Memorial Day Thoughts

A Message for Cindy Sheehan - the Dixie Chicks - and Jane Fonda

Several weeks ago I read a book that was written in 1939 by a man named Daulton Trumbo, titled Johnny Got His Gun. The particular version of the book I read had a foreword written by Cindy Sheehan. Mrs. Sheehan's son Casey was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004, and she got quite a bit of media attention when she camped out for 26 days in front of President George Bush‟s ranch in Crawford, TX. If you aren't familiar with Johnny Got His Gun, the identity of the person writing the foreword should tell you about all you need to know about it. According to Mrs. Sheehan, Johnny Got His Gun is one of the two most important books a person should read.

Johnny Got His Gun is a work of fiction about a man named Joe Bonham who was horribly maimed by a bomb during WW I. He lost both arms, both legs, and was left blind, deaf, and dumb, which is obviously a tragedy of unimaginable magnitude. From the perspective of literature, it was a fascinating story to read as Joe comes to an awareness of the extent of his injuries. And Trumbo does an outstanding job of describing Joe‟s battles to live and eventually communicate. I give full credit to Trumbo as a gifted author who has the ability to grab a reader, suck him into the book, and make him oblivious to time and meals and everything else. There are reasons why he won prestigious awards for his writing, but I disagree strongly with his overall point and the philosophy that underlies the book. Trumbo was eventually called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and ultimately fled to Mexico and Paris where he wrote under pseudonyms. To give you an idea of what this book is about, Johnny Got His Gun became a bestseller during the Vietnam War, and is the book Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland would quote from in their antiwar protests. There is a reason why Cindy Sheehan wrote the foreword of my copy.

If I had to distill the book into a single sentence, it would be this. Joe Bonham wanted freedom without cost. It is as simple as that – he wanted the benefits of freedom without paying for them. Listen to these several paragraphs and marvel at the self-centeredness. And pardon the language.

Lying on your back without anything to do, and anywhere to go, was kind of like being on a high hill far away from noise and people. It was like being on a camping trip all by yourself. You had plenty of time to think. You had time to figure things out. Things you'd never thought of before. Things like, for example, going to war. You were so completely alone on your hill that noise and people didn’t enter into your figuring of things at all. You figured only for yourself, without considering a single little thing outside yourself. It seemed that you thought clearer and that your answers made more sense. And even if they didn‟t make sense, it didn‟t matter because you were

n‟t ever going to be able to do anything about them anyway.

He thought, “Here you are Joe Bonham, lying like a side of beef all the rest of your life, and for what? Somebody tapped you on the shoulder and said, „Come along son, we‟re going to war.‟ So you went. But why? In any other deal, even like buying a car or running an errand, you had the right to say, „What’s there in it for me?‟ Otherwise, you‟d be buying bad cars for too much money, or running errands for fools and starving to death. It was a kind of duty you owed yourself, that when anybody said, „Come on son, do this, or do that,‟ you should stand up and say, „Look mister, why should I do this, for whom am I doing it, and what am I going to get out of it in the end?‟ But when a guy comes along and says, „Here, come with me and risk your life and maybe die or be crippled,‟ why then, you‟ve got no rights. You haven‟t even the right to say „yes‟ or „no‟ or „I‟ll think it over.‟ There are plenty of laws to protect guy‟s money even in war time, but there‟s nothing on the books says a man‟s life‟s his own.

Of course, a lot of guys were ashamed. Somebody said, „Let‟s go out and fight for liberty,‟ and so they went and got killed without ever once thinking about liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty, and whose idea of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives, or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to, or what? You tell a man he can‟t rob, and you take away some of his liberty. You‟ve got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It‟s just a word like „house‟ or „table‟ or any other word, only it‟s a special kind of word. A guy says „house‟ and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says, „Come on, let‟s fight for liberty,‟ and he can‟t show you liberty. He can‟t prove the thing he‟s talking about, so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?

No sir, anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a damn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar. Next time anybody game gabbling to him about liberty – what did he mean next time? There wasn‟t going to be any next time for him. But the hell with that. If there could be a next time and somebody said, „Let‟s fight for liberty,‟ he would say, „Mister, my life’s important. I‟m not a fool, and when I swap my life for liberty, I‟ve got to know in advance what liberty is, and whose idea of liberty we‟re talking about, and just how much of that liberty we‟re going to have. And what‟s more mister, are you as much interested in this liberty as you want me to be? And maybe too much liberty will be as bad as too little liberty, and I think you‟re a damned fourflusher talking through your hat and I‟ve already decided that I like the liberty I‟ve got right here, the liberty to walk, and see, and hear, and talk, and eat, and sleep with my girl. I think I like this here liberty better than fighting for a lot of things we won‟t get and ending up dead and rotting before my life has even begun good, or ending up like a side of beef. Thank you mister. You fight for liberty. Me, I don‟t care for some.‟”

Aren‟t you glad that this kind of thinking wasn‟t prevalent over the last 200 years of our history? Where would we be as a nation today if this kind of selfish thinking was more widespread?

Joe Bonham‟s frame of reference for life was the United States of America in the 1940‟s. To him, that was an inalienable right. He had a job in a bakery where he worked hard and made a reasonable salary. He wasn‟t wealthy, but he had a job, he could make a living, he could put aside a little money each week, he could walk home after work without worrying about whether or not he was going to be stopped and forced to show his papers. He had a girlfriend. He had a voice in the political arena. In short, his life was good! It was simple, and it was hard, but it was good. And since it was all he had known, and since it was all his parents had known, he viewed it as the norm.

And then, along came the war, and with it, his horrible disfigurement – and his good life was taken away from him. He very eloquently talks about how desperately he wants to go back to work in the bakery, get a hamburger from the Hamburger Man on the way home, and then spend the evening with his girlfriend. Is that asking for too much? He doesn‟t want to be rich. He doesn‟t want to be famous. He doesn‟t want to be powerful and influential. He just wants to go back to the simple, good life. But now, war had taken that from him. And Trumbo‟s line of reasoning (along with that of Cindy Sheehan and Jane Fonda) is that war is the culprit. Or more precisely, the men who make the decisions to go to war are the culprit.

The fallacy of this kind of thinking is that the life and freedoms Daulton Trumbo and Cindy Sheehan and Jane Fonda, and the Dixie Chicks, and all the other Hollywood elites enjoy – that life and freedom has been graciously handed to them on a silver platter by heroic men and women who went to war and suffered tremendously and even sacrificed their lives. This is why we say that freedom isn‟t free – it is very costly. And to enjoy the fruits of our veteran‟s sacrifice, and to revel in the freedoms and affluence that accompany our military‟s selfless actions, and at the same time demean, denigrate, and diminish our government and military is the height of selfishness, arrogance, and ingratitude. Freedom isn‟t free, it is very costly, and to quote a phrase by Lynard Skynard in the song Red, White, and Blue, “if you don‟t like it, just get the hell out!”