Johnny Got His Gun by
Dalton Trumbo, 1939, Excerpts
They were always fighting for
something the bastards and if anyone dared say the hell with fighting it’s all
the same each war is like the other and nobody gets any good out of it why they
hollered coward. If they weren’t fighting for liberty they were fighting for
independence or democracy or freedom or decency or honor or their native land
or something else that didn’t mean anything.
You can always hear the people who
are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they
talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and
legislatures and congress. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. Death
before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so
gloriously. They shall not have died in vane. Our noble dead. Nobody but the
dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or
not.
For Christ sake, give us things to
fight for we can see and feel and pin down and understand. No more highfalutin
words that mean nothing. Motherland fatherland homeland native land. It’s all
the same.
Born in Montrose, Colorado, 1905, Dalton Trumbo was the most
famous member of “The Hollywood Ten” film writers blacklisted during the
McCarthy era.
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