Born on the Fourth of July is widely regarded as one of the most important works of antiwar literature to come out of the Vietnam era. The author, Ron Kovic, was a US Marine in Vietnam who was shot and paralyzed from the chest down. He dreamed of becoming a marine as a boy during his storybook adolescence and was proud to fight in the war when he joined the Marine Corps after graduating high school. He served two tours in Vietnam, but his experiences there were not what he believed they would be. The carnage was horrifying and seemingly meaningless. The choices he made in Vietnam, as the reader will see late in the book, only filled him with a deeper sense of grief, rage and pain. After being shot and paralyzed, Kovic spends months in various hospitals, first in a hospital in Vietnam where...