He and Kovic Share Same Birthday--and a Disdain for Vietnam

Ron Kovic is going to speak at the Bren Events Center at UC Irvine next Wednesday, and I’ll be there.

He’ll be accompanied by movie director Oliver Stone, who will talk about the making of “Born on the Fourth of July”--the film biography of Kovic that is now playing in Orange County theaters and is attracting a lot of support as the best motion picture of 1989.

I have a lot in common with Ron Kovic, and if I have a chance, I’d like to tell him.

For starters, we were both born on the Fourth of July (I preceded him by two wars). And the next most important thing we have in common is the feeling we share that the war in Vietnam was the most grievous tragedy visited on the United States since the Civil War. And maybe the most grievous in U.S. history, since the Civil War couldn’t have been avoided and Vietnam could.

Not in a very long time has a motion picture moved me the way “Fourth of July” did. Its pace and message are both relentless, and I was wrung out when I left the theater.

Stone has taken a lot of heat on both counts, but he’s coming from a place his political critics find hard to attack.

He was there.

And whatever other voice he raises, his understanding and support of the men who fought that war is total. That makes the carping of the political right about his “trashing” of America something less than credible.

But in telling Kovic’s story, Stone does something that the movies have never attempted with any degree of depth before. He deals with the home front, with American attitudes about the Vietnam War that colored attitudes toward the returning soldiers and almost ripped this nation apart.

Jane Fonda took the only other shot at this in a movie called “Coming Home”--and she chickened out before she ever came to grips with the issue. Stone doesn’t chicken out; he deals frontally with the schism that Vietnam caused not only throughout the country but within families as well.

And in the process, he dealt with a small corner of that schism that touched me deeply: the philosophical problems of World War II veterans and their wives whose sons were of draft age during the Vietnam War.

I know of one family in which the mother secretly supported the efforts of her son to resist the draft over the violent objections of her ex-Marine husband who castigated the boy. The father doesn’t know to this day the part his wife played in helping their son get to Canada.

I know another family in which the older son--through a series of creative delaying tactics after college--avoided the draft while his younger brother was drafted out of high school and survived 18 months of combat in Vietnam. There is no rancor between them on this issue today; both respect the fact that the other was doing what he had to do.

The son of an ultraconservative Orange County family I knew fled to Canada and for three years the family was badgered by FBI agents seeking information about the son. By the time the war was over and amnesty declared, the boy’s parents had changed their basic position on Vietnam and welcomed him home.

I know dozens of such stories--including my own.

I had a son of draft age during the Vietnam period. Although his political and philosophical views were often unpredictable and not easily packaged, he was violently opposed to the Vietnam War and felt that the best contribution he could make toward ending it was to resist it in every way he could.

His mother and I both supported him in this position, and I suppose it was our good fortune that he failed the draft physical because of a childhood infirmity--and this cup was thus taken from us. But that experience only heightened the agony I felt for both the boys who went and those who didn’t.

One of the prevailing myths that the supporters of U.S. involvement in Vietnam like to repeat is that those who opposed the war were contemptuous of the fighting men when they returned home. Within the limits of my experience and observations, that simply was not true.

In that time of terrible confusion in this country, we all ended up following our own consciences, wherever they took us. No one respected that more in the men who went than those who didn’t.

The cold reception came from the great majority of Americans who managed to avoid any direct contact with the war at all and simply wanted it over so they could get back to business as usual. It was pressure from this group that finally ended it--and that pressure only came about when Lyndon Johnson exhausted his supply of draftees who had no way of avoiding the draft and started getting into the ranks of the children of middle- and upper-middle-class parents.

And so Vietnam continues to divide this country. Stone’s critics say he has poured gasoline on this fire with his new film, but the fact is that we are never going to heal this problem by ignoring it. And now, it looks as if it is going to become an issue in an Orange County election.

Ron Kovic is testing the Orange County waters to see if he wants to run for Congress against Robert K. Dornan.

Before you cry “carpetbagger,” remember that Dornan emigrated from Beverly Hills to do the same thing against former Rep. Jerry M. Patterson.

Already Dornan is heating up the Vietnam issue. Typical Dornan comment: “It is absurd to think that somebody would run for Congress based on a paperback book filled with self-pity and immoral excursions and a propaganda movie based on distortions and lies.”

So Dornan has already set the tone. But this time, attacks on his opponent’s war record aren’t going to carry him very far. Ron Kovic left the use of his legs on a battlefield in Vietnam, but his heart is intact.

If he likes what he hears at the Bren Center next Wednesday, it may carry him into hand-to-hand combat with an incumbent Orange County congressman.