Born on the Fourth of July (14 page)

When we got to the memorial, I remember looking at Lincoln's face and reading the words carved on the walls in back of him. I felt certain that if he were alive he would be there with us.

I told Skip that I was never going to be the same. The demonstration had stirred something in my mind that would be there from now on. It was so very different from boot camp and fighting in the war. There was a togetherness, just as there had been in Vietnam, but it was a togetherness of a different kind of people and for a much different reason. In the war we were killing and maiming people. In Washington on that Saturday afternoon in May we were trying to heal them and set them free.

I
T WILL
be my turn to speak soon. They have put me up on the platform of this auditorium in this high school that is so much like the one I went to, in this town that is like the one I grew up in. I am looking at all the young faces. Kids. They were laughing, horsing around when they came in, just the way we used to. Now they are silent, looking at me and Bobby Muller, my friend from the V.A. hospital who is speaking to them from his wheelchair
.

It is like the day the marine recruiters came. I remember it like it was yesterday—their shiny shoes and their uniforms, their firm handshakes, all the dreams, the medals, the hills taken with Castiglia by my side his army-navy store canteen rattling, the movies the books the plastic guns, everything in 3-D and the explosive spiraling colors of a rainbow. Except this time, this time it is Bobby and me. 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? Maybe things would have been different. Maybe that's all it would have taken
.

Bobby is telling his story and I will tell mine. I am glad he has brought me here and that all of them are looking at us, seeing the war firsthand—the dead while still living, the living reminders, the two young men who had the shit shot out of them
.

I have never spoken before but it is time now. I am thinking about what I can tell them. I wheel myself to the center of the platform. I begin by telling them about the hospital
.

5

A
FTER THE SPEECH
in the high school I spent less and less time going to classes at the university. Suddenly school no longer seemed important. What I really wanted to do was to go on speaking out. Bobby and I made a couple of other speeches at high schools together and once I did one by myself at a university. It was November and turning cold. Ever since I'd been wounded, I'd hated the cold weather. Snow was like a jailer for me. It made it so hard for me to get out of the house, to move around. I felt I'd stayed in one place for a very long time—I'd never lived more than a few miles from my parents' house except for the years when I was in Vietnam. For a while I thought of taking another trip to Mexico, but then just before Christmas my friend Kenny came home from California and asked me if I wanted to drive back across with him and live out there. I jumped at the idea of going. California seemed like such a warm and beautiful place, another planet. I cleaned my whole apartment out in one Sunday afternoon and gave all the furniture I owned to Mom and Dad. My car was packed that night and the next morning Kenny and I were on the road.

Three days later we'd gotten all the way to Texas. It was New Year's Eve. We celebrated it in a bar in Longview shooting a game of pool. The next day we got up early and drove straight through to Las Cruces, New Mexico. I remember big bramble bushes blowing in front of the car and dust all over everything. I wanted to push straight on to L.A., but Kenny and I hadn't eaten more than a few sandwiches in the last few days and we needed a good night's sleep. We stopped at a motel overnight and had a big breakfast of hot coffee and scrambled eggs before we started driving again. Even Kenny got excited later that afternoon when we passed the Great Salt Lake. He took the car the rest of the way in and I sat by the open window watching the orange groves and green trees begin to appear as we came out of the desert. It's California, I kept saying to myself, it's California. It got dark just as we came into L.A. and the lights went on all over the sprawling city like flickering little candles. No matter what Kenny or anybody said to me, this was Paradise, and like the pioneers before me I was going to make it my home. We got to Heliotrope Avenue and parked the car in front of Kenny's house. We went into his tiny apartment, turned the air conditioner on and fell asleep exhausted.

We rented a larger apartment down by the ocean later that week, and after a while Kenny quit school. We hung out together all the time. It was so good to be with someone who'd known me all my life. Every day we went swimming with two girls who lived next door and Kenny bought himself a brand-new motorcycle. He strapped me on the back and took me riding on it the first day he brought it home.

I had been in California for about a month when one day there was a big photo on the front page of the L.A.
Times
—a group of vets had gone to Washington and thrown away their medals. It was one of the most moving antiwar demonstrations there had been. I would have given anything to have been there with them. I read about it sitting by the pool of the Santa Monica Bay Club, wearing a ridiculous Mickey Mouse shirt. Suddenly I knew my easy life could never be enough for me. The war had not ended. It was time for me to join forces with other vets.

I went home and called a couple of people I knew. One of them told me there was going to be a meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War that night in an apartment in L.A. I was still a bit unsure of myself but I couldn't wait to get into my car and drive over.

I remember how kind they were to me from the moment I arrived. When I got there, a bunch of vets were in front of the house waiting to carry me up the stairs in my chair. “Hi brother,” they said to me warmly. “Can we help you brother? Is there anything we can do?”

All of a sudden everything seemed to change—the loneliness seemed to vanish. I was surrounded by friends. They were the new veterans, the new soldiers with floppy bush hats and jungle uniforms right here on the streets of America. I began to feel closer to them than I ever had to the people at the university and at the hospital and all the people who had welcomed me back to Massapequa. It had a lot to do with what we had all been through. We could talk and laugh once again. We could be honest about the war and ourselves. Before each meeting there was the thumb-and-fist handshake—it meant you cared about your brother.

We were men who had gone to war. Each of us had his story to tell, his own nightmare. Each of us had been made cold by this thing. We wore ribbons and uniforms. We talked of death and atrocity to each other with unaccustomed gentleness.

I remember being very nervous and anxious at that first meeting. I told them, Give me a speech, give me a place to show this wheelchair. I really wanted to get going immediately. The brothers told me to calm down and not to worry, there would be plenty of chances to speak, it was time to get the organization together.

Afterward I went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and one of the guys came up to me and gave me a big hug. He held me for a long time and when he let go there were tears streaming down his face. “I love you, brother,” he said, wiping his eyes. And then he said, “I'm sorry, I'm really sorry I did that.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I love you too. Now when's my first speaking gig?”

They told me to go to a rally in Pasadena the next day. I would be speaking at noon with a couple of other people.

The VVAW sent me to do a lot of speeches after that and soon I was on television all the time. On one network there was a big argument with a producer who didn't want a disfigured veteran on her show. “We've seen enough of that,” she told me over the phone. “Every night for the last couple of years people have seen it on the six o'clock news and they're tired of it.” She tried to be nice and told me that she had read a book called
Johnny Got His Gun
, so she knew what I was all about, but she didn't think it would be tasteful at all to let the people of L.A. see a crippled kid on a Sunday morning.

I was at a rally a few weeks later when Donald Sutherland began to read the last couple of pages of the book the woman had talked to me about, the one about the kid in World War I who gets blown to hell like myself and loses almost everything, he's just a hulk, a slab of meat. Sutherland began to read the passage and something I will never forget swept over me. It was as if someone was speaking for everything I ever went through in the hospital. It was as if the book was speaking about me, my wound and the hell it had been coming back and learning to live with it. I began to shake and I remember there were tears in my eyes. Just before Sutherland was finished I found myself pushing my chair toward the stage and telling them that I wanted to be lifted up the steps. “I have a poem,” I told them. “I have a poem I wrote about the vets who threw their medals away and I want to read it.”

They broke all the rules and hoisted my chair up on the stage. I went up to the microphone and started reading. The crowd cheered when I was finished and again I had tears in my eyes. I said a couple of words I can't remember.

For the next couple of weeks the phone wouldn't stop ringing. There were all sorts of clubs and schools wanting to hear me speak. I wrote the names and addresses down on pieces of paper and all over the walls of the apartment.

I went totally into speaking out against the war after that. I went into it the same way I'd gone into everything else I'd wanted to do in my life—the way I'd gone into pole vaulting or baseball or the marines. But this was something that meant much more than being an athlete or a marine. I could see that this thing—this body I had trained so hard to be strong and quick, this body I now dragged around with me like an empty corpse—was to mean much more than I had ever realized. Much more than I'd known the night I cried into my pillow in Massapequa because my youth had been desecrated, my physical humanity defiled. I think I honestly believed that if only I could speak out to enough people I could stop the war myself. I honestly believed people would listen to me because of who I was, a wounded American veteran. They would have to listen. Every chance I had to get my broken body on the tube or in front of an audience I went hog wild. Yes, let them get a look at me. Let them be reminded of what they'd done when they'd sent my generation off to war. One look would be enough—worth more than a thousand speeches. But if they wanted speeches I could give them speeches too. There was no end to what I had to tell them.

“I'm the example of the war,” I would say. “Look at me. Do you want your sons to look like this? Do you want to put on the uniform and come home like me?” Some people could not believe the conditions I told them about in the hospitals. Others could not believe anything at all. After one of the TV shows a cameraman called me a commie traitor to my face. He was pushing me down the studio steps in my chair and I wondered if he was going to drop me. I kept receiving letters from people calling me names and telling me what they would do if I didn't stop aiding the enemy.

The speaking went on and on, and so did the war, and after a while it all began to seem endless. My friends told me I was starting to sound like a broken record. Even Kenny got disgusted with my new role of activist and antiwar veteran and left for New York. I went a little crazy staying alone in the apartment, answering the phone that never stopped ringing and scrawling more names all over the walls. One night I tore the place apart.

I thought of stopping but I was afraid of the loneliness. The speaking had brought back everything—the hospital, Vietnam. Each time I spoke about an experience it was just like reliving it. And there were some things I never talked about—like the corporal from Georgia and the ambush in the village and the dead children lying on the ground.

I can't remember one time when I even came close to telling anyone exactly what had happened over there. Back then it was still deep inside of me and I shared it with no one—not even the men I had come to know as my brothers.

T
HE NOON TRAFFIC
is moving along Wilshire Boulevard just as if the line of veterans and ordinary citizens picketing Nixon's campaign headquarters were not there. “Join us!” we cry. “Stop the war!” Heavy curtains are drawn over the windows of the campaign headquarters where volunteers are working for the reelection of the president. We have been there for two days and not one of the volunteers has ever looked out. The people in their cars pass us quickly, intent on their steering wheels. Who are these people going to work, going to lunch, as if nothing is more important than that? “Here!” I scream. “Look at the war!” They never so much as turn their heads. I wheel out into the traffic, pushing myself in front of cars. “Take a good look at the war!” I cry, racing with my wheelchair in front of a truck. I do not think—or even care—about getting killed. I am screaming at them to look at me. Up on the rooftop of the headquarters the hidden police cameras are taking pictures, and I know that all by myself I have at least succeeded in stopping traffic.

One by one the other demonstrators are breaking from the line. They sit down among the cars, banging their picket sticks and yelling, their voices hoarse—“One, two, three, four. We don't want your fucking war”—tying up the traffic for blocks. We have taken the streets. People are honking their horns now, workers and secretaries hanging out their windows, busdrivers shouting their approval. Some of the demonstrators are dancing and I grab both wheels of my chair, then let go with one hand and raise my middle finger in the air as a salute to the cops and the FBI. I spin on my two wheels in front of everyone, as the shouting goes on for the war to end, for the killing to be stopped forever. I keep doing my wheelies as the police look on with envy and utter contempt, frozen on their side of the street. They seem torn between wanting to kill us and wanting to tear off their uniforms and throw away their guns. “Come join us!” we shout to them, but they do not take us up on our invitation.