Johnny thinks of himself as lying like a side of beef for the rest of his life. And for what? “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?”
Around me, most of my cousins stayed on the path our parents had set us on. My father used to joke that we just followed our town’s main street: baptized at Sacred Heart, wedding at the Club 400, funeral at Prata’s Funeral Home. As a child, I had found comfort in our church with its smell of wax and incense, the sounds of shoes walking on marble, the brilliance of its stained-glass windows. I’d loved those weddings at the Club 400 too, the specialness of that whiskey-sour fountain bubbling forth cocktails the adults caught in special half-moon-shaped glasses.
But asking “Why should I do this?” wasn’t just about the war. It was about everything I thought I believed and knew. I’d always had this yearning for something I couldn’t name, that no one could help me name. Maybe that yearning was a big question: why?
SOMETHING NEW STARTED taking up airtime on the news. Or maybe it had been happening before I began questioning, became aware. But it seemed to me that suddenly college students were protesting the war. They appeared in front of college buildings and on college greens, dozens and dozens of them, long hair and earnest faces, carrying signs: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR and HELL NO WE WON’T GO. They were angry and passionate as they stood shoulder to shoulder, shouting and singing protest songs by Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” I wanted to be one of them, to be a person who cared that much about something, a person who made a difference.
Once again, my world had been cracked open by a book. But this time, the world that was shifting around me—my own small one and the one outside it—and the book itself crashed together in such a way that I felt like I was suddenly awake. Around me, my classmates still seemed unaffected by the war, the demonstrations, all of it. Vietnam had become the backdrop of our childhoods and it was easy to keep it that way, in the background. But I’d had a summer of college boys sitting in my backyard discussing the war. I’d heard them debate my father at our kitchen table and for the first time in my young life I disagreed with him. I’d read Johnny Got His Gun, perhaps the greatest antiwar book ever written, a book of which Trumbo himself wrote: “Johnny held a different meaning for three different wars. Its present meaning is what each reader conceives it to be, and each reader is gloriously different from every other reader, and each is also changing. I’ve let it remain as it was to see what it is.”
AT SCHOOL I was labeled a hippie. Even one of my favorite teachers took to calling me Hippie Ann. I wasn’t offended; I was proud. To me, being a hippie meant that you cared about the world, that you wanted to help stop the war in Vietnam. With my gypsy skirts and John Lennon round wire-frame glasses, I dressed the part too. Except I wasn’t acting; I was a girl too young to really do anything except try to be heard. In 1970, when the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State, I wore a black armband to school for a week. When I watched students on TV protesting the war, I used to think, Wait for me. Wait for me to grow up enough to join you.
Of course, the world didn’t wait for me to grow up. By the time I went to college, the Vietnam War was finally ending and protests were a thing of the past. The hippies who were still on campus were burnouts who had smoked too much pot or dropped too much acid to do anything meaningful. Those socially minded students had been replaced by boys in white leisure suits and girls practicing the Hustle in their dorm rooms and playing the soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever. There were discos instead of sit-ins, high heels instead of sandals. In other words, nothing was how I’d hoped it would be when I arrived at college.
But the events I’d watched take place around me as an adolescent left me someone who leans further left than even my Democratic parents; who still protests and resists war. Although the war of my youth was fought in Vietnam, Johnny Got His Gun took place half a century earlier. Reading it didn’t just make me take notice of what was happening around me; it showed me the horrors of all wars, of all the dead boys and misguided politicians. It made me ask why then, and it makes me still ask why now.
Lesson 4: How to Buy Books
? Love Story BY ERICH SEGAL ?
EVERY WEEK MY MOTHER TOOK ME ALONG WITH HER to the local discount store, Ann & Hope, where she bought curtains, bath mats, and tablecloths on the cheap. Much to her disapproval, I brought my allowance so that I could buy a Nancy Drew book. The entire series was lined up, yellow spines out, the numbers and titles in order, beginning with The Secret of the Old Clock and ending with The Spider Sapphire Mystery. I had no sisters, just a mathematically obsessed brother who solved problems on a slide ruler for fun. But my cousin Gloria-Jean, a year older than me, shared my passion for reading and she also used her allowance to buy a Nancy Drew book every week. Our plan was to read every one of them, trading our newest ones after we’d finished.
At the cash register, my mother shook her head and sighed. “I cannot believe you are wasting your money on a book. A book! Of all things!”
I didn’t care. I held that yellow book close to my chest, and happily handed over my two dollars, the bills damp and creased.
Along the river of my small town, mills that had produced textiles in the nineteenth century now stood empty, leaving most of the town unemployed. A Champlin Grant to build a library led to breaking ground behind Main Street, where the movie theater showed XXX movies; Newberry’s, the five-and-dime, was boarded up; and sleazy bars replaced what had once been fine clothing stores. To avid readers like Gloria-Jean and me, the progress on the library seemed practically glacial. By the time it finally opened, we had read every Nancy Drew book and were ready to move on.
Move on we did. Agatha Christie and Charles Dickens; Harold Robbins and Herman Wouk; Victor Hugo and Evan Hunter. We read indiscriminately. We read everything. Three, four, five books a week we read. “A waste of time!” my mother would say when I hung up with Gloria-Jean after chatting about our latest reads. “Put the book down and go outside and play!” In family pictures during this time, I am always holding a book in my lap, my finger holding my place.