Will I love Johnny Got His Gun?

Published just two days after World War II was declared in Europe in 1939, and two years before the United States would enter the conflict, Dalton Trumbo’s powerfully emotional story centering on horribly wounded American World War I soldier Joe Bonham sparked controversy for its anti-war stance, while also winning the 1939 National Book Award for Most Original Book.

Apparently inspired by an article Trumbo had read about the Prince of Wales paying an emotional visit to Curley Christian, a Canadian soldier who’d survived the loss of all four limbs at the 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge. Johnny Got His… show more.

I can clearly remember where I was when I first read this anti-war novel: my bedroom in my small hometown of West Warwick, Rhode Island, with the slanted ceiling, yellow and white checkered bedspread, white and gold fake French Provincial furniture.

I bought the paperback–black cover with a stark white hand making a peace sign–at the Waldenbooks at the mall, came home, and went upstairs to read. I did not look up from that book once. I just read it straight through, all three hundred pages, horrified, mesmerized, angry, saddened. In WWI, Joe Bonham loses his ears, eyes, mouth, and… show more.

If you are looking for a traditional war novel, Dalton Trombo’s 1938 masterpiece is not it. The World War I tale of American Joe Bonham is a horror story, a gruesome, disturbing, anti-war novel told from Bonham’s point of view as he lies in a hospital bed after being wounded by a shell. 

But wounded doesn’t actually explain his situation. Bonham’s arms and legs are gone. He is also blind and deaf, and his face is missing. No eyes, ears, tongue, nose, or teeth. All he can do is think. He recalls his life before the war: his first girlfriend,… show more.

War sucks, man. And strangely, there aren’t many books about war! I can’t think of a single one. Really a missed opportunity on the part of the writer community at large. I mean, just think of the movies that could be made on the topic! Hollywood, take notes.

/s, as the kids say. More seriously: this book is claustrophobic on a cellular level. Reading it feels like suffocating in the dark. Extrapolate the ending of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream into an entire book about the horrors of war, and that’s Johnny Got His Gun.

A novel by the dude who wrote the screenplay for Spartacus, among many other films. Blacklisted during the Red Scare of the Fifties, he was indeed a communist. ‘Johnny’ is about a young man, eager for war, who gets his wish. Then he gets his arms and legs blown off, his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth destroyed, in an artillery blast, and becomes a prisoner in his own body. When he does learn to communicate, he tells his CO that he wants to go on tour as a warning against war. What follows is pretty sickening. I gave my… show more.