Johnny
Got What?
But the wordsmiths keep on keeping on. At least one American anti-war work has been deemed so harmless by adult powers-that-be that it's made it into the standard high school curriculum. We all know what an antiseptic effect high school English class has on any work taught there. Which means that The Red Badge of Courage has been pretty much defanged. Just before the start of World War II, America produced another anti-war novel, more powerful than anything before, or since. The timing of the publication of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun was unfortunate, coming just days before the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Though six years of world carnage overwhelmed the book, it is a work of such force that word got around through the 1950s. As the American war in Vietnam escalated, so did awareness of Johnny Got His Gun. One of the prime movers in bringing the book to a wider public at that time was Paul Krassner. No issue of The Realist, of which Krassner was founder and editor, went by without a blurb and an order form for Johnny. The status of the book in the 1960s changed rapidly from that of an "underground" classic to that of an aboveground must- read. (So well known did it finally become that even Hollywood was moved to try its hand. The disastrous movie should be avoided.)** Given the continuing hair trigger belligerence of our self-satisfied wired world, it's only a matter of time till we plunge again into the nightmare of war. Cynicism? Realism? Who knows? The only thing that seems clear is that, for all our growing bandwidth, we still have not even begun to address the underlying madness of human history. Still, if every mother could somehow get every teenage son to read Johnny Got His Gun, we might be able to avoid the next nightmare. And not just American mothers. War, after all, is an accepted form of insanity practiced intermittently and with some pride by all humans. <> Trumbo's premise is devastatingly simple: For 300 pages he puts you inside the head of a World War I veteran. We share Johnny's*** memories of life before the war. With him, we recall how he was swept up in the tide of patriotic fervor as war came closer and closer. He was sure that if his country would just give him a gun along with a bit of training, he could cross the ocean and find glory as he defeated the enemy. And we also share, in relentless detail, the horrific nature of his present situation. Johnny, you see, wound up in a trench in France as a shell exploded nearby. Johnny survived, but with a certain amount of collateral damage. He lost both legs, both arms, his face, his eyes, his ears, and his voice. He is the ultimate basket case. Johnny got his gun, all right. And now everybody agrees he's a hero. The only thing is, he's also a monster--this ultimate basket case--tucked away in a veteran's hospital where nobody but the medical staff has to think about him. Is war worth it? Is pride in any system of human governance that repeatedly leads to war justified? We all, experts and non experts, have various answers to those questions. Before you speak your own answer with too much confidence, I'd urge you to get a second opinion from Johnny. Lend him an ear, which he is in much need of. Fiction? Yes. But we can dismiss it only because we choose not to think about the real Johnny's who are still tucked away in veterans' hospitals, well tended unto the end of their days of suffering. Propaganda? Yes. But, unlike the abstract propaganda of those who speak of glorious and just wars, it is propaganda based in the day to day, minute to minute, second to second pain and deprivation of a patriot-soldier who, unlike the thousands lying beneath neat white crosses in Europe and elsewhere, didn't quite die. Almost, but not quite. And that is the horrible challenge that Dalton Trumbo presents to the reader. Will you look, or will you look away? END Want more info?
***For purposes of plot, the mute lump of barely living flesh has a name in the book: Joe Bonham. The "Johnny" of the title--and the "Johnny" I use here--is Everyman. Not the least of the American ironies that Trumbo is playing off of here is the old Civil War song, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," with its celebratory words about the "hero's" return sung against its dirge-like minor-key music.
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People have been writing anti-war books for quite a while, a couple of
thousand years, give or take a few centuries. Have they done any good? It's hard to see
how, given the 