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born on the 4th of july Essay

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“Born on the Fourth of July”

This book was incredible! In all truth this was the first book I have ever read cover to cover. The book, by Ron Kovic, as compared to the film, by Oliver Stone, had some impressive similarities. Both the book and the film did a great job of portraying Ron’s childhood in Massapequa, Long Island. From the little league games to playing war in the woods, leading charges and setting ambushes. This was especially well done in the movie, and exactly as I pictured them while reading the book. The time that he spent in Mexico was well defined in the book as well as in the film. While there were many similarities, what I feel is more important is to focus on the differences.
There were countless small differences in …show more content…

His parents were also a lot more concerned with him going in the film than they were in the book, especially his mother. While in the book Kovic makes it extremely clear that the most influential reason for him joining the Marines was because of the movies he saw as a boy, specifically the “Sands of Iwo Jima” and “To Hell and Back”. He loved the way that Hollywood had glamorized the battles and the wars. When he thought of war that was what he thought about, John Wayne making a stand, taking out Japs and Nazi’s with quick shots from the hip, all these things. No innocent people were hurt, the hero always came home and that hero was loved and applauded when he got there. What Kovic found out was that these ideas were indeed influenced by Hollywood. The hero seldom comes home, and during these times he was not greeted by screaming fans but by “hippies” that protested his involvement.
It also seemed that the film did not do a great job of portraying the deplorable conditions of the veteran’s hospitals. Sure they showed some of the crude parts, but for the amount of the book that was dedicated to exposing what was going on in the VA hospitals the film did not seem to express it.
From what I can tell Oliver Stone did an incredible job making this movie. There were a few discrepancies between the book and the film, but on the whole I believe

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