There are very few, if any, positive takeaways from America’s harrowing war in Vietnam. There are also few honest chronicles that made the atrocities from that insidious venture known to the world. Ron Kovic, who emerged from the Vietnam War severely wounded and distraught, became one of its most well known and celebrated truth tellers. Kovic has made his transformative experience accessible and comprehensible since 1976, beginning with his best-selling memoir, “Born on the Fourth of July,” adapted into a film directed by Oliver Stone. “Hurricane Street” followed, dealing with Kovic’s activism in leading a nationwide movement to organize the American Veterans Movement in 1974 and improve the deplorable conditions in VA hospitals, in which he spent much time.
Kovic now ends his trilogy by detailing his metamorphosis as a young, naive, patriotic soldier to a disabled yet politically enlightened veteran. “A Dangerous Country: An American Elegy” traces Kovic’s journey that continues to leave in print an indelible mark on audiences worldwide. His experience serving two tours in Vietnam, leaving him paralyzed from his chest down, lays the context for this book’s intimate account of survival, both on the battlefield and back in society.
Below are excerpts from Kovic’s new book, which begins with entries from his diary written to “Dear Joe,” in place of Dear Diary to honor a friend and fellow U.S. marine. (Any errors in the diary entries are from the original diary).
By Ron Kovic / A Dangerous Country: An American Elegy
December 7, 1967
Dear Joey,
Had a good night’s sleep last night, feel real good. When we brought the 2 suspects in yesterday, the men cheered us. Something I really think we didn’t deserve. (They’re only suspects.) The scouts are really beginning to get a good name around here, Lt Wally called us outstanding and said it was a pleasure working with us. I was on my knees praying to God this morning, thanking him for all he has done for the team and asking him for guidance and courage in the weeks ahead. Blessed be the Lord, Jesus Christ—killed one VC tonight. Civilians got in the way. A 7-year-old’s foot shot off, a man wounded through the legs, another boy shot up badly, Lord have mercy.
War stinks, it’s lousy, I want out, I’ve had enough.
Ron
December 8, 1967
Dear Joe,
Last night was a nightmare. Our patrol ran into 10 men inside a hut. We set up on line then popped a flare. Orders were not to fire until Lt Blair gave the word. Someone fired on the end. Killer team was sent out with me. I ran into the hut to find a man shot through his legs and another lying in the back with his head blown off from the eyes up with his brains hanging out. Another young boy was shot up and his foot was hanging off by a thread. It was a horrible sight. Some of my men cried, “God have mercy, God forgive us!” I bandaged up one man and helped the others. There was blood all over my hands and a dead man right next to me. It seemed a hundred years before the choppers came and took the wounded out. It rained all night and we ended up going back out on patrol. I was numb with despair and disgust.
I hate this damn war. I’m sick and tired of it.
Ron
The Sea Lodge
It is early 1982 and I am in my room at the Sea Lodge in Venice, California, several blocks up from the beach. I lie on my bed staring out the sliding glass window of my third-floor room and down into the parking lot of the Baja Cantina. It is sometime in the late afternoon and I have been writing all day. I write with a terrible fury, as if I cannot get the words down fast enough, as if each second matters and if I don’t hurry up I might suddenly die before I’m able to say all I have to say.
I am completely and totally dedicated to my project. It is all I do, with the exception of taking breaks for lunch and dinner and occasional strolls along the Ocean Front Walk in my wheelchair. When I’m not writing or talking into my tape recorder here on my bed at the Sea Lodge, I am reading aloud to my friend Pat. Sometimes my voice grows hoarse and Pat pleads for me to stop: “Ronnie, you’ve got to rest. Let’s get out of here for a while. You’ve got to take a break!” Sometimes it takes hours for me to come down from all the intense work I’m doing.
I don’t remember ever working harder in my life. And it goes on like this for months, seven days a week, fourteen, sixteen hours a day. The manuscript keeps growing, it’s almost three feet high by mid-April, driven by something I can only now begin to understand.
The Sea Lodge is where I can finally put all these pieces together, all these scraps of notes that I have saved, every word that I have written in all the hotel and motel rooms, all these hundreds of manuscript pages stuffed into that traveling bag, always running from myself, the anxiety attacks, the nightmares, the speeding cabs and roaring jets in half a dozen American cities, all over Europe and in Jacques’s apartment in Paris, and even on the Concorde on the way back to the States. I am determined to overcome, to rise above everything I’ve been through—and whatever the cost, I feel it is worth it, a chance to redeem myself, a stream of consciousness, an uninterrupted thousand-page monologue speaking to the man I killed in the war.
It is very difficult writing the opening section. The words do not come easily. I feel my pulse quicken, my heart beating faster and faster. There is still a part of me resisting writing this material, a voice screaming inside of me to stop, yet I decide to continue on, determined to complete the book.
October 15, 1967. That is the night that it happened, a night that I will never forget, a night that will haunt me for as long as I live. I was twenty-one and you were nineteen. I was your sergeant, your squad leader, the man who was supposed to lead you, to protect you. I was responsible for your life and all the other lives in the platoon, but I failed you that night. I failed you and nothing on earth, no God, no prayer or plea, no matter how beseeching, will ever bring you back.
The entire novel, titled An American Elegy, will be set in the graveyard of the marine I killed in Vietnam. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, it will all occur in one afternoon—but it will be my confession, the story of what happened that night and all the years that followed . . .
I think of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” a poem sent to me anonymously not long after I returned home from Vietnam, leaving me shaken. Who could have sent that poem—one of the men from my platoon, someone from Georgia who attended your funeral? Your mother, your father? Who would do such a thing, and why?
I think about how your mother and father must still come to stand before your grave, their son, their boy, killed in Vietnam at nineteen. Do they know I was the one who killed you, that I was the one who pulled the trigger that night? They must know by now. I’m sure they know. They have probably known all these years, but still they say nothing?
Am I crazy? How much more am I going to let myself suffer? Am I robbing from the crypt? Am I stealing from the dead? When will I stop exploiting your death? When will I decide to live in the here and now? When will I let you rest?
Am I doing what I have heard others sometimes do when they visit the site of the deceased, speaking to the dead as if they are still alive and can hear what is being said? Ever since I came home from the war, I’ve had a recurring nightmare that I visit the graveyard where you are buried. In every nightmare I sit before your grave pleading with you to forgive me. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I say, tears streaming down my face, begging for your forgiveness, telling you that I made a terrible mistake and that in a moment of panic and doubt I mistook you for the enemy.
That night keeps coming back. I cannot forget what happened. It pursues me and haunts me, that terrible night. I ran from your death deeply ashamed at what I had done. There is so much guilt, so much pain. I hide behind anything that will keep you and that night away from me, but you will not leave me; even in death you follow me wherever I go.
Sometimes I hear your voice screaming inside of me; my chest tightens and it becomes difficult to breathe. Even writing it down on paper or talking it into the tape recorder is a stressful and frightening experience.
Locked Steel Doors and Wire Windows
As I looked at all the broken men around me, I wondered what the presidents would have thought if they were still alive and could walk into this place. Here’s your New Frontier, Mr. President, impaled on all those hopes and dreams, pissing in their bedsheets, crying out in a grief they cannot express. Here is your war on Communism and crusade against the Reds. Here’s your Great Society in ashes. Here’s your “noble victory” and “honorable peace,” lost in a lithium haze, staggering down the hall on Thorazine. “Yet, were they not blind too?” whispers a sightless man alone in his room.
Is it that we are the prisoners inside this place or are we the free ones, the few human beings who have the courage to admit our pain, to confess our sorrow, the few who have been willing to cry out, like Eddie, who continues to weep unashamedly as he stares through the wire windows of the psychiatric ward’s steel door. Perhaps we are not the crazy ones, I think, the ones to fear. Perhaps we are the fortunate ones, being protected here from the real danger out there, and this place is but a brief respite from all that madness.
Everyone knows what’s going on here. Nobody says it openly, none of the nurses or doctors. They seem to respect us because we have been willing to say what almost everyone else does not want to say; the way Hopkins did, and Tom and Marty and Max and all the rest. Yet still we continued on, brothers of this madness, victims of this idiocy, ghosts like shadows acting out a play that will never be written.
Even with all the humiliation and shame of having to turn myself in to a place like this, I could not help but feel that I had finally come home; the way I felt when I visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, and sat before the names of the dead, all that death carved into stone. The “Wall” should have been extended for all the psychiatric casualties, for all the people like Tony and Jim and countless others who died and were buried behind these locked steel doors and wire windows.
The staff at the psychiatric ward use an assortment of drugs to keep us all in line. I remember one guy, an extremely agitated former Marine Corps drill instructor named Billy, who had served two tours of duty in Vietnam and received a Silver Star, telling me he was going to become the president of the United States someday. He began explaining in great detail how he planned to go about reaching his goal. Then, five minutes after receiving his medication, he could no longer remember who he was, and all he wanted to do now was fly to Alabama and go fishing. “I used to fish with my father when I was a boy,” he told me, staring off into the distance. “I loved fishing with my dad, but after Vietnam I told him I didn’t want to go fishing anymore. I was sick and tired of killing. I said, Dad, the only way I’m going to fish with you again is if we don’t use any hooks. He agreed and we’ve been fishing together now for years without hooks . . . I’m going to go to sleep now,” he said, staggering down the hall in his rumpled pajamas.
So now here I was in a place I had feared for so long. I had finally made it to the loony bin, a locked psychiatric ward at the Manhattan VA hospital. It was quiet, deceptively quiet, with its drab green walls and antiseptic smell. Some of the veterans around me had looks on their faces that seemed completely out of this world, while others seemed shocked from some trauma buried deep inside them that they might never be able to express. There were screams at night and patients howling during the day for reasons I never knew. One veteran with tears streaming down his face kept walking past me whispering, “Incoming! Incoming!” and appeared to be lost in some faraway place he might never return from.
I overheard various conversations in the visiting room, some men talking about how they wanted to go home, others apparently quite satisfied with being on the psychiatric ward, as if it was one of the nicest places in the world. Tony kept telling his mother he wanted to die. Jimmy just sat there staring at his girlfriend like she didn’t exist. Eddie said to his mother that he wished he’d never joined the marines, and that if he had to do it again he would have become a priest, and how during his second tour of duty he’d held his dying buddy in his arms and ever since then had felt guilty that he’d survived. “Sometimes I just don’t feel like I deserve to be here, Mom,” he muttered. “I mean, I’m glad I made it home, but a part of me feels like I already died.” His mother started crying.
As the hours passed, I could not help but think how these men I had come to know as my brothers represented millions of other Vietnam veterans out there; and how countless psychiatric wards across the country had to deal with the psychological effects of that war; and what about the families, the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, the brothers, like my mother who became an alcoholic after I came home? She never told me about it. I wouldn’t find out about it until years later, when she finally explained how she had started drinking again while I was a patient at the Bronx VA hospital from all the guilt she felt about my paralysis and how she thought it was her fault because she had told me to go fight the Communists.
Mona, who had resisted allowing me to spend even one night at her place, now seemed ready to make all sorts of concessions. She showed up one afternoon behind the wire window and told me that after giving it a lot of thought and talking to some of the other members of the cast, she had decided to let me move into her apartment as soon as I got out of the psychiatric ward. She seemed sincere and promised to bring me a key to her place the following day.
I smiled and thanked her, doing my best to appear grateful. But to be honest, all I could feel was anger and contempt. Great, I thought to myself, I can finally move into your fucking place now that I’ve been locked up in this crazy house. She left very quickly after that, telling me she had to get back to the Village for another performance. I just sat there watching her walk away, her Gucci heels clicking on the floor so loud that I came very close to screaming.
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Ron Kovic
Ronald Lawrence Kovic (born July 4, 1946)] is an American anti-war activist, writer, and United States Marine Corps sergeant who was wounded and paralyzed in the Vietnam War. His 1976 memoir Born on the Fourth of July was made into the film of the same name which starred actor Tom Cruise as Kovic, and was co-written by Kovic and directed by Oliver Stone.