Ron Kovic

Imagine having Tom Cruise play your life story in a movie, and ending up on stage in Hollywood celebrating the movie's two Oscars? All Ron Kovic had to do to achieve this fantasy was serve three tours of duty in Vietnam, get paralyzed for life by combat wounds, and write a best-selling book about it all. A war veteran turned anti-war activist, Kovic turned his 1976 autobiography, "Born on the Fourth of July", into the eponymous film with the help of fellow Vietnam vet Oliver Stone. The son of a grocery clerk and a housewife, Kovic grew up in the Midwest and New York's suburban Massapequa, Long Island. In high school he competed as a wrestler and pole vaulter, and after graduation hoped to play major league baseball. But he enlisted in the Marines in 1964, in the early days of the Vietnam war, after the assassination of President Kennedy and inspired by the speech of a Marine recruiter. His gung-ho Marine patriotism was undermined by two incidents - one in which he feared he had accide