Ron Kovic

Ron Kovic is both the author and the main character of Born on the Fourth of July. Kovic was born July 4th, 1946. He grew up in Massapequa, New York with loving parents, a Catholic faith and a neighborhood full of kids Ron's age that he grew up with. Kovic had a storybook childhood, hating school, playing baseball, discovering girls, high school sports. After high school he joins the Marine Corps and is sent off to Vietnam. In Vietnam, Kovic experiences the horrors of war, seeing his fellow soldiers killed, shooting one of his fellow soldiers and participating in an unintentional massacre of a village full of Vietnamese children. Kovic gets himself shot in order to come home and winds up paralyzed from the chest down. He is poorly cared for in the Veterans Administration Hospitals and feels alienated from American society. Depressed, alone, and partly unable to...