Cara’s Blog

Kovic really surprised me with his audacious descriptions of his life after the war. I think that this was an effective, not vulgar, tool because the readers can truly understanding how the character is feeling. For example, the author repeatedly talks about how he lost use of his penis. As he dwells on this, he becomes very cynical about the rest of his life and his religion that had been so important to him before the war. In his anger Kovic writes “ The Church says if you play with it, it is a sin. Now… it is gone for America…I have given my numb young dick for democracy.” He escapes American democracy and his disability for a time in Mexico. As Kovic went each night from prostitute to prostitute, was relieved of some of his frustrations but realized he felt numb in more than one place.

I gasped out loud as I read the atrocities of the Veterans Administration hospital. Kovic wrote that his nurse told him he was crazy, his doctor always called him by the wrong name, and he was left lying in his own excrement for hours. “I asked for a bath. I asked for vomit to be wiped up from the floor. I asked to be treated like a human being.” The hostility that Kovic and his fellow veterans faced from the police sickened me. To be beaten and have his metals ripped from his chest my the force that is supposed to protect and serve him is simply atrocious.