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