Born on the Fourth of July

Chapter 5’s four sections describe the fall of 1970. Kovic stops going to classes at college and starts to give more speeches after the first one at the high school. As fall turns to winter, Kovic feels restless and decides to move to California with his friend Kenny. He settles in an apartment by the beach near Los Angeles. There he is inspired by a protest he reads about in the Los Angeles 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” (158). Kovic joins a meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) where “everything seemed to change—the loneliness seemed to vanish” (158). He feels closer camaraderie than he’s felt since Vietnam and recognizes that the men are his friends and peers, even though most of them served in Vietnam more recently than he did and dress differently, wearing their “floppy bush hats and jungle uniforms right here on the streets of America” (159).

The VVAW sends Kovic out to make various speeches, and he becomes an in-demand speaker with a mission that, he says, “meant much more to me than being an athlete or a marine” (161).