Free Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic Page A

the last stickball game we ever played on Hamilton Avenue.
    One day that summer I quit my job at the food store and went to the little red, white, and blue shack in Levittown. My father and I went down together. It was September by the time all the paperwork was completed, September 1964. I was going to leave on a train one morning and become a marine.
    I stayed up most of the night before I left, watching the late movie. Then “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. I remember standing up and feeling very patriotic, chills running up and down my spine. I put my hand over my heart and stood rigid at attention until the screen went blank.

A WRIGHT, LADIES!” shouted the sergeant again. “My name is Staff Sergeant Joseph. This—” he said, pointing to the short sergeant at the end of the formation, “this is Sergeant Mullins. I am your senior drill instructor and he is your junior drill instructor. You will obey both of us. You will listen to everything we say. You will do everything we tell you to do. Your souls today may belong to God, but your asses belong to the United States Marine Corps!” The sergeant swaggered sharply back and forth in front of the formation, almost bouncing up and down on his heels, his long thin hands sliding up and down against his hips. “I want you swinging dicks to stand straight at attention, do you hear me? I don’t want you people to look left or right, I want you people to stand straight ahead.”
    It was unbearably hot. He could feel the sweat rolling off his face. He was afraid to look either way and he stared straight ahead like he’d been told.
    â€œLeft face!” screamed the sergeant.
    â€œYou goddamned idiots!” screamed the short sergeant again. “You’re turned the wrong way. You goddamned fucking people, you goddamned scum, when are you people gonna listen, when are you people gonna learn? You came here to be marines.”
    The short sergeant was laughing now. He took a deep breath and stepped forward, picking out one of the young boys, the tips of his shiny shoes almost touching the tips of the ones the boy wore. “You no good fucking civilian maggot,” he screamed in the boy’s ears. “You’re worthless, do you understand? And I’m gonna kill you. There are eighty of you, eighty young warm bodies, eighty sweet little ladies, eighty sweetpeas, and I want you maggots to know today that you belong to me and you will belong to me until I have made you into marines.”
    The formation was very sloppy. It didn’t look to him like a military formation at all. He was trying so hard, standing straight and looking straight ahead and cupping his hands right along the seams of his trousers the way the guidebook had taught him, the way Richie and he had practiced it so many times. He was straining till he felt his hands almost go numb, he was trying so hard to be a good marine and do what they said and boot camp hadn’t even started yet. But he was determined, even though he didn’t understand why they had to be so angry and so mean, why they had to scream and shout and curse the way they did. He couldn’t understand that, but it didn’t matter. He was going to make it, he was going to do what they said, like a good marine.
    They took them from the place where they had stayed that night and marched them and ran them shouting and screaming, eighty of them, dressed in suits and ties and sweatshirts and T-shirts, long-haired and short-haired, short ones and fat ones, kids from New Jersey, kids from Detroit, the drill instructor almost stepping on the boys’ heels, taunting and threatening, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” He looked up at the sky as he ran; he could hardly breathe.
    â€œAwright, awright, all you maggots, get in there!”
    They had come to what looked like a large hangar. And they marched, all eighty, single file, with their heads straight ahead, into the