That was the first indication I had that this war was not a two-dimensional image on my television screen. That gunfire was real. Those bodies falling were people. People dying. A person could go to war in love and return unable to go through with the wedding. Of course, I knew this was true of World War II. All of our fathers, except mine, who was just young enough to miss it, had been in the War. There were lingering bad feelings toward Japan and Germany. We celebrated V-J Day every August—Victory over Japan. We knew who Hitler was (though not the atrocities, not yet), and we knew what had happened on Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima. My cousin’s neighbor Frenchie had one arm, the other lost at Iwo Jima. In the eponymous movie about the battle there was a character named Frenchie: him. He was one of the men in the famous statue of soldiers raising the flag. To me—maybe to all of us my age—that was the War. This thing on television was more like the show Combat! on Monday nights, Vic Morrow crawling toward the camera in his camouflage, clutching his gun.
The other war—World War I—seemed to have happened a million years earlier. It wasn’t until high school that I even learned what had started it, Gavrilo Princip jumping out in front of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and shooting him and his wife. My father used to tell me about a teacher he had in grade school back in Indiana who was “shell-shocked from the war.” If a child tapped his pencil or foot, the teacher would start to shake and run to the closet to hide. I never bothered to ask which war he’d fought in; it wasn’t until many years later that I understood it was World War I. In front of the high school in our town stood a statue of a World War I soldier called Jerry, but to me the statue seemed to be there not to commemorate a war but rather to get spray-painted red and white by the Coventry Oakers, our football rivals on Thanksgiving weekend every year. When I watched All Quiet on the Western Front on Saturday Night at the Movies with Skip and Mama Rose (our parents out playing cards with my aunts and uncles as they did every Saturday night), I didn’t even realize the movie was about World War I. World War II was the war that still haunted us, that in many ways seemed more real than the one we were actually fighting at the time.
ALTHOUGH I CAN’T say for certain, I must have gotten a copy of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun from one of my brother’s friends. They often gave me books to read, most of which I didn’t really understand. The Tin Drum. Siddhartha. The Painted Bird. The Teachings of Don Juan. But unlike those books, Johnny Got His Gun had a profound and lasting impact on me. Originally published in 1939, it is the story of Joe Bonham, an ordinary young man, in love with his sweetheart back home, who loses his arms, legs, face, ears—after a bomb dropped on him during World War I.
The book I read was a small paperback, and had a black cover with a large white hand forming a peace sign on it. Inside the palm of the hand stands the silhouette of a soldier in the iconic doughboy helmet of World War I, pointing a rifle. It was the edition I read a few years after it was released, dog-eared and wrinkled from so many readings by so many young men facing the draft. “This was no war for you. This thing wasn’t any of your business. What do you care about making the world safe for democracy? All you wanted to do Joe was live.” The little I knew about the Vietnam War sounded eerily similar. The United States was over there fighting for democracy, weren’t they? North Vietnam was Communist. Communism was spreading. If they took over South Vietnam, no one was safe from it, were we? “Oh why the hell did you ever get into this mess anyway? Because it wasn’t your fight Joe. You never really knew what the fight was all about.”
Wait, I thought as I read, this was what my brother and his friends were saying in our backyard, on the beach, and sitting around our kitchen table. This wasn’t our fight. This wasn’t any of our business.
Sometimes I tried to imagine Skip or one of his friends in a uniform, holding a gun, standing in a jungle. I tried to imagine their faces on the soldiers who fought on my television screen every night on the news. But it was too frightening—in the war I watched on TV, the soldiers got shot. They died. I saw coffins draped in American flags, dead boys inside, waiting to come home. It sounds foolish to say this now, but it wasn’t until that summer that I realized the war I saw on television was real. Now when Walter Cronkite announced the day’s death toll, I listened.
They knew what was important. . . . They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.
SKIP AND HIS friends had college deferments. But still the draft loomed over them. They drank beers and ate Mama Rose’s meatballs and sausage and pepper sandwiches and talked about going to Canada or Sweden for amnesty. Although there was something thrilling about that idea—sneaking over a border at night on foot; living among fjords and the Northern Lights—I knew that if you did that you were never allowed home to the United States again. Surely Skip wouldn’t opt for that, would he?
They discussed the viability of filing as a conscientious objector. A well-told story in our household was that my mother had dated a conscientious objector during World War II. He was a Quaker and Quakers were against war. (Of course, I had no idea what a Quaker was, except that one peered out at me from our container of oatmeal and that William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, had been one too.) Was it too late for Skip to convert and become a Quaker? I wondered. After all, our father had converted to Catholicism in order to marry our mother and he always said it was really nothing. “You believe what you believe anyway,” he’d say.
All of these conversations made me unsettled in a way I couldn’t explain. Suddenly, the war itself made me unsettled. I grew up in a mostly traditional family, surrounded by dozens of relatives who were Democrats, went to town hall meetings, and voted in every election. Two of my uncles had fought in WWII. The other had a bad heart and the army wouldn’t take him, but he tried to enlist because you fought for your country. In other words, I was raised a proud American. My father was even born on the Fourth of July. He loved that his birthday was the same day as Independence Day. He’d blast John Philip Sousa music from the minute he woke up, and often at night the men who had come to his party, all of them WWII veterans, picked up broomsticks and mops and marched around the yard with tears in their eyes.
But after I read Johnny Got His Gun, I started to question the things I’d been raised to believe. What were we fighting for in Vietnam anyway? Did Americans have the right to tell other countries how to live? What did it even mean to be an American? I started watching the news more carefully, and reading the newspaper reports about the war that I’d been ignoring. I sat in the backyard with Skip and his friends and listened to what they thought, what they believed. They discussed how Johnson had escalated the war, how we’d killed four hundred civilians at My Lai, how we’d secretly bombed Laos and Cambodia. No one could be trusted, not our president or any of the authority figures in charge.