This is one of the most powerful statements in a very thoughtful antiwar novel.
I
mentioned before in concluding Warfare, how powerful an anti-war statement Dalton
Trumbo had made in his book, Johny Got His Gun. The protagonist was a "basket
case", a World War I soldier who had lost all his limbs, a good bit of torso and
most of his head, but not his brain.
Here follows a paragraph from the last pages of the
text:
"And then suddenly he saw. He had a vision of himself
as a new kind of Christ as a man who carries within himself all the seeds of
a new order of things. He was the new messiah of the battlefields saying to
people as I am so shall you be. For he had seen the future he had tasted it
and now he was living it. He had seen the airplanes flying in the sky he had
seen the skies of the future filled with them black with them and now he saw
the horror beneath. He saw a world of lovers forever parted of dreams never
consummated of plans that never turned into reality. 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."
"An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of
bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000
years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children who will never be
born. (The last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the
world already.)
"Do we scream in the night when it touches our dreams?
No. We don't dream about it because we don't think about it; we don't think
about it because we don't care about it. We are much more interested in law
and order, so that American streets may be made safe while we transform those
of Vietnam into flowing sewers of blood which we replenish each year by forcing
our sons to choose between a prison cell here or a coffin there. 'Every time
I look at the flag, my eyes fill with tears.' Mine too.
"If the dead mean nothing to us (except on Memorial
Day weekend when the national freeway is clotted with surfers, swimmers, skiers,
picnickers, campers. hunters, fishers, footballers, beer-busters), what of
our 3000,000 wounded? Does anyone know where they are? How they feel? How
many arms, legs, ears, noses, mouths, faces, penises they've lost? How many
are deaf or dumb or blind or all three? How many are single or double or triple
or quadruple amputees? How many will remain immobile for the rest of their
days? How many hang on as decerebrated vegetables quietly breathing their
lives away in small, dark, secret rooms?
"Write the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine
Corps, the Army and Navy Hospitals, the Director of Medical Sciences at the
National Library of Medicine, the Veterans Administration, the Office of the
Surgeon General - and be surprised by what you don't learn. One agency reports
726 admissions "for amputation services" since January, 1965. Another reports
3,011 amputees since the beginning of the fiscal year 1968. The rest is silence.
"The Annual Report of the Surgeon General: Medical
Statistics of the United States Army ceased publication in 1954. The
Library of Congress reports that the Army Office of the Surgeon General for
Medical Statistics 'does not have figures on single or multiple amputees.'
Either the government doesn't think them important or, in the words of a researcher
for one of the national television networks, 'the military itself, while sure
of how many tons of bombs it has dropped, is unsure of how many legs and arms
its men have lost.'
"If there are no concrete figures, at least we are
beginning to get comparative ones. Proportionately, Vietnam has given us eight
times as many paralytics as World War II, three times as many totally disabled,
35% more amputees. Senator Cranston of California concludes that out of every
hundred army veterans receiving compensation for wounds received in action
in Vietnam, 12.4% are totally disabled. Totally.
"But exactly how many hundreds or thousands of the
dead-while-living does that give us? We don't know. We don't ask. We
turn away from them; we avert the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, face. 'Why should
I look, it wasn't my fault, was it?' It was, of course, but no matter. Time
presses. Death waits even for us. We have a dream to pursue, the whitest white
hope of them all, and we must follow and find it before the light fails.
"So long, losers. God bless. Take care. We'll be seeing
you."
From Los Angeles, on January 3, 1970, Dalton Trumbo
wrote an addendum to his 1939 novel:
"Eleven years later. Numbers have dehumanized us. Over
breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 Americans 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.