Ron Kovic was a natural athlete, a shy teenager who dreamed of girls and loved baseball, God, John Wayne, John F. Kennedy, and above all his country. He was a boy who yearned to be an American hero, and who couldn't wait to enlist in the Marines and be shipped off to Vietnam to fight. But Kovic did not come marching back a hero; he came back in a wheelchair, a man with strong reservations about the conduct of the war, and a growing determination to voice those reservations. This is a reissue of his account, which became an Oscar-winning film starring Tom Cruise, of innocence lost and courage found.