Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo (1939) (read in 2022)

“He had no legs and no arms and no eyes and no ears and no nose and no mouth and no tongue. What a hell of a dream. It must be a dream. Of course sweet god it’s a dream. He’d have to wake up or he’d go nuts. Nobody could live like that. A person in that condition would be dead and he wasn’t dead so he wasn’t in that condition. Just dreaming.”

“He was the future he was a perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight that war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn’t fight.”

“And if they put guns in our hands and point us to kill other human beings, no one will have to tell us who the enemy is this time, because we will know, we will certainly know. The enemy is the government in all its greed and corruption, in all its scheming and manipulations, in its endless desire for profit at the expense of human lives. Try it again, and we will fight you with everything within us, and we will not rest until there is an end to war for all time, and all of us together can begin to truly live.”

“Maybe that’s a bad way to think. There are lots of idealists around who will say have we got so low that nothing is more precious than life? Surely there are ideals worth fighting for even dying for. If not then we are worse than the beasts of the field and have sunk into barbarity. Then you say that’s all right let’s be barbarous just so long as we don’t have war. You keep your ideals just as long as they don’t cost me my life.”

“Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn’t know what death is. He isn’t able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn’t know anything about dying.”

“Maybe times are bad and your salaries are low. Don’t worry boys because there is always a way to cure things like that. Have a war and then prices go up and wages go up and everybody makes a hell of a lot of money. There’ll be one along pretty soon boys so don’t get impatient. It’ll come and then you’ll have your chance.”

“And if they put guns in our hands and point us to kill other human beings, no one will have to tell us who the enemy is this time, because we will know, we will certainly know. The enemy is the government in all its greed and corruption, in all its scheming and manipulations, in its endless desire for profit at the expense of human lives. Try it again, and we will fight you with everything within us, and we will not rest until there is an end to war for all time, and all of us together can begin to truly live.”

“The book has a weird political history. Written in 1938 when pacifism was anathema to the American left and most of the center, it went to the printers in the spring of 1939 and was published on September third—ten days after the Nazi–Soviet pact, two days after the start of World War II.”

“As the conflict deepened, and Johnny went out of print altogether, its unavailability became a civil liberties issue with the extreme American right. Peace organizations and “Mothers’” groups from all over the country showered me with fiercely sympathetic letters denouncing Jews, Communists, New Dealers and international bankers, who had suppressed my novel to intimidate millions of true Americans who demanded an immediate negotiated peace.”

“ADDENDUM: 1970 Eleven years later. Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American 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.”

“Things weren’t going well and they never would have gone well for you and it’s just as good you’re dead. People’ve got to be quicker and harder these days than you were dad. Goodnight and good-dreams. I won’t forget you and I’m not as sorry for you today as I was yesterday. I loved you dad goodnight.”

“His mother would go back to the piano and play After the Ball is Over and Clem somewhere would be listening to music for maybe the first time in three or four months. Farmers’ wives would be sitting with their work done and receivers to their ears listening too and getting dreamy and thinking about things their husbands wouldn’t suspect […]”

“But even better than the bread were the rolls. She baked them to come out of the oven just before supper. They were steaming hot and you put butter inside them and it melted and then you put jam on them or apricot preserves with nuts in the syrup. That was all you wanted for supper although you had to eat other things of course. On summer afternoons you took a thick slice of the bread and put cold butter on it. Then you sprinkled sugar over the butter and that was better than cake. Or you got a thick slice of sweet bermuda onion and put it between two slabs of bread and butter and nobody anywhere in the world had anything more delicious to eat.”

“All you wanted to do Joe was to live. You were born and raised in the good healthy country of Colorado and you had no more to do with Germany or England or France or even with Washington D.C. than you had to do with the man in the moon. Yet here you are and it was none of your affair. Here you are Joe and you’re hurt worse than you think. You’re hurt bad.”

“Oh Kareen why do they have a war right now just when we find each other? Kareen we’ve got more important things than war. Us Kareen you and me in a house. I’ll come home at night to you in my house your house our house. We’ll have fat happy kids smart kids too. That’s more important than a war.”

“His head throbbed and he could hear his heart pounding against his ribs and even down in the calves of his legs he could feel the strong pulse beat and yet he couldn’t stop work even for a minute. His breath came shorter and shorter and it seemed that his lungs were too small to hold the air he had to get into them if he was going to keep alive. It was a hundred and twenty-five in the shade and there wasn’t any shade and he felt like he was smothering under a white hot blanket and all he could think was I’ve got to stop I’ve got to stop I’ve got to stop.”

“He had no legs and no arms and no eyes and no ears and no nose and no mouth and no tongue. What a hell of a dream. It must be a dream. Of course sweet god it’s a dream. He’d have to wake up or he’d go nuts. Nobody could live like that. A person in that condition would be dead and he wasn’t dead so he wasn’t in that condition. Just dreaming.”

“He couldn’t live like this because he would go crazy. But he couldn’t die because he couldn’t kill himself. If he could only breathe he could die. That was funny but it was true. He could hold his breath and kill himself. That was the only way left. Except that he wasn’t breathing. His lungs were pumping air but he couldn’t stop them from doing it. He couldn’t live and he couldn’t die.”

“He hardly ever got tired. When you got to thinking about it it wasn’t bad. Walking all night long and working hard and getting eighteen dollars at the end of the week for your trouble. Not bad.”

“He was lying in stillness. He was completely helpless. Somewhere sticking in his stomach was a tube they fed him through. That was exactly like the womb except a baby in its mother’s body could look forward to the time when it would live.”

“He would be in this womb forever and ever and ever. He must remember that. He must never expect or hope for anything different. This was his life from now on every day and every hour and every minute of it. He would never again be able to say hello how are you I love you. He would never again be able to hear music or the whisper of the wind through trees or the chuckle of running water. He would never again breathe in the smell of a steak frying in his mother’s kitchen or the dampness of spring in the air or the wonderful fragrance of sagebrush carried on the wind across a wide open plain.”

“He found himself running through the corridors of the hospital. He found himself coming upon a nurse and grabbing her by the throat and putting her head down to the hole in his side where the rat was still clinging and hollering at her you lazy slut why don’t you come and chase the rats off your customers? He was running through the night shrieking. Running through a whole series of nights running through an eternity of nights yelling for Christ sake somebody take this rat off me see him hanging there? Running through a lifetime of nights and shrieking and trying to push the rat off and feeling the rat sink its teeth deeper and deeper.”

“Each time he fell asleep the rat would come and sleep instead of being forgetfulness would become as bad as being awake.”

“That was the way to stop nightmares by yelling so hard you waked yourself up. But hell that wouldn’t work for him now. In the first place he couldn’t yell and in the second place he was so deaf he couldn’t hear the noise anyhow. That was no good. He would have to find some other way.”

“Jesus he was in an awful mess. He was in an awful mess if he couldn’t even tell whether he was awake or asleep. But there wasn’t any way to tell he could think of.”

“It was hard to understand how his father could be such a big failure when you stopped to think about the thing. He was a good man and an honest man. He kept his children together and they ate good food fine food rich food better food than people ate in the cities. Even rich people in the cities couldn’t get vegetables as fresh or as crisp. They couldn’t get meat as well cured. No amount of money could buy that. Those things you had to raise for yourself. His father had managed to do it even to the honey they used on the hot biscuits his mother made. His father had managed to produce all these things on two city lots and yet his father was a failure.”

“He was lonely for one look for one smell for one taste for one word that would bring Shale City and his father and his mother and his sisters back to him. But he was so cut off from them that even if they were standing beside his bed they would be as distant as if they were ten thousand miles away.”

“Maybe that’s a bad way to think. There are lots of idealists around who will say have we got so low that nothing is more precious than life? Surely there are ideals worth fighting for even dying for. If not then we are worse than the beasts of the field and have sunk into barbarity. Then you say that’s all right let’s be barbarous just so long as we don’t have war. You keep your ideals just as long as they don’t cost me my life.”

“Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn’t know what death is. He isn’t able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn’t know anything about dying.”

“Now if you die to protect your life you aren’t alive anyhow so how is there any sense in a thing like that? A man doesn’t say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving. He doesn’t say I will spend all my money in order to save my money. He doesn’t say I will burn my house down in order to keep it from burning. Why then should he be willing to die for the privilege of living? There ought to be at least as much common sense about living and dying as there is about going to the grocery store and buying a loaf of bread.”

“Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t. If it does all you have to do is to wait six more trips and see if there is another sunrise and if there is you’ll have the number of trips every twenty-four hours and that will give you a way of setting up a calendar around the nurse’s visits. The important thing is to catch two sunrises in a row and then you have trapped time forever then you can begin to catch up with the world.”

“He had been a very busy guy and he had learned a lot. He had learned how to check everything against something else so that he couldn’t possibly lose the grip he had gained on time. He could tell day from night without straining for the sunrise. He knew exactly what visit from the nurse would bring him a bath and a change of bedclothes. When the schedule was interrupted and the nurse was a visit late he grew disappointed and sullen and tried to imagine what she was doing but when she finally came he was always excited.”

“Kareen would never grow old. She was still nineteen. She would be nineteen forever. Her hair would stay brown and her eyes clear and her skin fresh like rain. He would never let one line mark her face. That was something he could do for her that no other man on earth could ever do.”

“A guy liked to think he was home. Even though he could do nothing but lie in blackness it would be better if the blackness were the blackness of home and if the people who moved in the blackness were his own people his own American people.”

“Her hands sought out the far parts of his body. They inflamed his nerves with a kind of false passion that fled in little tremors along the surface of his skin. Even while he was thinking oh my god it’s come to this here is the reason she thinks I’m tapping goddam her god bless her what shall I do?—even while he was thinking it he fell in with her rhythm he strained to her touch his heart pounded to a faster tempo and he forgot everything in the world except the motion and the sudden pumping of his blood […]”

“How the great Carthaginian lords wanting someone to guard their treasure stores would find a healthy young man and put out his eyes with sharp sticks so he wouldn’t be able to see where they took him and thus learn the location of their treasures. Then they would take him poor blinded young guy down into the passages under the level of the streets to the door of the treasure house. There they chained one arm and one leg to the door and one arm and one leg to the wall so that for anyone to enter the seal would have to be broken and the seal was the living breathing body of a man.”

“God help us he thought god help us all the slaves. For hundreds and thousands of years we have been tapping we slaves tapping away from the depths of our prisons. All of us all of the little guys all the slaves from the beginning of time tapping tapping tapping—”

“He was falling a million times faster than a shooting star falling faster than light travels falling through ten thousand years and ten thousand worlds with things becoming louder and faster and more terrible. Great round globes bigger than the sun bigger than the whole milky way came at him so fast they might have been cards shuffled through a pack. They came at him and hit him full in the face and burst like soap bubbles to make way for the next and the next. His brain was working so fast that he had time to flinch for each one and after it had burst to prepare himself for the shock of the next.”

“The nightmare train went on through the sunlight its whistle screeching and the dead men inside laughing. But he was alone in the desert running running till his lungs squeaked running toward Christ who floated there in the heat with purple robes. He ran and he ran and he ran and finally he came up to Christ. He threw himself into the hot sand at the feet of Christ and began to cry.”

“Maybe times are bad and your salaries are low. Don’t worry boys because there is always a way to cure things like that. Have a war and then prices go up and wages go up and everybody makes a hell of a lot of money. There’ll be one along pretty soon boys so don’t get impatient. It’ll come and then you’ll have your chance.”

“And if they draft you why you’ve got a good chance of coming back without so many needs. Maybe you’ll need only one shoe instead of two that’s saving money. Maybe you’ll be blind and if you are why then you never need worry about the expense of glasses. Maybe you’ll be lucky like me. Look at me close boys I don’t need anything. A little broth or something three times a day and that’s all. No shoes no socks no underwear no shirt no gloves no hat no necktie no collar-buttons no vest no coat no movies no vaudeville no football not even a shave.”

“Quit crying you silly little girl come over here and look at the nice man the nice man who was a soldier boy. You remember him don’t you? Don’t you remember little crybaby how you waved flags and saved tinfoil and put your savings in thrift stamps? Of course you do you silly. Well here’s the soldier you did it for.”

“New nursery rhymes for new times. Hickory dickory dock my daddy’s nuts from shellshock. Humpty dumpty thought he was wise till gas came along and burned out his eyes. A diller a dollar a ten o’clock scholar blow off his legs and then watch him holler. Rockabye baby in the treetop don’t stop a bomb or you’ll probably flop. Now I lay me down to sleep my bombproof cellar’s good and deep but if I’m killed before I wake remember god it’s for your sake amen.”

“Let them talk more munitions and airplanes and battleships and tanks and gases why of course we’ve got to have them we can’t get along without them how in the world could we protect the peace if we didn’t have them? Let them form blocs and alliances and mutual assistance pacts and guarantees of neutrality. Let them draft notes and ultimatums and protests and accusations.”

“He saw a world of dead fathers and crippled brothers and crazy screaming sons. He saw a world of armless mothers clasping headless babies to their breasts trying to scream out their grief from throats that were cancerous with gas. He saw starved cities black and cold and motionless and the only things in this whole dead terrible world that made a move or a sound were the airplanes that blackened the sky and far off against the horizon the thunder of the big guns and the puffs that rose from barren tortured earth when their shells exploded.”

“He was the future he was a perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight that war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn’t fight.”

“In your opinion, given the current state of world affairs, is Johnny Got His Gun still an important book?”