Born on the Fourth of July (16 page)

He had been born on the Fourth of July, he had been their Yankee Doodle Dandy, their all-American boy. He had given them almost his whole being in the war and now, after all that, they weren't satisfied with three-quarters being gone, they wanted to take the rest of him. It was crazy but he knew that's what they wanted. They wanted his head and his mind, the numb legs and the wheelchair, they wanted everything. It had all been one big dirty trick and he didn't know what to think anymore. All he had tried to do was tell the truth about the war. But now he just wanted it to be quiet, to be where they weren't cursing at him and beating him and jailing him, lying and calling him a traitor. He had never been anything but a thing to them, a thing to put a uniform on and train to kill, a young thing to run through the meatgrinder, a cheap small nothing thing to make mincemeat out of.

And somewhere along the way he had forgotten to be polite anymore, and how to be a nice person. Somewhere through it all they had taken even that and he wanted it back so much, so very desperately, he would give almost anything to be able to be kind to people again, but the big machine, the one that had given him the number and the rifle, had sucked it out of him forever. They had made him confused and uncertain and blind with hate. They wanted to make him hide like he was hiding now. How many more, he thought, how many more like him were out there hiding on a thousand other Hurricane Streets? He was a living reminder of something terrible and awful. No matter what they said to him, no matter how much they tried to twist and bend things, he held on to what he knew and all the terrible things he had seen and done for them. They had buried the corporal and the children he had killed in the ground, but he was still sitting and breathing in his wheelchair, and now the last thing he could do for them if he wasn't going to die was to disappear.

He knew too much about them. He knew, goddamn it, like no one else would ever know. They were small men with small ideas, gamblers and hustlers who had gambled with his life and hustled him off to the war. They were smooth talkers, men who wore suits and smiled and were polite, men who wore watches and sat behind big desks sticking pins in maps in rooms he had never seen, men who had long-winded telephone conversations and went home to their wives and children. They were like the guy on television who hid the little pea under the three cups, moving them back and forth, back and forth, until you got real confused and didn't know where the hell anything was. They had never seen blood and guts and heads and arms. They had never picked up the shattered legs of children and watched the blood drip into the sand below their feet. It was they who were the little dots, the small cheap things, not him and the others they had sent to do their killing.

He had to rise up out of this deep dark prison. He had to come back. He knew the power he had. Maybe he had forgotten it for a while but it was still there and he could feel it growing in his mind, bigger and bigger—the power to make people remember, to make them as angry as he was every day of his life, every moment of his existence. He would come back very soon and he would make it like all the stories of the baseball players he had read when he was a kid.
“He's picking up the ball. He's running across the field. Kovic is making a terrific comeback, folks! A terrific comeback.
…”

6

E
VERY ONCE
in a while as I drive the Oldsmobile down the long, hot Texas highway, I look into the dust-covered rearview mirror and see the convoy behind me, stretching back like a gigantic snake so far I cannot even tell where it ends—cars and buses, trucks and jeeps, painted with flowers and peace signs, a strange caravan of young men wearing war ribbons on torn utility jackets and carrying plastic guns. It is August of 1972 and we have come nearly two thousand miles with another thousand still ahead of us before we reach Miami. We have shared food and cans of Coke. We have driven like madmen across the desert and lain down in the sand in our sleeping bags. We have played and laughed around campfires. It is our last patrol together, and I know I will remember it as long as I live. It is a historic event like the Bonus March of thousands of veterans upon the Capitol in the thirties. And now it is we who are marching, the boys of the fifties. We are going to the Republican National Convention to reclaim America and a bit of ourselves. It is war and we are soldiers again, as tight as we have ever been, a whole lost generation of dope-smoking kids in worn jungle boots coming from all over the country to tell Nixon a thing or two. We know we are fighting the real enemies this time—the ones who have made profit off our very lives. We have lain all night in the rain in ambush together. We have burned anthills with kerosene and stalked through Sally's Woods with plastic machine guns, shooting people out of trees. We have been a generation of violence and madness, of dead Indians and drunken cowboys, of iron pipes full of matchheads.

There is a tremendous downpour just outside of Houston that almost tears the windshield wipers off the car. And after the rain there is one of the most beautiful rainbows I have ever seen, and then a second rainbow appears—a magnificent double rainbow above our heads. I am certain I want to be alive forever. I know that no matter what has happened the world is a beautiful place, and I am here with my brothers.

We drive into Louisiana through the little towns, past waving schoolchildren and smiling gas-station attendants flashing the peace sign and faces looking curiously at us from windows, not angry just curious and friendly, surprisingly friendly—the ordinary working people who want the war to end too, the glory John Wayne war. But I am scared in Louisiana. Like a lot of the other guys I think the KKK is all over the place and someone says there is no difference between the Klan and the cops, they are both the same thing.

He probably hated niggers, the corporal from Georgia.
All through the South, these roads, the memories are talking.

He probably hated niggers. Pushing shoving, moving grooving, sliding diving into the coffin, into the soft earth of Georgia. Brought him back in and some guys sent him down the river where all of the dead went to, all the nineteen-year-old corpses who had to be fixed up, shot full of stuff and preserved real good so they could be packaged like meat in the deli to be sent back home where their mothers and their sisters and their fathers and their wives could stand and pray and talk about what they were like when they were alive. She'd probably remember better than most of them what it was like to hold his hand, walk with him, kiss him on his soft lips that were now cold and dead, planted six feet in the Georgia mud. Nothing will bring him back, nothing on earth will bring him back. The corporal's dead and he's dead because of me. Oh god, oh Jesus, I want to cry, I want to scream, I want him to be alive again, I want him to be alive again I want him to be alive again oh god oh Jesus oh god o god ogod help me, make him feel, bring him back, bring him back wailing and talking, breathing and laughing again. Who who who who who is he? Now he's finished in the earth, in the ground. Try not to think about it, the thought, the dead thought. Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn fuckin' southern bigot. They were all that way in boot camp. Yes yes I remember. I want school and sitting on the fence and where's Mom and the heater, Richie and me stringing high-tension stickballs, eggballs, baseballs, r r r r r r r run the bases to Castiglia's basement. I want out, I want out, I want out mom mom mom mom mom mom. Take a drag of the cigarette Yes thank you. Can't move, can't you see Richie, can't move, no more posters, teacher's dirty looks, no more warm good red checkered table … let me out let me out.

And the last Patrol moved into the silence and darkness of Louisiana, the long snake, long line of us packed together, moving slower and slower, following the cops under the swaying beautiful trees, the warm muggy night, so warm and muggy and nice and getting ready to rain. Okay okay everybody! Someone screaming into a bullhorn and we are easing into the campsite, circling around like Gabby Hayes and the wagon trains, like a big 360 in the Nam. People crawling into their sleeping bags all over the tall swampy grass, crawling in and pulling them up over their heads dreaming of illumination canisters, or popping red flares in the DMZ, they make love like morphine, rolling and driving together like tomorrow will never come.
What gave them the right to beat me, the war, the scar, the scar in the chair, in the road, for whose trophy case this time
Mr.
President?

There is a bridge that goes into Miami and we moved over it like a returning army, like a returning army we moved together slowly across the bridge, our horns blasting, our flags waving, shouting into the wind that blew from the ocean. Once we crossed the bridge we headed through the city, headlights burning on all the cars and trucks. A quick decision was made and we went through every red light and stop sign in the town. I remember hanging out of the Oldsmobile with the big upside-down flag flapping, screaming and shouting as we came nearer and nearer to Flamingo Park. This was the end of the journey and as we approached the park we were beseiged by hundreds and hundreds of well-wishers yelling and cheering and clapping the arrival of the veterans. People were dancing in the streets, playing flutes, running up to us, Yippies and Zippies shoving handfuls of joints into our laps and all the brothers were climbing out of their cars hugging and jumping on top of each other, singing and screaming and carrying on like we had just won the war.

A couple of vets from New York who knew me ran up and hugged me, welcoming me to the enormous tent city. “Yeah man,” one of them said, “I read about you in New York when they beat you up. Good to see you down here, good to have you down.” I found a place to put my rubber mattress and plant my upside-down American flag. I sat down and looked at all the wild activity around me. Later in the afternoon one of the first reporters came by. “I've got a few things to say,” I told her, and we talked for about two hours until she had to go. It got dark and all of us went to sleep. The Yippies and the Zippies were still smoking dope and carrying on in a wild pot party but the Last Patrol was tired. It had been a long journey across America.

I
T WAS THE NIGHT
of Nixon's acceptance speech and now I was on my own, deep in his territory, all alone in my wheelchair in a sweat-soaked marine utility jacket covered with medals from the war. A TV producer I knew from the Coast had gotten me past the guards at the entrance with his press pass. My eyes were still smarting from teargas. Outside the chain metal fence around the Convention Center my friends were being clubbed and arrested, herded into wagons. The crowds were thick all around me, people dressed as if they were going to a banquet, men in expensive summer suits and women in light elegant dresses. Every once in a while someone would look at me as if I didn't belong there. But I had come almost three thousand miles for this meeting with the president and nothing was going to prevent it from taking place.

I worked my way slowly and carefully into the huge hall, moving down one of the side aisles. “Excuse me, excuse me,” I said to delegates as I pushed past them farther and farther to the front of the hall toward the speakers' podium.

I had gotten only halfway toward where I wanted to be when I was stopped by one of the convention security marshals. “Where are you going?” he said. He grabbed hold of the back of my chair. I made believe I hadn't heard him and kept turning my wheels, but his grip on the chair was too tight and now two other security men had joined him.

“What's the matter?” I said. “Can't a disabled veteran who fought for his country sit up front?”

The three men looked at each other for a moment and one of them said, “I'm afraid not. You're not allowed up front with the delegates.” I had gotten as far I had on sheer bluff alone and now they were telling me I could go no farther. “You'll have to go to the back of the convention hall, son. Let's go,” said the guard who was holding my chair.

In a move of desperation I swung around facing all three of them, shouting as loud as I could so Walter Cronkite and the CBS camera crew that was just above me could hear me and maybe even focus their cameras in for the six o'clock news. “I'm a Vietnam veteran and I fought in the war! Did you fight in the war?”

One of the guards looked away.

“Yeah, that's what I thought,” I said. “I bet none of you fought in the war and you guys are trying to throw me out of the convention. I've got just as much right to be up front here as any of these delegates. I fought for that right and I was born on the Fourth of July.”

I was really shouting now and another officer came over. I think he might have been in charge of the hall. He told me I could stay where I was if I was quiet and didn't move up any farther. I agreed with the compromise. I locked my brakes and looked for other veterans in the tremendous crowd. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who had made it in.

People had begun to sit down all around me. They all had Four More Years buttons and I was surprised to see how many of them were young. I began speaking to them, telling them about the Last Patrol and why veterans from all over the United States had taken the time and effort to travel thousands of miles to the Republican National Convention. “I'm a disabled veteran!” I shouted. “I served two tours of duty in Vietnam and while on my second tour of duty up in the DMZ I was wounded and paralyzed from the chest down.” I told them I would be that way for the rest of my life. Then I began to talk about the hospitals and how they treated the returning veterans like animals, how I, many nights in the Bronx, had lain in my own shit for hours waiting for an aide. “And they never come,” I said. “They never come because that man that's going to accept the nomination tonight has been lying to all of us and spending the money on war that should be spent on healing and helping the wounded. That's the biggest lie and hypocrisy of all—that we had to go over there and fight and get crippled and come home to a government and leaders who could care less about the same boys they sent over.”