“You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congresses. 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. Hmmm. But what do the dead say?”
– Johnny Got His Gun
Since opening in 1909, Walter Reed Hospital, the premiere military facility in the US, has treated hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers with various degrees of injuries beginning with World War I and continuing through the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. While improved treatments in the theater have resulted in fewer deaths, the number of injured continues to add up. Indeed, a 2018 Watson Institute report on the Human Costs of War post 9/11 found that although there were less than 7,000 military deaths, there were over 50,000 injuries, including over 1,500 amputations. Modern warfare has also produced over 300,000 troops with traumatic brain injuries, 138,000 incidents of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and an estimated 6,000 suicides every year.
In Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 classic anti-war novel, “Johnny Got His Gun”, Trumbo follows the fictional life of Joe Bonham as he enters service in World War I. Within a year, he would lie in a hospital without arms, legs, or even a face, losing all his senses, from hearing, to tasting, to seeing, and smelling, while retaining his sharp mind. Inspired by an article on the reality of war for men who return with life-changing injuries, Trumbo went all in, by creating a fictional soldier trapped in his own body, not broken enough to die, but not well enough to live. Told through a stream of consciousness as he ebbed in and out of restless sleep, Bonham struggles to come to terms with life so unlike the one he left. Through past recollections and present events, his story reveals both the realities of war and eventually, his political transformation.
Trumbo’s fictitious account of the ravages of war “Johnny Got His Gun” is named after a rallying cry from the late nineteenth century encouraging boys to step up to their duties to serve their country. Using words like liberty, honor, and service, many unsuspecting youths were inspired to enlist. Sold as a rite of passage, where boys become men, these young naïfs would find out too late, that their sacrifice was bigger than their reward. Their utopian plans too often shattered with an outcome they could not have fathomed.
War is, instead, an unequal bargain resulting from unequal power. Soldiers, not unlike the slaves of the past, worked for others’ profit, especially during times when service was compulsory. They often pay the full price themselves, with death, injuries, PTSD, and time away from family. Although heralded as heroes, many end up feeling betrayed and cheated, after returning home with a variety of maladies. Only to be lionized once again, with an empty symbolic metal.
Unable to communicate successfully with his caregivers, a reflective Joe Bonham conceived of a productive and meaningful life as a war exhibit. He imagined being paraded in front of the population, like a circus act. Yet, because his body would betray the truth about war, his request was unsurprisingly denied. And since the government needs to keep the wars going, they also need the public to be oblivious to the real costs. Eventually, Bonham came to realize that the fight wasn’t against other soldiers in other nations, but against the profiteers of war, the ones who never don the uniform, but always manage to win.
As another Memorial Day arrives, and people flock to the cemeteries to honor the dead from wars long passed, Trumbo’s pacifist tale reminds us there is little pride for the dead. Given the option, they, too, would have chosen life.
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