Johnny Got His Gun

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.