New Film Brings the Old War Home : Director Oliver Stone makes good on his promise to Ron Kovic by telling the disabled Vietnam vet’s story

Up the Convention Center ramp they come, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, some in wheelchairs. They wear their old fatigues and ribbons, and sardonically whistle “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.”

A dwarf in a boonie hat brings up the rear. Out of camera range, a real Vietnam veteran watches him pass by. “Man,” the vet drawls, “that Agent Orange is a mutha!”

Grunt humor with a 1988 perspective.

Welcome to filming of the next Oliver Stone movie, “Born on the Fourth of July.” It stars Tom Cruise, the cocky, handsome jet jock who three years ago was rendered sensitive by Kelly McGillis in “Top Gun.” And likewise the cocky, handsome brother of Dustin Hoffman in the current “Rain Man.”

He’s a little different here--scruffy at times with long, disheveled hair, his forehead slightly shaved to suggest balding. He plays a Vietnam vet in a wheelchair who bitterly protests the war in which he fought.

Director’s Promise

That the film is being made is largely due to a promise Stone once made to Ron Kovic, a fellow ex-grunt and Purple Heart recipient. The vow came nine years before Stone’s 1987 Oscar for “Platoon,” his wildly successful story of his Vietnam War.

There was to be a post-Vietnam sequel to “Platoon,” but “it’s been subsumed by this idea,” Stone said, referring to the story of Kovic, whom Cruise plays in “Born.”

“I wrote a sequel, based on my own personal problems. But I felt this story was a bigger story. I thought it would cut across more class lines, would be more more effective, but would, at the same time, encompass my own story in many ways.”

Hence this re-created moment of dissent and bad craziness in 1972. What we have here are 1,000 extras dressed as old-fatigue veterans, cops in impersonal shades, flower children, gays, freaks, geeks, bikers and, yes, the waving banners that say things like Victory to the Viet Cong and--how quaint it sounds now--SDS.

Marching and rolling along on an unusually balmy December day, the pretend protesters are outside the Dallas Convention Center, redoing the Great March of August, 1972, at the GOP convention in Miami Beach.

Deja vu time, folks. Clenched fists. Bell-bottom trousers. Long hair. Love beads. Women in whiteface, dressed in black as Vietnamese peasants, holding bloody, eviscerated plastic models of babies. Chants of “Peace--now!” and “1, 2, 3, 4, We don’t want your . . . war!”

A night earlier here, 800 extras are in the convention hall as well-dressed, well-off Republican delegates, many of the women clad in blue and white.

Holding Nixon-Agnew signs, they chant “Four more years!” and stare with adoration at a Richard Nixon look-alike with a frozen smile standing, arms raised, high above them at the podium.

Kovic/Cruise starts shouting from the convention floor, assailing the war, the government’s ill treatment of disabled veterans. TV crews move in. So do security agents who, after a brief scuffle with other veterans, quickly wheel him away.

Later, in a scene outside the convention center, there’s another scuffle. Kovic/Cruise is yanked from his wheelchair and arrested. Dramatic license, though: It happened at a Los Angeles demonstration, not in Miami Beach.

The re-created GOP convention segues the same night to the start of Kovic/Cruise on the road to reconciliation--his speech to the 1976 Democratic convention in New York. Finally, the sound of cheers.

Like “Platoon,” finally made in 1986 after a false start and crushed hopes 10 years earlier, “Born” has not been Easy Street.

Kovic and Stone collaborated on the script. They co-wrote the first edition--both are based on a book by Kovic--in 1978, two years after the latter’s “Born” was published.

Al Pacino was to have starred in the movie, but the project collapsed. A shortage of funds, even for a film budgeted at $6 million, Stone says. Coincidentally, that’s all “Platoon” cost to make.

(Sources say this one, filming this month in the Philippines, where Vietnam combat and a veterans’ hideaway in Mexico will be re-created, is budgeted at between $15 million and $16 million.)

Kovic’s memories of the 1978 dream that died are painful. “Oliver had said to me, ‘If I ever get the opportunity to direct, if I ever break through, I’ll come back for you,’ ” he said.

“And he never forgot that promise. And when ‘Platoon’ came out and Oliver could have done any film he wanted to do, he came back. He said it was an old marker for him.”

Bullet-Shattered Spine

As his book says and the movie will show, Ron Kovic was a working-class kid from Massapequa, N.Y., one of six born to Tom and Pat Kovic. He was a good high school athlete. He believed in God, the flag, the Marines and all that “Sands of Iwo Jima” stuff; he joined the Marines, became a grunt, did two tours in Vietnam.

Twenty years ago, his second tour was cut short when his spine was shattered by North Vietnamese bullets in a fire fight not far from the Demilitarized Zone, near the Cua Viet River.

He has been in a wheelchair ever since, paralyzed from the waist down.

In the waning days of the war, he was often seen on TV as a strident, angry man with long hair, clad in a wrinkled Marine tropical khaki shirt, loudly denouncing the war as a “crime” and--with ample justification, some say--the U.S. government’s treatment of its disabled Vietnam veterans.

Today, at the age of 41 and living in a Redondo Beach home, Kovic is no longer is a raggedy warrior. He dresses neatly, speaks gently, laughs easily and, as his mother puts it, he is “almost a member of the Establishment.”

But back then, he was a defiant member of the anti-Establishment, a man of inflammatory anti-war phrases perfectly suited--as he knew--for 30-second sound bites certain to make the evening news.

Kovic’s protests for disabled Vietnam veterans had made him a familiar face for reporters at the GOP convention, recalls Frank Cavestani, an actor and Vietnam vet who accompanied Kovic to Miami Beach and made a documentary about the veterans’ anti-war demonstrations there.

“Ron was a particular media-catcher,” said Cavestani, who worked with Stone and Kovic in re-creating the Miami Beach protests here. “The veterans were really aware of that. They were trying to get media.”

Was He Disloyal?

But was Kovic, in protesting the war, disloyal to the guys who had fought in it? What did his fellow grunts think?

Hear the voices of some who were there.

Like James Webb, former secretary of the Navy. He was a Marine rifle platoon leader, fought in very bad turf called the Arizona Territory, southwest of Da Nang. He’s a Navy Cross, Silver Star and Purple Heart recipient, retired from service because of wounds.

“He had every right to do what he did,” says Webb, whose best-selling Vietnam novel in 1978, “Fields of Fire,” accurately summed up the camaraderie, horror and ambiguity felt by the Americans who did the fighting.

“He certainly served, which is a lot more than a lot of people did. But I really feel that the (anti-war protest) experiences of people like Ron Kovic in no way represent what the average veteran did. And to continue to focus on them, I think, skews our understanding of the war.”

Hear former Marine Lt. Lew Puller, son of the late Marine idol, Lt. Gen. Lewis (Chesty) Puller. Nine months after Kovic was hit, the younger Puller lost both legs to a 105-millimeter artillery shell the Viet Cong had rigged as a booby trap in the “rocket belt” south of Da Nang.

Now a Pentagon attorney, he doesn’t necessarily agree with what Kovic did. However, “I don’t buy the argument that the Vietnam veterans who came back and then protested the war were somehow disloyal to the guys who were still over there fighting it.

“If anybody had a right to say how they felt about things, it was certainly those guys who had already gone and paid for what they did in blood.”

Hear a GOP extra in the movie, Jerry Lack, Vietnam class of ‘69-70, a rifleman in the American Division’s 196th Light Infantry Brigade. His old outfit became the last U.S. ground combat unit to fight in Vietnam; it was pulled out the same month that Kovic showed up at the GOP convention to protest the war.

Now a sales executive in Dallas, Lack wasn’t offended by Kovic’s protests. “Somebody needed to bring this up.” He pauses. “I’m an American, and I was drafted and I went. I think everyone needs to do their part. . . .”

But he adds a qualifier.

“Fine, send us over there. But, damn, give us a good reason to send us over there. We had no business being over there, in my opinion.”

And hear Peter Weber, a boyhood friend of Kovic. Weber was a grunt in Vietnam, in the Ninth Infantry Division. He still lives in Massapequa, a mechanic for Nassau County on Long Island, N.Y.

He sympathizes with what Kovic went through after Vietnam. But in his mind, Kovic’s anti-war demonstrations were only “a way of getting attention,” celebrity status, of not becoming just another disabled veteran in a wheelchair.

“I once said to him, ‘Do me a favor, you have to be honest with me. Do you believe in this?’ And he said no. And I said, ‘As long as you don’t believe in it. that’s great.’ ”

Still, he doesn’t dispute Kovic’s right to protest as he did: “If anything, he’s got the right to say anything he wants to say.”

The Walking Dead

Kovic, wrapped in a denim jacket, moves in quick, nervous bursts around the convention hall, watching, listening. He’s often halted by young extras who want to pose for pictures with him but now and then, an older extra, a veteran, just wants to shake his hand.

“Glad to meet you,” one veteran said. “I was in Three-Nine.” Mutual respect time from a former member of the Ninth Marines, which took so many casualties, it was called the Walking Dead.

Later, Kovic, who once strongly supported the war, talks with a visitor about that support. Like most grunts, when he was in combat, he was angry at the anti-war protesters safely back in the States.

“The anger toward the protesters, the feeling of invincibility, that was gone the day I was shot. . . . I was much more accepting of the world around me after I was shot, just more thankful of simply being alive,” Kovic said.

A variety of things turned him against the war, beginning with his paralysis from combat wounds, followed by what he recalls as the indifference of hospital corpsmen in Da Nang, then the overcrowded, “slum-like” conditions at veterans hospitals back in the United States.

Finally, there was the night in a hospital ward when he watched the 1968 Democratic convention on TV, saw the tear gas, rock-throwing, club-swinging melee, the Chicago cops battling the demonstrators and radicals in the streets.

“That was the night I began to side with the protesters,” Kovic said. The decision to become an activist came two years later when Ohio National Guardsmen shot and killed four young demonstrators at Kent State.

His anti-war protests embarrassed his father, a supermarket manager now retired and living with his wife in Yuma, Ariz.

“He was concerned,” Kovic recalls. “My dad was supporting the administration, a Republican when I was protesting. . . . He got calls from neighbors, ‘Did you see Ron on TV?’

“The neighbors, they’d tell their kids to stay away from me, I was a protester.”

The period of estrangement at home then is forgotten now. His parents, who married when each served in the Navy in World War II, came to Dallas to watch the filming. They are clearly proud of their son.

The elder Kovic asks that his wife, Pat, do the talking. She does, recalling the bad times. “Ronnie lived at home for a short while after he came home. Just stayed in the house during the day, went out drinking at night, usually came home drunk.

“He worried Tom and me silly, he really did. . . . He also tried drugs, I don’t know if it was pot or what. But the drugs did not bring back the legs, and he flushed the drugs down the toilet, thank God.”

She talks rapid-fire as she and her husband sit out of camera range at the Dallas convention hall, awaiting the ninth take of the Kovic/Cruise speech at the 1976 Democratic convention.

“Some woman walked up to me yesterday and she shook my hand,” Pat Kovic said. “She said, ‘Thank you for giving birth to Ronnie,’ and I thought that was beautiful.”

A Return to Dallas

Filming began in October, with a residential section of southeast Dallas transformed into the Massapequa neighborhood in which Kovic grew up. The Old Parkland Hospital, as it’s called, now a sheriff’s department training facility, was used for the grim hospital ward scenes.

Now, it is December, the filming nearly done in Dallas, where earlier this year Oliver Stone filmed his dark, ominous “Talk Radio.”

Inside a cavernous portion of the Dallas Convention Center where hundreds of extras are fed and their costumes hung on endless rows of hangers, a weary Stone, suffering a slight cold, is taking 10.

In his trailer, grabbing a bite to eat he is both distracted and amused by his son Sean, 4, who has managed to squeeze a huge cluster of red and blue convention balloons through the trailer door.

“ ‘Platoon,’ made this film possible, no question,” Stone said. He doesn’t know, as he didn’t with “Platoon,” how “Born” will do at the box office.

“I can’t calculate that. I’m just going to make as fine a movie as I can about a period in this man’s life, a period in American history, and let it go at that--and see what the public says,” Stone said.

It may help that Cruise is starring, although some eyebrows were raised when it was announced he was signed for the film. In trying to segue from his recent raffish roles, Cruise wanted to work with Stone.

Consider a time in New York in February, 1987, when the director-writer taped a CBS morning show in which he, for a “Platoon” piece, reminisced with three grunts with whom he’d served in Vietnam.

That night, they adjourned to the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village for serious pub drinking. Cruise materialized and joined them. Might not that have been the start of the Ron Kovic role?

Maybe. “We started talking about doing things,” Stone said. “I don’t specifically think I mentioned ‘Born’ to him. Maybe I did, but I don’t think so. We talked about ‘Wall Street.’ He wanted to do it very much, but I had already committed to Charlie Sheen.”

Stone thinks Paula Wagner, who is both his and Cruise’s agent, joined them in a deal for the Kovic movie.

Cruise, through his press reps, declined to be interviewed during filming. It was explained that the star doesn’t do interviews about a movie while he is making it. The star no doubt will talk a lot about it later.

In any event, he got hot with “Top Gun” three years ago.

“Platoon” started what seems to have become the Oliver Stone Stock Company. In addition to Sheen, two “Platoon” vets, John C. McGinley and John Glover, wound up in “Wall Street.”

Others now are in “Born on the Fourth of July.” The best-known of them are two Oscar-nominated “Platoon” co-stars--Tom Berenger, in a brief bit as a Marine recruiting sergeant, and Willem Dafoe, in a larger role as a disabled vet who befriends Kovic in Mexico.

In addition to them, “Platoon” veterans Paul Sanchez, David Neidorf, Corky Ford, Chris Pederson, Ivan Kane and Mark Moses also have roles in “Born.” And retired Marine Capt. Dale Dye, the chief combat technical adviser and an Army captain in “Platoon,” is working on Stone’s new film as an adviser on combat and other scenes.

Stone grins. He professes not to have a repertory troupe under way: “I like the actors. They fit the roles. It’s nice to have an ongoing relationship with certain actors. But only if the role fits.”

Not all in “Born” are “Platoon” graduates, of course, and some aren’t even professional actors.

Consider Kevin McGuire, 27, cast as former Marine Lt. Bobby Muller, a disabled veteran who was Kovic’s real-life partner in protest at Miami Beach.

Although McGuire wants to be an actor, his day job, so to speak, is as an assistant district attorney in the Bronx, N.Y. He has been in a wheelchair since 1968, the victim of a drunk driver. He didn’t know Kovic personally, but had read his book and known about him since the mid-’70s: “He was a very important person to the disabled vets I played with on a (wheelchair) basketball team.”

Last year, he read a newspaper article about the movie and took action.

“I figured they’d be looking for a disabled person to play a role of some sort,” says McGuire, a lean, intense, muscular man who bears an eerie resemblance to the man he plays.

“I found out Oliver Stone’s address and wrote a letter . . . and two months later I got called in and got the part.”

An army of acting protesters assemble on the ramp outside the convention center for yet another take. This is an army of amazing patience. Fragments of an assistant director’s loudspeakered instructions fill the air:

“ . . . so, if anybody’s in a radical group, step forward.”

“Yippies, go down behind the vets.”

Ron Kovic sits in his wheelchair, watching. “Looks great,” he says, laughing.

Finally letting go of the war? He smiles. “Yeah, it sure is. Letting go of Vietnam, realizing that it’s a beautiful world, letting go of a lot of the guilt and a lot of the pain.”

By Kovic’s estimate, he put in almost 19 years of protest. As one might expect, there were times the charge of ego-tripping would be laid on him. What says he to that?

“I would tell them that I’ve got to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life and that I feel what is a very important lesson . . . that we must never let what happened in Vietnam happen again.”

Marine Lt. Col. Art Weber Jr., older brother of Kovic’s boyhood pal, Peter Weber, was also in Vietnam, led a reconnaissance platoon there and is now a senior Marine recruiting officer in the Midwest.

When Kovic came home from the Veterans Administration hospital on Long Island, the older Weber and his brother took him out to talk as Kovic was doing some heavy drinking.

Did he think Kovic, in his anti-Vietnam protest days, was disloyal to the guys who also fought in Vietnam?

“I was disappointed in him for doing that,” Weber said, “but I tried to look at it, get a sense of it, when I wrote about what he thought.”

In 1976, in a surprisingly compassionate article, Weber reviewed Kovic’s angry book for Marine Corps Gazette magazine, concluding it by recalling the time he and a sergeant major, a friend from Vietnam, had recruiting duty in New York and were visited by Kovic:

“He was still bitter at the war, the government and the VA. But, he said, ‘I’m not bitter about the Marines; you’re still my friends, aren’t you?’ ”

Yes, Weber wrote, “this Marine is and will be for some time to come.”