The Bible and the Psalms were a soothing balm, an anesthetic, in frightening situations I could not understand or had no control over. Even the 23rd Psalm, which was my favorite, and gave me great comfort, never affected me in the way Trumbo’s Johnny did.

It was like a Bible to me, but more relevant than anything I had ever read in the Holy Scriptures, including the Psalms, which I read before going out on patrol in Vietnam. I carried the book everywhere I went-with all the pages faded and turned yellow. When I was twenty-four, that remarkable work exploded in my consciousness like a timebomb of truth, hurtling me into action and a fiercer commitment against the Vietnam War than I ever thought possible. And there is no higher compliment that you can give a book, or for that matter any piece of art, than that you have been changed by it forever. Simply put, I was not the same person after reading it that I was before. Most importantly, Johnny Got His Gun was the cornerstone in a great monument of protest and dissent that my life would become-it was the anchor, the key foundation. Trumbo’s novel came at a time in my life when I desperately needed to know that I was not alone. I had been one of those everyday kids, who bought the lie, the way a million others did. It was clear that Trumbo wrote that book for everyday people, for the ones out there, the poor suckers, as he called them, who had to send their sons, those young boys who worked in the factories and the bakeries-or like myself, in the A & P-to the wars for the rich and mighty. That’s me! I kept thinking, that’s what happened to me, that’s how I felt, that’s what I went through. I went up to the stage, and made my very first speech as a political activist. stood for Free the Army, or Fuck the Army, depending on how angry you were.) Trumbo’s words moved me so much that day I wanted to speak out, and I was able to. Sutherland and his partner Jane Fonda were traveling around the country on their famous F.T.A. The first time I heard Dalton Trumbo’s words was at an antiwar demonstration in Los Angeles in the spring of 1971, when I heard actor Donald Sutherland read from Johnny Got His Gun. Page after page I read, drawn deeper and deeper into the story and identifying with every page, every paragraph, every word. I was immediately drawn to it, the way I had been drawn to Kerouac’s On the Road, and could not put it down. Dalton Trumbo’s classic antiwar novel was written simply and honestly in a language that I understood. Martin Luther King-but there has been nothing out of that body of great literature to compare to this book. Upon my return from the war, and all these twenty-two years spent in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the mid-chest down, I’ve read many writers that have influenced my life profoundly-Hemingway, Conrad, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Dr. J ohnny Got His Gun still remains the most powerful piece of writing to influence me after Vietnam.

Johnny got his gun by dalton trumbo