What do you call a guy with no arms, no legs, no ears...

Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo

He was just your ordinary joe: nineteen, maybe twenty years old. Somebody's son. Somebody's brother. Somebody's friend. Somebody's co-worker. Somebody's lover. And then one spring day he stepped aboard a troop train in Los Angeles, bound for the trenches of the war that the politicians said would make the world safe for democracy; the first step of a journey that would never end. His name was Joe Bonham, and he took up arms to answer a call he didn't even understand. What happened to Joe after that should never happen to any living creature.

A couple of decades ago a spate of tasteless little jokes made all the rounds; each followed a simple pattern: "What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs sitting on your front porch?"* Oh, there were dozens of 'em, all answered with a name or nickname; none of them really all that witty -- just sort of the elephant jokes of the eighties. They do, however, bring us to the question in the title:

What do you call a guy with no arms, no legs, no ears, no face, no eyes, no mouth, no nose... Dalton Trumbo called him Joe Bonham, and made his GI Joe the subject of the twentieth century's most renowned antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Trumbo's novel was written about the First World War and published at the dawn of World War II. The book's been reprinted more than forty times; it was made into a movie at the height of the Vietnam war. Today, more than sixty years after first publication, Trumbo's narrative remains ageless, relying on a simple message spoken in the voice of a frightened young man.

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're pretty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in the churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.

Hmmmm...

But what do the dead say?

This is a text that is as distant from Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown as one could possibly get. There is no glorious battle action, no fall-on-the-grenade heroism, no gritty cigarette-behind-the ear dialogue, no bombs bursting in air, no crisp pennants flapping in the breeze. No war. Everything that occurs in Johnny Got His Gun happens inside Joe's head, for -- as we learn right along with our narrator -- his brain is the only thing left that works.

Joe imagines a telephone ringing, ringing, ringing in the distance -- and he dreams that his mother is calling the bakery where he worked to tell him his father just died. When he realizes that the only sounds he hears are inside his skull, he knows he's deaf. But that's OK, a deaf man can get by if he works at it. Chapter by chapter, we see Joe as a boy, a young man -- we see the funny tales of his co-workers at the bakery. We go fishing with him and his dad in the Rockies. We share his last night with Kareen, the young woman whose ring he wears. But the hand that wore the ring is gone, and so is the other. Chapter by chapter, we are led through an horrific inventory of a battered body. No legs. No arms. His entire face wiped out by an exploding artillery shell -- deaf, blind, dumb, no lips, no tongue, no nose, no eyes. How can he not go mad?

I can't. I can't stand it. Scream. Move. Shake something. Make a noise any noise. I can't stand it. Oh no no no.

Please I can't. Please no. Somebody come. Help me. I can't lie here forever like this until maybe years from now I die. I can't. Nobody can. It isn't possible.

I can't breathe but I'm breathing. I'm so scared I can't think but I'm thinking. Oh please please no. No no. It isn't me. Help me. It can't be me. Not me. No no no.

Oh please oh oh please. No no no please no. Please.

Not me.

Years before Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross tallied the stages of dying, Trumbo wrote all about the pleading.

And then Trumbo wrote about the acceptance. Here lies a man who, by any reckoning including his own, would certainly be better off dead. He's imprisoned inside a body that retains only one sense; touch; but lacks fingertips with which to feel. Yet he uses what little remains to try to master his environment: first, he tackles the passage of time. How do you know how long a day is when you cannot see the sunrise, or hear a clock? Joe masters time with logic and persistence. Having beaten the clock in his own way, he attempts to communicate; and the idea that he wants to communicate is that his mutilated body should be the ultimate example for peace. But it is not to be.

The language of Johnny Got His Gun is the language of a young man, literate but not well educated. He makes no impassioned polysyllabic pleas for peace, he speaks only in the plain language of working-class folk. The sentences are short, the sentences are simple; flowing in a stream from Joe's consciousness. The thoughts are simple and sincere, expressed in self-talk; for there is no other way for Joe to express himself. Trumbo's choice of language is much of the reason why this work has lasted, because it is couched in terms that almost anyone can understand. The life Joe relives and retells is one that each of us can relate to: he remembers teenage angst, first love, a boy's coming of age, a child's loss of his father. Each time he realizes yet another part of his body is gone, he slips into memory of the sensations he can never have again. The sound of his mother reading "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"; the sound of artillery shells whistling to earth. The scent of the pines high in the Colorado Rockies; the odor of a dead body in no-mans-land. The glorious colors of a desert sky at sunset; the sight of rats feasting on a dead body in the trenches. The touch of his lover's hand; the cold muck in a foxhole. All gone; the good and the bad.

A poster child for peace indeed.

On censorship and Book Banning:

In the first (1959) of his two introductions to Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo wrote that the timing of the book's first publication was unfortunate. Few but the most radical would disagree with the oft-repeated sentiment that, if any war was ever necessary, it was World War II. Although a dedicated pacifist, Trumbo allowed the book to go out of print for the duration of the war once the US had entered in 1941:

After Pearl Harbor its subject matter seemed as inappropriate to the times as the shriek of bagpipes... My correspondents, a number of whom used elegant stationery and sported tidewater addresses... proposed a national rally for peace-now, with me as cheer leader; they promised (and delivered) a letter campaign to pressure the editor for a fresh edition.

Nothing could have convinced me so quickly that Johnny was exactly the sort of book that shouldn't be reprinted until the war's end. The publishers agreed.

Long a dedicated leftist, Trumbo chose this self-censorship when he found his work becoming a vehicle for right-wing opposition to America's entrance into World War II. He was, however, more than happy to find its resurgence as a rallying point for a new generation of antiwar activists during the Vietnam era, as evidenced by these words in his second foreword to the book, circa 1971:

Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 Americans dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.

An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children who will never be born. (The last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already.)

Trumbo was himself the victim of perhaps the one of the most heinous act of censorship in American history. When the longtime Communist was called to testify before Joseph McCarthy's House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1947, he refused to speak. For this "contempt," he was jailed briefly, and blacklisted. The blacklist period lasted from 1947 until 1960, when director Otto Preminger announced that he would hire Trumbo as screenwriter for "Exodus." Trumbo was not by any means inactive during his blacklist period. The prolific writer worked under several different pseudonyms (including James Bonham). His work during and after the blacklist period includes the screenplays for "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," "Papillon," and "Exodus," among others.

In what may well be the ultimate triumph of an artist over censorship, in 1956 the Blacklisted Trumbo won a screenwriting Academy Award for "The Brave Ones," written under the assumed name Robert Rich.

* you call him Matt.

copyright © 2009-2017 scmrak

A Tale of a Tutsi

Strength in What Remains – Tracy Kidder

As is the custom of his people, Deogratias has a single name. As the family tells it, his mother looked upon her tiny newborn and cried, “Deo gratias!” and that is how his name became “Thanks be to God.” He prefers to be called Deo, caring not at all that, to those who speak Latin, he asks to be called “God.” Deo was born into a deceptively simple society, the son and grandson of cowherds who’d always assumed that his destiny, too, was to be a cowherd. Life had other plans for Deogratias, however, plans he welcomed: Deo would become a doctor. So when he finished secondary schooling, Deo entered his tiny country’s one medical school. He wanted to be a doctor to help his people you see; to build a clinic near his village where the sick and the injured could find comfort. Then life took a different turn. As Deo served his internship in a village near the border, however, ethnic violence erupted. It was October, 1993, and that country was Burundi: the desperately poor central African nation next door to Rwanda. Deo remembers his classmates whispering among themselves before the violence began; puzzling through the slogans they shared: “At the level of the ear!” and “Heat him up!” all advice on how to kill the hated enemy. Deo just didn’t realize that he was the enemy… And so he fled, dodging men (and women) wielding guns and machetes, transistor radios pressed to their ears as some unseen voice chanted the same instructions to its followers over and over.

You need to know that Deo is Tutsi; an ethnic “fact” he had only recently learned in 1993 – a fact that colors his being to this very day. Deo spent not just those first long and violent October days, but the next six months fleeing for his life. He witnessed scenes of unspeakable brutality: massacre, mutilation, and degradation; all based on a belief that Tutsis are different from Hutus.

Deo must have been born under a lucky star: in 1994, after six months hiding from his Hutu neighbors, he flew from Burundi to New York City on a faked business visa. When he arrived in the States, he spoke not a word of English; only French and his native Kirundi. For the next year, Deo survived by squatting in an abandoned tenement; living in the forest of Central Park; delivering groceries twelve hours a day, six days a week for fifteen dollars a day. He survived because people noticed the slender young man with the unquenchable thirst for knowledge and the unstoppable drive to become the doctor he’d planned to be. He survived because the strength of his character and of his will impressed people – people with the means to see his dream come true. Within five years, Deo was a student at Columbia University on his way to a medical degree.

This is his story – and it is the story of Burundi: the two are inextricably intertwined.

The William Wordsworth poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood gives us the familiar phrase, “splendor in the grass” (the title of the 1961 Oscar-winner written by William Inge and directed by Elia Kazan). Later in the same stanza of his poem, however, Wordsworth speaks to the darker side of human emotion:

“…Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind…”

It is from this same ode that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder takes the title of his latest work; Strength in What Remains. The saga of Deo’s escape from Burundi and his “rebirth” as an adopted American are more than simple history; more than some sort of modern success story. It is also a stark depiction of cultural differences – not merely the hypertribalism that led to the mass murders in Rwanda and Burundi, but of other, simpler differences. Deo’s native Kurundi has a word for which there is no English equivalent. No strike that, there is an English equivalent for the word – there is no American equivalent for the practice. It’s a culture that either lacks or suppresses the victim mentality that so seems to characterize our society. The word is gusimbura:

“…And when we get to Butanza we don’t talk about Clovis.”
“Why?”
“Because people don’t talk about people who died. By their names, anyways. They call it gusimbura. If for example you say, ‘Oh, your granddad.’ And you say his name to people, they say you gusimbura them. It’s a bad word. You are reminding people…” Deo’s voice trailed off.
“You’re reminding people of something bad?”
“Yes It’s hard to understand, because in the Western world…” Again, Deo left the thought half finished.
“People try to remember?”
“Yah.”
“Here in Burundi, they try to forget?”
“Exactly, he said."

That entire concept seems as alien to our society as the word itself: gusimbura…

Tracy Kidder might well have yanked his readers’ heartstrings in writing Strength in What Remains by playing to their emotions; he chose not to. It would have been unutterably simple to have cast Deo’s story as some great rags-to-riches triumph with overtones of Horatio Alger. After all, Deo arrived in New York without a word of English and only two hundred dollars to his name; yet he ended up a student at a prestigious university, a student who returned to a tiny village in a backwards country as a hero. Kidder, however, laid out Deo’s story in simple, straightforward prose; avoiding those bloody details that both titillate and disgust. Where necessary, he called upon scholarly explanations of the Hutu/Tutsi conflict, which he writes is rooted in European colonialism instead of ethnic differences. Instead of concentrating on the horrific violence – obviously, his narrative cannot completely ignore it – Kidder chooses to concentrate on the stories of people who sheltered Deo and helped him escape. It’s the people to whom he owes his life that Deo honors in his return to Burundi, in his creation of a clinic in a small border town.

Kidder is clearly in awe of his Burundian friend. It speaks from the pages of the first half of Strength in What Remains where the author recounts the incredible resolve of this young man. He was barely out of his teens when he escaped the violence in Africa, only to be dropped unceremoniously into – and eventually thrive within – a culture so foreign that he might as well be among Martians. As a young refugee, he learned English (a damnably difficult language) to matriculate at a prestigious university. Kidder’s admiration for Deo is just as obvious in the second half, which recounts a 2006 journey the two men took to Burundi. Deo returned to his native land in hopes of bringing healthcare to one of the poorest nations on Earth. Yet in recounting the story of Deo’s flight and the following fifteen years, Kidder does not toss about superlatives. He chooses instead to matter-of-factly recount Deo’s history and his vision. Deogratias is a humble man, and Kidder respects that humility. Simply put, Strength in What Remains is the story of a remarkable young man, elegantly told.

copyright © 2009-2017 scmrak