Born on the Fourth of July (17 page)

I kept shouting and speaking, looking for some kind of reaction from the crowd. No one seemed to want to even look at me.

“Is it too real for you to look at? Is this wheelchair too much for you to take? The man who will accept the nomination tonight is a liar!” I shouted again and again, until finally one of the security men came back and told me to be quiet or they would have to take me to the back of the hall.

I told him that if they tried to move me or touch my chair there would be a fight and hell to pay right there in front of Walter Cronkite and the national television networks. I told him if he wanted to wrestle me and beat me on the floor of the convention hall in front of all those cameras he could.

By then a couple of newsmen, including Roger Mudd from CBS, had worked their way through the security barricades and begun to ask me questions.

“Why are you here tonight?” Roger Mudd asked me. “But don't start talking until I get the camera here,” he shouted.

It was too good to be true. In a few seconds Roger Mudd and I would be going on live all over the country. I would be doing what I had come here for, showing the whole nation what the war was all about. The camera began to roll, and I began to explain why I and the others had come, that the war was wrong and it had to stop immediately. “I'm a Vietnam veteran,” I said. “I gave America my all and the leaders of this government threw me and the others away to rot in their V.A. hospitals. What's happening in Vietnam is a crime against humanity, and I just want the American people to know that we have come all the way across this country, sleeping on the ground and in the rain, to let the American people see for themselves the men who fought their war and have come to oppose it. If you can't believe the veteran who fought the war and was wounded in the war, who can you believe?”

“Thank you,” said Roger Mudd, visibly moved by what I had said. “This is Roger Mudd,” he said, “down on the convention floor with Ron Kovic, a disabled veteran protesting President Nixon's policy in Vietnam.”

The security agents were frantically trying to stop other cameras from getting through and later I was to learn that Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler had almost flipped out when he heard Mudd had interviewed me and it had gone nationwide for almost two minutes.

By this time a few other veterans had managed to get into the hall. One of them came to tell me that my old friend Bobby Muller and Bill Wieman, a double amputee, had gotten passes from Congressman McCloskey and had managed to get into the center aisle in direct line with the podium almost two hundred feet back. “Get me up there quick,” I said. He turned me around and wheeled me toward the back past the smiling security officers who must have thought I was leaving. What are you smiling at? I thought to myself. I'm just warming up.

“There, up there,” the vet said, pointing to the front of the aisle where Bobby and Bill were sitting in their wheelchairs.

“Where you been?” Wieman said to me, as I shook their hands.

“I've been over there,” I said, pointing to the other aisle. “I wanted to get all the way to the front, but this place is great.”

We lined ourselves up together, wheelchair to wheelchair, facing the platform where Nixon would speak. They had brought in a couple of Stop the War signs, and I grabbed one and held it above my head.

There was an announcement at the podium and then a tremendous roar. It was the vice president of the United States, Spiro T. Agnew. The delegates stood chanting and shaking their clasped hands over their heads, stamping their feet up and down until it seemed as though the whole convention hall was going to explode. “Four more years,” the crowd shouted. “Four more years, four more years.”

Agnew stood rigid at attention, accepting the tumultuous applause. Finally he raised both of his palms, signaling them all to stop so he could give his speech. Every time he spoke a few words, he was interrupted by the wild crowd, wild and enthusiastic. “Agnew in 'seventy-six!” a fat woman yelled next to me. “Agnew in 'seventy-six!”

I pulled myself up onto the siderail of my wheelchair and sat holding my sign as high as I could. I wanted everyone in the hall to be able to see it. A man came up suddenly from my blind side. Before I knew what hit me he had grabbed my sign and torn it into shreds in front of me. “You lousy commie sonofabitch!” he shouted.

Now there was only one sign left and we decided to hold on to it until it was Nixon's turn to speak. A few seconds before he was introduced, security agents began to move in all around us. We must have been an ugly sight to the National Republican Party as we sat there in perfect view of all the national networks that were perched above us.

Suddenly a roar went up in the convention hall, louder than anything I had ever heard in my life. It started off as a rumble, then gained in intensity until it sounded like a tremendous thunderbolt. “Four more years, four more years,” the crowd roared over and over again. The fat woman next to me was jumping up and down and dancing in the aisle. It was the greatest ovation the president of the United States had ever received and he loved it. I held the sides of my wheelchair to keep my hands from shaking. After what seemed forever, the roar finally began to die down.

This was the moment I had come three thousand miles for, this was it, all the pain and the rage, all the trials and the death of the war and what had been done to me and a generation of Americans by all the men who had lied to us and tricked us, by the man who stood before us in the convention hall that night, while men who had fought for their country were being gassed and beaten in the street outside the hall. I thought of Bobby who sat next to me and the months we had spent in the hospital in the Bronx. It was all hitting me at once, all those years, all that destruction, all that sorrow.

President Nixon began to speak and all three of us took a deep breath and shouted at the top of our lungs, “Stop the bombing, stop the war, stop the bombing, stop the war,” as loud and as hard as we could, looking directly at Nixon. The security agents immediately threw up their arms, trying to hide us from the cameras and the president. “Stop the bombing, stop the bombing,” I screamed. For an instant Cronkite looked down, then turned his head away. They're not going to show it, I thought. They're going to try and hide us like they did in the hospitals. Hundreds of people around us began to clap and shout “Four more years,” trying to drown out our protest. They all seemed very angry and shouted at us to stop. We continued shouting, interrupting Nixon again and again until Secret Service agents grabbed our chairs from behind and began pulling us backward as fast as they could out of the convention hall. “Take it easy,” Bobby said to me. “Don't fight back.”

I wanted to take a swing and fight right there in the middle of the convention hall in front of the president and the whole country. “So this is how they treat their wounded veterans!” I screamed.

A short guy with a big Four More Years button ran up to me and spat in my face. “Traitor!” he screamed, as he was yanked back by police. Pandemonium was breaking out all around us and the Secret Service men kept pulling us out backward.

“I served two tours of duty in Vietnam!” I screamed to one newsman. “I gave three-quarters of my body for America. And what do I get? Spit in the face!” I kept screaming until we hit the side entrance where the agents pushed us outside and shut the doors, locking them with chains and padlocks so reporters wouldn't be able to follow us out for interviews.

All three of us sat holding on to each other shaking. We had done it. It had been the biggest moment of our lives, we had shouted down the president of the United States and disrupted his acceptance speech. What more was there left to do but go home?

I sat in my chair still shaking and began to cry.

7

A
LL HIS LIFE
he'd wanted to be a winner. It was always so important to win, to be the very best. He thought back to high school and the wrestling team and out on Lee Place and Hamilton Avenue when he and the rest of the boys had played stickball or football. He thought back to that and remembered how hard he'd tried to win even in those simple games.

But now it all seemed different. All the hopes about being the best marine, winning all those medals. They all seemed crushed now, they were gone forever. Like the man he had just killed with one shot, all these things had disappeared and he knew, he was very certain, they would never come back again. It had been so simple when he was back on the block with Richie or running down to the deli to pick up a pack of Topps baseball cards, even working in the food store that summer before he went to the war now seemed like a real nice thing. It seemed like so much nicer a thing than what was happening around him now, all the faces, the torn green fatigues, and just below his foot was the guy's head with a gaping hole through his throat.

The Amtrac was heading back to the thick barbed wire where the battalion lived and everyone around him was quiet. There was no question in his mind they all knew what had happened—that he had just pulled the little metal trigger and put a slug through the corporal's neck.

Inside he felt everything sort of squeezing in on him. His hands kept rubbing up and down his leg. He was very nervous and his finger, the one that pulled the trigger, was sort of scratching his leg now.

Later, when they got back to the battalion area, he gave a quick report to a young lieutenant in the major's bunker. “They were attacking,” he said, looking at the lieutenant's face, “and we moved backward.”

“You retreated,” the lieutenant said.

“Yes, we retreated and he got shot. He lived a little while but then he died. He died there in the sand and we called for help. And then we put him in the Amtrac. He must have run away when they started firing. It was dark and I couldn't tell.”

“Okay,” said the young-looking lieutenant. “Come back again in the morning and we can go over it again. Too bad about …” he said.

“Yeah,” he said.

He was almost crying now as he turned and walked out of the big command bunker. There was sand all over the place outside and a cold monsoon wind was blowing. He looked out into the darkness and heard the waves of the China Sea breaking softly far away.

There was a path made of wooden ammo casings that led back to his tent. He walked on it like a man on a tightrope, it was so dark and so very hard to see. A couple of times he stumbled on the wooden boxes. It was quiet as he opened the tent flap, as quiet and dark as it had been outside the major's bunker. He dragged in carrying his rifle in one hand and the map case in the other. They were all asleep, all curled up on their cots, inside their mosquito nets. He walked up to his rack and sat down, his head sinking down to the floor. Panic was still rushing through him like a wild train, his heart still raced through his chest as he saw over and over again the kid from Georgia running toward him and the crack of his rifle killing him dead.

I killed him, he kept repeating over and over to himself.

He's dead, he thought.

Gripping his rifle, holding the trigger, he went through the whole thing again and again, tapping, touching the trigger lightly each time he saw the corporal from Georgia running toward him just as he had out there in the sand when everything seemed so crazy and frightening. Each time he felt his heart racing as the three cracks went off and the dark figure slumped to the sand in front of him.

“He's dead—go get him!” someone was yelling to his right. “Go get him he's hit!” Someone was running now, running to the body and they were pulling the guy in. They were bringing him back to the trench where they all lay scared and shivering.

“Doc—Doc—where's the corpsman!” somebody was yelling.

“Hey Doc, hurry up!” Then somebody said it. Somebody shouted real loud, “It's corporal. They got corporal …”

“He's dead,” somebody said. “He's gone.”

Slowly he turned the rifle around and pointed the barrel toward his head. Oh Jesus God almighty, he thought.
Why?
Why? Why? He began to cry slowly at first.
Why?
I'm going to kill myself, he thought. I'm going to pull this trigger. He was going mad. One minute he wanted to pull the trigger and the next he was feeling the strange power of a man who had just killed someone.

He laid the weapon down by the side of his rack and crawled in with his clothing still on. I killed him, he kept thinking, and when I wake up tomorrow, he thought, when I wake up tomorrow it will still be the same. He wanted to run and hide. He felt like he was in boot camp again and there was no escape, no way off the island. He would wake up with the rest of them the next day. He would get up and wash outside the tent in his tin dish, he would shave and go to chow. But everything would not be all right, he thought, nothing would be all right at all. It was starting to be very different now, very different from what he had ever thought possible.

He opened his eyes slowly as the light came into the tent like a bright triangle. They were all starting to stir, the other men, starting to get up. And then he remembered again what had happened. He hadn't killed any Communist, he thought, he hadn't killed any Communist. Panic swept through his body. In some wild and crazy moment the night before he had pulled the trigger and killed one of his own people.

He tried to slow everything down. He had to think of it as an accident. A lot of guys were firing their guns, there was so much noise and confusion going on. And maybe, he tried real hard to think, maybe he didn't kill the corporal at all, maybe it was someone else. Didn't everyone else start firing after his first three shots? Didn't they all start screaming and shooting after that? Yes, he thought, that's exactly what happened. They were all firing too, he thought. I wasn't the only one. It could have been any of them. Any of them could have put the slug through the corporal's neck. Maybe it was the Communists who killed him. Maybe. But that was awfully hard to believe, that was even harder now to believe than the other men shooting the corporal. Something had gone wrong, something crazy had happened out there and he didn't want to think about it. He was getting tired of turning it over in his mind, over and over again. He was getting real tired of the whole thing. It was all playing so fast and so hard. It all hurt too much. It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. He wanted to forget it, but it wouldn't stop.