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Blaming America Again
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16900 |
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THE ARTS
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
2,295 Words |
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Col. Harry G. Summers, Jr.
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"All I want is for someone to love me," says Tom Cruise in his role as Ron Kovic in Oliver Stone's movie, Born on the Fourth of July. He need not have worried. Once Kovic defected to thier ranks back in 1970, the antiwar movement positively adored him, for he gave those pampered and precocious “revolutionaries," who themselves had shirked Vietnam service, an unbeatable symbol with which to flay "America".
Twenty years later, Stone continues the assault with his movie about Kovic's exploits. It must have seemed like a surefire formula. After all, how could anyone attack a genuine Marine war hero who had sacrificed so much for his country? And, whatever one thinks about him otherwise, there is no question of Kovic's sacrifice. He experienced, and still experiences, every soldier's nightmare.
There is a very good reason why heliborne air assault troops sit on their helmets enroute to the battle area. Better a bullet in the head than a bullet in the groin. As Kovic himself said poignantly in his 1976 book, "I have given my dead swinging dick for America. I have given my numb young dick for democracy. It is gone and numb, lost somewhere out there by the river where the artillery is screaming in. Oh God, oh God I want it back!"
Shot by a North Vietnamese soldier during a firefight along the DMZ (demilitarized zone) between North and South Vietnam, then Sergeant Kovic emerged paralyzed from the chest down. By his own admission that fact - with all that of the despair and the impotence that it entails - has driven him mad. And that pitiful madness, cynically exploited for all it's worth by the antiwar movement in the 1970s and now by director Oliver Stone, has given him a kind of immunity from criticism. But even pity has its limits.
Defining Limits
How to define those limits is not a new problem. Over two hundred years ago, in April 1776, it was the topic of conversation between Dr. Samuel Johnson and Mr. Alexander Murray, the solicitor general of Scotland. "It seems to me," said Murray, "that we are not angry at a man for controverting an opinion which we believe and value; we should rather pity him."
"If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand," replied Johnson, "no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards."
Exactly. The primary consideration of Americans, and Vietnam veterans in particular, is to take care of ourselves. With Born on the Fourth of July, Stone has come into the theater with a "stick" (Ron Kovic played by Tom Cruise) in his hand and deliberately set out to flay the audience with his convoluted "truths" about the Vietnam War, to stir up old passions, and to break open old wounds. We should pity the state of Stone's and Kovic's minds. But first we should knock them down.
And that's especially true for Vietnam veterans whose honor and integrity are being impugned, for if the truth is to be told about Vietnam, it is the Vietnam veterans who will have to insist that it be told. Those fellow citizens not directly involved in the Vietnam War - and that means
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