A Book Review

Few works of fiction have truly altered my perspective or permanently haunted my thoughts. One is Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. I have never done a book review here but this story has been on my mind lately and I wanted to share.

Joe Bonham is an American Soldier who is severely wounded in WWI. He wakes up without knowing what has happened to him or where he is. Through self observation and the few remaining senses he has left, he comes to realize his horrific state: existing within the gap between the living and the dead. Both of his arms and legs have been amputated and his face has been blown off. He cannot see, hear, taste or talk, and he lies in a hospital in an unknown country. The reader goes through his struggles of coming to grips with this reality as his mind wanders back and forth between his past and his immediate condition, as well as his desperate and futile attempts to communicate with his caregivers. Through vibrations, touch, and temperature changes, he keeps himself busy by learning patterns – and in time figures out the time of day and staff shift changes, anything to clue him in on gaining a foothold in the outside world, meanwhile placing himself in the path of sedation due to his incessant head motions – attempts at communication by using Morse Code, mistaken for spasms. The quiet times are spent flashing back to his youth – girls, friends, adventures – the simple sensations he took for granted and will now never experience again. We suffer with him through the time it takes to assess what his life is now, and learning to move forward while teetering on the edge of lunacy from the isolation.

The text itself is written with very little punctuation, creating assaulting, run-on, manic thought patterns – a very effective mood-setting style. Trumbo forces the reader to bypass pause in thought, causing the reader themselves to experience Joe’s panic-ridden struggle, and his passages of heartbreak, hope and triumph.

This book will bring you to your proverbial knees. I first read it over 10 years ago, and it continues to haunt me. I’m sure it will the rest of my life. It’s been called “the most powerful anti-war story ever written”, but I find that a little superficial and more than a little oversimplified. More accurately, it is a brutal look at the human condition at its most rudimentary, and the horror of true aloneness - so close to others yet permantly isolated - on an uncomfortably up close and personal level. Having half a human body is far from synonymous with being half a human being. How much is too much suffering? Does the Hippocratic oath have a limitation on the stance of cruelty? Is there a point where it’s just better, more compassionate, to let a victim pass on via nature of his massive injuries?

May God grant peace to the Joe Bonhams.