Ron Kovic: Breaking the Silence of the Night
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Posted October 10th, 2006 on TruthDIg
By Ron Kovic
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"A time comes when silence is betrayal". - Martin Luther King Jr.,
April 4, 1967
It all begins somewhere, the questioning, the doubting, the feeling that
somethings not right; like that day the captain set fire to the
Vietnamese womans hooch, or the night we shot those women and children
by mistake. Its all got to start somewhere. For them it might have been
the innocent civilians killed that day at the checkpoint just north of
Baghdad or the dead children lying in the road in Kirkuk, or that night
in Nasiriyah when they kicked in the front door of that house, screaming
and cursing at the children as they threw their father to the floor,
tying his hands behind his back and putting a hood over his head, but
you remain silent, you say nothing. Youve been taught to follow orders,
to obey and not question, to go along with the program and do exactly
what youre told. You learned that in boot camp.
Like many Americans who served in Vietnam and those now serving in Iraq,
and countless other human beings throughout history, I had been willing
to give my life for my country with little knowledge or awareness of
what that really meant.
You learned that the very first day at Parris Island when the drill
instructors started screaming at you. It is Yes sir and No sir, and
nothing in between. There is the physical and verbal abuse, the vicious
threats and constant harassment to keep you off balance. It is a
powerful conditioning process, a process that began long ago, long
before we signed those papers at the recruit stations in our hometowns,
a process deeply ingrained in the American culture and psyche, and it
has shaped and influenced us from our earliest childhood.
Born on my countrys birthday in 1946, I had grown up in the shadow of
the Cold War after the great victory of World War Two. Both my mother
and father had served in the Navy during that war. It was where they met
and were married, and we their children were to be called the Baby
Boom. It was a beautiful time, a time of innocence, a time of
patriotism, a time of loyalty, conformity and obedience. The threat of
Communism was everywhere. We did not question. We did not doubt. We
believed and we trusted our leaders. America was always right. How could
we ever be wrong? We were the most powerful nation on earth and we had
never lost a war, but all that was to change, all that was to be
shattered in Vietnam.
I can still remember marching on Memorial Day, our parents on the
sidewalks waving their American flags proudly. There were the war movies
and the Sergeant Rock comic books, the toy guns that we got for
Christmas, and the little plastic green soldiers that I played with in
my backyard, fighting the Japs and the Germans, attacking the imaginary
bunkers with our bazookas and flamethrowers, dreaming that someday like
our fathers before us we would become men.
I volunteered for my first tour of duty in Vietnam in 1965, only to
return to a country deeply divided. I remember tears coming to my eyes
when I saw a photograph in the newspaper of the American flag being
burned at an antiwar rally in New York City. I was outraged and became
determined to set my own example of patriotism and volunteered to go to
Vietnam a second time, ready to die for my country if need be. Before
leaving I purchased a diary that I promised to keep during my second
tour of duty. I still have that diary today, and though it is a bit worn
and frayed the words that I wrote nearly four decades ago are still
there. On January 18th, 1968, two days before I was shot and paralyzed,
I wrote, Time is going fast in a way, while in other ways it seems Ive
been here 100 years. I love my great nation and am ready to die for
freedom. Just below I had written the quote,
Fear not that ye have died for naught
The torch ye threw to us we caught.
Ten million hands will hold it high,
And Freedoms light shall never die!
Weve learned the lesson that ye taught
In Flanders fields. R.W. Lillard
Like many Americans who served in Vietnam and those now serving in Iraq,
and countless other human beings throughout history, I had been willing
to give my life for my country with little knowledge or awareness of
what that really meant. I trusted and believed and had no reason to
doubt the sincerity or motives of my government. It would not be until
many months later at the Bronx Veterans Hospital in New York that I
would begin to question whether I and the others who had gone to that
war had gone for nothing.
I now wanted to know who this enemy was, who were these people I had
been taught to hate and sent to fight and kill.
It was a violent spring. Martin Luther King had been killed in Memphis
and I had just begun reading Senator Robert F. Kennedys book To Seek a
Newer World at the Bronx VA when Kennedy was assassinated at the
Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy had been the antiwar candidate,
and I remember picking up his book with hesitation at first, his views
seeming so very different from my own back then, but there was something
that drew me toward him and his call to end the war that spring. Maybe
it was the wounded all around me on the paraplegic ward, or the hundreds
of Americans who continued to die each week, but I remember feeling
deeply saddened when he died, just as I had when his brother, President
John F. Kennedy, had been killed in Dallas in 1963.
I had been so certain of victory, but each day now I began to realize
more and more that we were not going to win in Vietnam, and that
realization was painful and devastating. I felt betrayed and could not
understand why my government had not done all that it could to win the
war. Did they have any idea how much we had sacrificed, how many had
already died and been maimed like myself? I felt sad and depressed and
would often go down to the hospital library on the first floor, where I
would read for hours at a time trying to forget the war. The first book
that I read was about the life of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and I
remember listening to his voice on the Armed Forces Radio during my
second tour of duty and writing in my diary how much hearing him and his
determination to stay the course and not give up in Vietnam had inspired
me. Several days later I discovered the diary of Che Guevara, the Cuban
revolutionary who had gone to Bolivia and was later killed there while
attempting to inspire a revolution. I felt uneasy at first holding the
book in my hands as I sat paralyzed in my wheelchair, afraid that
someone might come up to me and catch me reading about the enemy, but
I now wanted to know who this enemy was, who were these people I had
been taught to hate and sent to fight and kill.
I remember watching the 1968 Chicago Republican National Convention on
TV with other paralyzed veterans in their wheelchairs, the crowds in the
streets outside the convention hall chanting, The whole world is
watching! The whole world is watching! as antiwar demonstrators were
beaten and bloodied by police and dragged into waiting paddy wagons.
Most of my fellow veterans were angry at the protesters, cursing them
and calling them traitors, but I remember feeling very differently that
night. What the police had done was wrong, and for the first time,
though I did not share it with anyone yet, I began to sympathize with
the demonstrators.
It was during this period that I read Henry David Thoreaus essay Civil
Disobedience and was immediately struck by the concept of resistance
to civil government and non cooperation with evil seeming to directly
contradict what I had once believed in as a boy.
It was not long after that that I left the hospital and began attending
classes at Hofstra University on Long Island, determined to rise above
what had happened to me and begin a new life after the war. It was a
quiet and peaceful campus, so different from Vietnam and the hospital,
and it was at the university that I was to first hear the passionate
exchange of ideas and different points of view. Many of the discussions
had to do with the war and why it had to end. There were the lit candles
and the moratoriums, the John Lennon song Give Peace a Chance, and I
remember listening to the Woodstock album and hearing Jimi Hendrixs
wild rendition of the Star Spangled Banner for the first time. There
was the infamous My Lai massacre poster, And babies too? It was
shocking and I could not help but think back to that night during my
second tour of duty when we shot those women and children by mistake,
all those bloody bodies, the old man with his brains hanging out and
that Vietnamese child whose foot had nearly been shot off, dangling by a
thread.
I continued to attend classes, still keeping my thoughts and feelings
about the war deep inside of me and sharing them with no one.
It was during this period that I read Henry David Thoreaus essay Civil
Disobedience and was immediately struck by the concept of resistance
to civil government and non cooperation with evil seeming to directly
contradict what I had once believed in as a boythat my country was
always right and could do no wrong. The whole idea that we as citizens
had a right to follow our conscience and resist laws that were unjust
and immoral had a powerful effect on me. I was later to learn that
Senator Joseph McCarthy had attempted to ban Thoreaus essay (<
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html>) and that both
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther Kings philosophy of creative
nonviolence as a tactic for social change had been strongly influenced
by their reading of Civil Disobedience.
There was The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Nigger: An
Autobiography by Dick Gregory and Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness,
which exposed the brutality and horror of colonialism. I remember
reading Jerry Rubins Do It and Abbie Hoffmans Revolution for the
Hell of It, astounded at the sheer audacity of these two Yippie
(Youth International Party) radicals and their willingness to stand up
to the most powerful government in the world and its policy in Vietnam.
They were wild and outrageous, and believed in revolution and were not
afraid to say it or write about it and act it out. There was the article
in Ramparts magazine by the Army Green Beret Sergeant Donald Duncan, who
had turned against the war, and I remember someone from the university
mentioning that a Vietnam veteran from Suffolk Community College was now
heading the S.D.S. (Students for a Democratic Society) on his campus.
Everything was being questioned, nothing was sacred, even the existence
of God was now suspect.
There were the Columbia University sit-ins and Woodstock and the
alternative radio station WBAI, which I listened to in my room late at
night, deeply moved by talk of protest and revolution, power to the
people and provocative antiwar songs that brought tears to my eyes,
giving me an entirely different perspective on what was happening in
Vietnam and here at home.
America seemed to be tearing itself apart; never before had the nation
been so polarized, not since the Civil War had we as a people been so
divided. Everything was being questioned, nothing was sacred, even the
existence of God was now suspect. The very earth beneath my feet seemed
to be shifting, and there no longer seemed to be any guarantees, or
anything that could be trusted or believed in anymore. Many of the
students had become so angry and frustrated with the war and what was
going on that they had begun to give up on America. Many wondered if we
were ever really a democracy to begin with, while still others spoke
openly of leaving the country and abandoning America forever. I
continued attending my classes, trying to be a good student, but I could
not help but be affected by all the things that were happening around
me. Several weeks later while sitting in the back of a crowded
auditorium I remember listening to the impassioned words of the late
Congressman Allard Lowenstein, who had come to speak at our campus that
day, fiercely condemning the war and telling us all to not give up and
that it was better to reclaim the country than abandon it!
It was about that time I received a call from my friend Bobby Muller,
whom I had first met at the Bronx Veterans Hospital only a few months
before and who had also been paralyzed in Vietnam, asking me if I would
join him at Levittown Memorial High School on Long Island later that
week to speak against the war. I remember being hesitant at first,
telling him I wasnt sure. I had never spoken in public before and the
thought of giving my first speech against the war frightened me. When I
got off the phone I felt an uncomfortable burning in my stomach. A part
of me wanted to speak for all I had seen in Vietnam and the hospital and
for all the thoughts and feelings I had been having ever since I had
begun attending classes at the university, while another part could not
help but think of what might happen to me if I did. Would I be called a
traitor? Would I end up in some FBI file, no longer the quiet student
sitting in his wheelchair alone on the outskirts of the demonstrations
but now a direct participant, a radical, a demonstrator? I would be
stepping over the line and joining with the very people I had once
thought of as traitors. What would my mother and father think if they
found out? And the veterans at the universitywhat would they say? Would
they feel that I had betrayed them? Bobby called me several times that
week, sounding a bit impatient, but again I hesitated, telling him that
I hadnt made up my mind yet. I asked him if he would call me the
following morning, which was the day of the speech, saying I would let
him know for sure. I could hardly sleep that night, tossing and turning,
tormented by fear and doubt, trapped between the awful twilight of what
might happen to me if I did speak and what I knew would continue to
happen if I remained silent.
The phone rang early the next morning and I remember picking it up,
telling Bobby in a voice that was still only half awake that I had
decided to join him that day. It was nearly forty years ago but I can
still remember driving down to the high school in my hand-controlled car
thinking of all the things I wanted to say to the students. When I
arrived I parked the car, transferred into my wheelchair and pushed over
to the entrance of the school and into the auditorium, where Bobby was
already sitting on the stage in his wheelchair talking to one of the
teachers. I was carried up a few steps, where I joined him, and for a
moment I remember turning my head and looking out at all the students,
thinking how much they reminded me of myself only a few years before, so
young and innocent, so trusting and willing to believe without question.
Bobby spoke first and a few minutes later it was my turn. I approached
the microphone slowly, pushing my wheelchair to the very center of the
stage, and in a voice that I can still remember being a bit anxious I
began to speak. I told them about the hospital first, the overcrowded
conditions, the rats on the ward, and just as I began to speak about how
I had been shot and paralyzed in Vietnam the fire bell rang. The
auditorium quickly cleared after that, one of the teachers telling us
that someone had just called in a bomb threat. I didnt know what to
think at first. I remember feeling frightened, angry and outraged all at
the same time! Why would anyone want to stop me from speaking? Who could
that voice on the other end of the phone have been? Was it another boy,
a student, a teacher, an angry parent? What could they have possibly
been thinking? I would never know for sure, only that someone had made
an effort to stop me from speaking that day, and that affected me
deeply. We all went outside and after a brief discussion decided to go
over to the high school football field, where we assembled all the
students in the grandstands and I continued speaking, more determined
than ever to not be silenced.
Perhaps it was survivors guilt, or my own desperate need to be forgiven
and keep others from having to come back like me, but as I sat before
those crowds I began to open up my heart in a way that I had never done
before....
There would be Kent State and my first demonstration against the war in
Washington, D.C, the VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War), arrests,
tapped phones, undercover agents, and many more speeches in the months
and years that were to follow as my political awakening continued and I
began to discover an America far different than the one I had once
believed in as a boy. There were the trials and days and nights I spent
in jail in my wheelchair feeling more like a criminal than someone who
had risked his life for his country, but I continued to speak.
Perhaps it was survivors guilt, or my own desperate need to be forgiven
and keep others from having to come back like me, but as I sat before
those crowds I began to open up my heart in a way that I had never done
before, sharing everything, all the horrors and nightmares, all the
things I had locked deep inside of me and had for so long been afraid to
say. In many ways I was confessing the sins of America. I remember many
nights driving home to my apartment after those speeches feeling
exhausted and deeply troubled, unable to sleep, knowing that if I did,
the nightmares would return and I would be back in Vietnam all over
again; only to awaken a few hours later with my heart pounding in my
chest, feeling terribly alone and wondering why I was putting myself
through all this pain and agony.
It had only been a few years before that I had sat in the living room of
my house in Massapequa, Long Island, with tears in my eyes listening to
the words of President John F. Kennedy call my generation to A New
Frontier, urging us all to be ready to pay any price, bear any burden,
meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to insure
the success and survival of liberty, but those words seemed hollow to
me now. Somewhere along the way we had taken the wrong turn, somewhere
through it all America had veered tragically off course, leaving behind
our sacred ideals and betraying the very roots of our revolutionary
past. Instead of the great champion of liberty we had emerged the
imposter, a fraud, a dangerous, corrupt frightening monstrosity of what
we had first set out to be. America had lived a terrible lie. We had
been on the wrong side of history. The great defender of liberty had
become the tyrant, the arrogant bully, the cruel exploiter of the
tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breath free. Wearing
the deceitful mask of the great liberator and promising freedom and
democracy, we had robbed and raped, blackmailed and perverted our way
around the world, supporting the most despicable tyrants and despots as
we expanded our bloody empire, causing the death and suffering of
countless human beings. I now understood what Martin Luther King had
meant when he had called America the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world....
I remember reading State and Revolution by Lenin and The Prison Poems
of Ho Chi Minh. There was George Jacksons Prison Letters and a
powerful book by Felix Green called The Enemy: What Every American
Should Know About Imperialism. There was the documentary Hearts and
Minds, and the agonizing scene of the grief-stricken Vietnamese woman
being held back by family members as she tried to crawl into the grave
of her husband, who had just been killed in an American air strike, and
the haunting scene of a terrified Vietnamese child screaming and running
naked from her village after being severely burned in a napalm attack as
the war raged on, and my speeches grew angry and bitter at a government
I could no longer trust or believe in anymore. There were the body
counts and booby traps, body bags, light at the end of the tunnel and
Vietnam veterans throwing their ribbons and medals away at the Capitol
in Washington, D.C., outraged with a government and a war they had now
come to see as unjust and immoral.
For the past three and a half years I have watched in horror the mirror
image of another Vietnam unfolding in Iraq.
The Vietnam War finally ended in the spring of 1975 and with its end
came the hope that America might change and begin to confront the
painful legacy of its past. I will always remember the words of Vietnam
Veteran Against the War John Kerry as he spoke before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee in the spring of 1971:
And so when thirty years from now a brother goes down the street
without an arm, without a leg or a face and small boys ask why, we can
say, Vietnam, and not mean a desert or some filthy obscene memory, but
instead mean the place where America finally turned and where soldiers
like us helped in that turning.
But tragically that turning was not to be, and the dream of a more
peaceful and nonviolent America was put on hold by a government that
continued to refuse to face the reality of the terrible crimes it had
committed in our name.
For the past three and a half years I have watched in horror the mirror
image of another Vietnam unfolding in Iraq. As of this writing over
2,700 Americans have died and nearly 20,000 have been wounded while tens
of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, many of them women and
children, have been killed. Refusing to learn from the lessons of
Vietnam, our government continues to pursue a policy of deception,
distortion, manipulation and denial, doing everything it can to hide
from the American people its true intentions in Iraq. Sadly, the War on
Terror has become a war of terror. Never before has this government
through its outrageous provocations and violent aggressions placed the
citizens of this country in such grave danger. Never have the people of
this country been so threatened, never before has life and liberty been
in such great peril; not in the two hundred and thirty years since our
revolution have we as a people and a nation been at such a crucial
turning point. These are dangerous times. A century of arrogance,
brutality and aggression has come back to haunt us all. September 11th
has happened. The mask has been ripped away. The lie has been exposed
and this criminal government now stands naked before the world! These
are provocative words, and the truth may be deeply unsettling but when
will we speak the truth? When will we end this silence? How much longer
will we wait before we are ready to finally admit that the murderer
lives in our own house, that this government that we entrusted long ago
with the sacred task of protecting life and liberty now, by its every
reckless, unjust and immoral action threatens the lives and liberty of
us all?
Have we become so complacent, so coward and intimidated by this
government that we have forgotten our own revolutionary birthright of
rebellion and dissent? Have we become so paralyzed by the eleventh of
September that we would give up our liberty and freedom for the promise
of a security that does not exist by a government that now threatens our
very lives? What will it take before we finally realize the true reality
of this crisis? How many more terrorist attacks, senseless wars, flag
draped caskets, grieving mothers, paraplegics, amputees, stressed out
sons and daughters before we finally begin to break the silence of this
shameful night? Let us open up our hearts and speak in a way we have
never spoken before knowing that lives now depend on it, and the very
survival of our nation is now at stake. Let not our silence in this
crucial moment betray us from our destiny.
Ron Kovic will be speaking at our event honoring Fernando Suarez -
Saturday October 28th, 7:00 PM at the Venice United Methodist Church
In Peace,
Frank Dorrel
310-838-8131
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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ADDICTED To WAR has a newly redesigned web site!
Check it out today!
HYPERLINK "outbind://177/www.addictedtowar.com"www.addictedtowar.com
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