went. The depression sometimes was awesome, like he was drowning in it, and no matter how hard he tried he wasn't ever getting out. He had tried so hard for years to hold on. He had even sometimes invented things that weren't true, made believe so the feelings would go away. But now he wasn't making things up anymore, he was too tired to do that, in too much pain. Where were his legs that used to run? he thought.

He wanted people around him. He wanted someone to call him on the phone. He wanted just one friend he could talk to about the real things, the painful truths about his miserable existence that would make most people walk away from him—“Sorry I gotta run now. I'm late already.” Other people always seemed able to laugh and joke about the whole thing, but they weren't the one who was living in this angry numb corpse, they didn't have to wake up each morning and feel the dead weight of these legs and strain the yellow urine into the ugly rubber bag, they didn't have to put on the rubber gloves each morning over the bathroom bowl and dig into his rear end to clean the brown chunks of shit out. They lived very easy lives, why their lives were disgustingly easy compared to his and they acted sometimes like everything was equal and he was the same as them, but he knew they were lying and especially the women, when they lay with him and told him how much they loved his body, how it wasn't any different than any other man's, that they didn't care if his dick was numb and dead and he couldn't feel warm and good inside a woman ever again. He was a half-dead corpse and no one could tell him any different. They could use the fancy medical words like they had in the hospital but he knew who they had brought back with all their new helicopters and wonderful new ways of killing people, all that incredible advancement in technology. He would never have come back from any other war. But now here he was. He was back and dead and breathing. Oh Mom, oh Dad, somebody, Jesus, somebody please help me. No one to love him, no one to touch him the way he had been touched before the war. He was a little speck now, he was a tiny little dot and he had to do something fast because he felt himself getting smaller and smaller. He had to live again, feel again.