While Brave Men Die

“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.

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.

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."

Dalton Trumbo, 1970. Read the full piece on LA Taco.

Poster at Berkeley, captured by ivangonecrazy

In August 1939, Dalton Trumbo published the American anti-war book of the century, Johnny Got His Gun. Days later Germany invaded Poland and such pacific perspectives were forgotten. Trumbo writes the narrative of a "deadman-who-is-alive", a World War I soldier who has lost his arms, legs, ears, eyes and most of his face. This darkest night of the soul speaks a tragic and bitter journey of realisation, despair and attempted suicide that culminates in a rallying cry against the lies, cruelty and foolishness that buries men- and worse- in the name of liberty.

"And all the guys who died all the five million or seven million or ten million who went out and died to make the world safe for democracy to make the world safe for words without meaning how did they feel about it just before they died? How did they feel as they watched their blood pump out into the mud? How did they feel when the gas hit their lungs and began eating them all away? How did they feel as they lay crazed in hospitals and looked death straight in the face and saw him come and take them? If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you've given it away you'd ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever?

You're goddamn right they didn't.

They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.

He ought to know.

He was the nearest thing to a dead man on earth."

Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, 1939. An online excerpt can be found here.