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wyrmdog 's review for:
Johnny Got His Gun
by Dalton Trumbo
This book is relentlessly bleak, even with its engaging asides showing us everything that's been lost and everything that remains. It exists in a delirium of reality and dream, a place where the narrator is both living and dead, yet neither. He touches the real world intermittently, or so he believes, and as he does, we witness the struggle to be heard, we feel the agony of his choice and the injustice of choices taken from him to serve others.
As searing an indictment of capitalism as of war, of class as of violence, Johnny Got His Gun is a book that should be required reading of anyone pushing either capitalism or war, or considering service to either.
When I was in the US military, a quite popular read was Starship Troopers. It's platitudinous jingoism is threaded through every page, building a bromide to entrap the mind and divert the intellect. Its praise of the soldier is unending and its derision of those for whom we soldier repugnant. Yet its advocation of service is undeniable, gripping, and not wholly wrong. It told the soldiers reading it that not only were they honorable, but that they were morally superior to those that did not serve, and that theirs was the only voice worth considering.
Johnny Got his Gun serves unashamedly as a counterpoint to those beliefs and to the dogma of sacrifice, to such thinking that war is honorable rather than occasionally necessary and always cruel. It calls after the idea of nobility in violence and the structures that are built to sustain a war machine that grinds and grinds and spits out only misery and blood. It strips away the romance and leaves only questions.
Are there 'good' wars? Are all wars bad? Who should fight? Who should profit? What price should be extracted, from whom and more pertinently, why? At what point is it all academic and does war become the right thing to do? When is war the answer? Are we willing to pay - individually - for the goals of our wars? What would you give up, and for what?
The issue of war deserves a full accounting to those that will do the fighting, the dying, and the surviving, to those that do not participate but suffer nonetheless as men with guns strip away life and liberty both, and to those that may profit that they might see the true accounting of their prosperity. To that canon goes Trumbo's indictment to sit alongside Heinlein's paean and even Hersey's horrified lament (non-fiction though it is).
It's a sticky subject, but it is also the subject of the human condition. Humans have always waged war and probably always will. We need to understand it if it is ever to change.
As searing an indictment of capitalism as of war, of class as of violence, Johnny Got His Gun is a book that should be required reading of anyone pushing either capitalism or war, or considering service to either.
When I was in the US military, a quite popular read was Starship Troopers. It's platitudinous jingoism is threaded through every page, building a bromide to entrap the mind and divert the intellect. Its praise of the soldier is unending and its derision of those for whom we soldier repugnant. Yet its advocation of service is undeniable, gripping, and not wholly wrong. It told the soldiers reading it that not only were they honorable, but that they were morally superior to those that did not serve, and that theirs was the only voice worth considering.
Johnny Got his Gun serves unashamedly as a counterpoint to those beliefs and to the dogma of sacrifice, to such thinking that war is honorable rather than occasionally necessary and always cruel. It calls after the idea of nobility in violence and the structures that are built to sustain a war machine that grinds and grinds and spits out only misery and blood. It strips away the romance and leaves only questions.
Are there 'good' wars? Are all wars bad? Who should fight? Who should profit? What price should be extracted, from whom and more pertinently, why? At what point is it all academic and does war become the right thing to do? When is war the answer? Are we willing to pay - individually - for the goals of our wars? What would you give up, and for what?
The issue of war deserves a full accounting to those that will do the fighting, the dying, and the surviving, to those that do not participate but suffer nonetheless as men with guns strip away life and liberty both, and to those that may profit that they might see the true accounting of their prosperity. To that canon goes Trumbo's indictment to sit alongside Heinlein's paean and even Hersey's horrified lament (non-fiction though it is).
It's a sticky subject, but it is also the subject of the human condition. Humans have always waged war and probably always will. We need to understand it if it is ever to change.