Born on the Fourth of July opens with Kovic in Vietnam, where he has just been shot in his shoulder. He can’t feel his legs and vows that he has “to get out of this place, make it out of here somewhere” (31). He hears voices asking if he needs help and then is dragged into a safe hole by a stranger whose face Kovic never sees. Kovic is loaded onto a helicopter that takes him to an army hospital in Vietnam, where he sees “a man without any legs screaming in pain […] bleeding terribly from the stumps that were once his legs” (34). Kovic, though, feels happy to be in the hospital because he will be operated on and because he has survived “not because of any god, or any religion, but because I want to make it” (35). He survives surgery but has lost feeling from the chest down and wonders if the wound is his “punishment for killing the corporal and the children” (37).

In and out of sleep, Kovic watches a doctor and a corpsman blithely talk about the Green Bay Packers while trying to save the life of a black pilot, and he sees others wounded by war, including a Green Beret calling for his mother, a baby damaged by napalm, and a Korean civilian who was gravely injured on a booby trap when he went out to buy a newspaper.