made his way to the Ash Grove. We became friends, social and
political, enabling me to see the growth of the most moving, effective
anti-war figure in the U.S., from then til now. He just wrote, asking me
to post this. I replied that he'd read my mind as I'd saved it for today,
Sunday. It's a beautiful, horrible cautionary tale for these times.
Ed
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/in_the_presence_of_my_enemy_a_reflection_20110120/
In the Presence of My Enemy: A Reflection on War and Forgiveness
By Ron Kovic
Truthdig: January 20, 2011
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou
anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. (Psalms 23:5)
As this, the 43rd anniversary of my wounding in Vietnam approaches, and I
once again try to find meaning in that day and the days which were to
follow, my thoughts return to the northern bank of the Cua Viet River on
Jan. 20, 1968. It is a day that will change my life forever.
I am medevaced from the battlefield to the intensive care ward in Da Nang,
Vietnam. For the next several days I struggle with everything inside me to
live. The dead and dying are everywhere. I am in and out of morphine every
four hours. I awaken to the screams of the wounded all around me-young men
like myself, 19, 20-year-olds. I am told by a doctor that I will never walk
again, that I will be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.
Still I am grateful to be alive, to still be breathing. I dream of my
hometown, of my mother, my father and my backyard where I had played as a
boy. All I want to do now is survive, to get out of this place somehow and
return home. I completely lose track of time; I don't know if it is day or
night. They keep bringing in the wounded and carting out the dead.
It is the eve of the Tet offensive. A young Vietnamese man who has been
severely wounded is brought into the intensive care ward. I can still
remember that day clearly-his face, the fear in his eyes. One of the nurses
tells me that he is a Viet Cong soldier who had been shot in the chest only
a few days before. I look into his eyes as he is carefully placed in his bed
directly across from me. "He's the enemy, the Viet Cong, the 'Gook,' the
Communist," I think to myself, "the one my country sent me to fight and
kill. The one I must fear, the one I must hate, the man who is not even
human."
That belief and hatred had been reinforced in Marine Corp boot camp, at
Parris Island, S.C., where we had chanted, "I'm going to go to Vietnam. I'm
going to kill the Viet Cong!" Perhaps he was the one who had pulled the
trigger a few days before, trying to kill me, the one who had shot and
paralyzed me from my mid-chest down for the rest of my life. I will never
know for sure. Yet as I lie in that hospital bed and our eyes meet, I feel
no hatred or animosity toward him. On the contrary, I feel compassion for
this man I had been taught to hate, this man who is my enemy.
Each day upon awakening from the morphine I look at him and he looks back at
me, our eyes meeting, our gaze a recognition of each other's presence, our
humanity, an understanding that both our worlds have been turned upside down
and we are now in a far different place than we had been only a few days
before. We reach an equality of sorts in this place of the wounded and
dying, that great leveler, where distinctions vanish, where there is no
prejudice or hatred, where all becomes equal. We are two wounded young men
in late January of 1968 simply trying to survive, two human beings who only
want to live.
A sort of unique bond begins to develop between my "enemy" and myself over
the next several days, a strange and at first somewhat uneasy camaraderie
without words, which is both unsettling and at the same time seems
completely natural to me. I do not think of him as my enemy anymore. I begin
to care about him more and each time I awaken from the morphine, and with
the screams of the wounded and dying all around me, I reach out to him with
my eyes, with my heart, as he lies across from me in his bed. I now want him
to live just as much as I want to live.
"Keep fighting," I think as I watch him trying to communicate. We are
together in this now, and none of those other things seem to matter anymore.
"If you don't give up I won't give up," I think, pressing my lips together,
reaching out to him, one human being to another, no longer enemies-two young
men struggling to live and go home, leave all of this sorrow behind, back to
our families, our homes and our towns where it was simple again, where it
was safe.
The days and nights and hours pass. The lights are always on and I never
know if it is night or day, and after a while it doesn't really matter
anymore. I awake one day and look across and see the empty hospital bed. He
is gone, and the nurse tells me he has died. There is no emotion in her
voice. She is very tired, and there will be many more dead and many more
wounded before it is all over. I stare at his empty bed for a long time,
feeling a sadness I could not fully comprehend.
In the years that have passed, I have often thought about those days on the
intensive care ward and about that young Vietnamese man, my "enemy," who lay
in that hospital bed across from me, and how we are all perhaps much closer
to each other as brothers and sisters on this Earth than we realize. Despite
all our differences, there is, I believe, a powerful connectedness to our
humanity-a deep desire to reach out with kindness, with love and great
caring toward each other, even to our supposed enemies, and to bring forth
"the better angels of our nature"-that is undeniable and cannot be
extinguished, even in death.
This, I believe, is the hope of the world. This is the faith we now need in
these times.
In the years that followed, I would attempt to write about the war and about
that long and often difficult journey home, trying to give meaning to what I
and so many others had gone through. There would be other profound moments
of reconciliation and forgiveness to come, but almost always my mind would
drift back to that young Vietnamese man who laid across from me for those
few brief days on the Da Nang intensive care ward in 1968.
Ron Kovic served two tours of duty as a U.S. Marine in the Vietnam War and
was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. In combat on Jan. 20,
1968, he suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the
chest down. He became one of the best-known peace activists among the
veterans of the war.
Kovic was born in Ladysmith, Wis., and grew up in Massapequa, N.Y.
His autobiography, "Born on the Fourth of July," was adapted as an Academy
Award-winning film directed by Oliver Stone and starring Tom Cruise as
Kovic. Kovic received a Golden Globe for his screenplay adaptation of his
autobiography.
Kovic is an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq.
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