Addendum: 1970

Eleven years later. Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American 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. (The last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already.)

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.

If the dead mean nothing to us (except on Memorial Day weekend when the national freeway is clotted with surfers, swimmers, skiers, picnickers, campers, hunters, fishers, footballers, beer-busters), what of our 300,000 wounded? Does anyone know where they are? How they feel? How many arms, legs, ears, noses, mouths, faces, penises they've lost? How many are deaf or dumb or blind or all three? How many are single or double or triple or quadruple amputees? How many will remain immobile for the rest of their days? How many hang on as decerebrated vegetables quietly breathing their lives away in small, dark, secret rooms?

Write the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Army and Navy Hospitals, the Director of Medical Sciences at the National Library of Medicine, the Veterans Administration, the Office of the Surgeon General - and be surprised by what you don't learn--One agency reports 726 admissions "for amputation services" since January, 1965. Another reports 3,011 amputees since the beginning of the fiscal year 1968. The rest is silence.

The Annual Report of the Surgeon General: Medical Statistics of the Untied States Army ceased publication in 1954. The Library of Congress reports that the Army Office of the Surgeon General for Medical Statistics "does not have figures on single or multiple amputees." Either the government doesn't think them important or, in the words of a researcher for one of the national television networks, "the military itself, while sure of how many tons of bombs it has dropped, is unsure of how many legs and arms its men have lost."

If there are no concrete figures, at least we are beginning to get comparative ones. Proportionately, Vietnam has given us eight times as many paralytics as World War II, three times as many totally disabled, 35% more amputees. Senator Cranston of California concludes that out of every hundred army veterans receiving compensation for wounds received in action in Vietnam, 12.4% are totally disabled. Totally.

But exactly how many hundreds or thousands of the dead-while-living does that give us? We don't know. We don't ask. We turn away from them; we avert the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, face. "Why should I look, it wasn't my fault, was it?" It was, of course, but no matter. Time presses. Death waits even for us. We have a dream to pursue, the whitest white hope of them all, and we must follow and find it before the light fails.

So long, losers. God bless. Take care. We'll be seeing you.

-Donald Trumbo. Published as an addendum to the 1959 introduction to the novel Johnny Got His Gun.

Unrequited

I am once again flipping through the tall man's script, searching fruitlessly for the character that will be me just as soon as he takes off the hat and glasses.  I am the priest, driving frantically to return my secret love to her wedding, for I am also the high school sweetheart who's mom thinks he's gay but in all actuality just can't get past the flashing yellow sign pointing out the detour that I have no interest in taking because I know the way.  Things are different under an African sun, iluminating the keyboard and the paper in bright shades of white that fade away after dusk, and it is here that I see more clearly the glimmer of goldfish darting in the transparent waters of the pond, easily identifiable but somehow not marked in my guidebook.

The Predator

There should be rain tonight, it feels like.  The air outside is a predator, still and waiting outside my window for me to stand up from my chair so it can hit me with some emotion I haven't quite placed, like a murmur in my malfunctioning heart that tells me things I shouldn't know.  A frown and a laugh are all I have to offer, wondering just where the words come from and whether I was on to something when I knocked on that door, looking for the vocalist who was singing so beautifully in her sleep.

There it is again; that whisper... or is it a hum?  Somehow it says to me that something's not done, or something's not right.  Somewhere out there a man cries himself to sleep with a bottle of whiskey and a torn picture of what he'll never have.  And here I am, locked alone in the quiet and helpless to help... hopeless to hope.  Doomed to sleep and forget it all, turning instead to my own desires.

7th and King

There's a filthy diner on the corner of 7th and King.
The sort of place you can sit in and smoke and nobody says a thing because nobody who gives a damn has ever set foot there.
You know, the people who get all antsy when they're standing behind you in the convenience store when you're buying a pack of Camels but then they hop in their Toyota Camry and drive back to their home on Sycamore Lane or some other place with a naturey name where all the houses look alike and the neighbor is the nice woman who sometimes bakes cookies, not the guy who got hauled away by the cops last night.

The folks at the diner know full well what it's like to have a cigarette for their Sunday night meal. Sometimes they come in and order a cup of coffee and sit there for a smoke or two, or maybe as long as the waitress will refill their joe without giving them dirty looks.
They sit there and stare out the window onto the cruddy narrow street watching the guy selling fake watches or bootleg DVD's or some shit like that, but they see it special.

The window of this shit-hole diner shows something Sycamore Lane will never know. Maybe it's the grime and soot and smog from years of not being washed, or the chinks where someone shot it up with a pellet gun, but the stuff outside looks different.
There's something else there that nobody else sees. They just stand out there and look at the diner and say someone should call code enforcement, or second hand smoke kills too.

Scribbles

The gentle pitter-patter of the rain reminds me that no child of mine ill ever face this darkness, for the guns are all locked up in the chest with the broken hinges that I can never quite get open. And my wife can go ahead and run away with the man in the dark suit who comes to the door babbling meaningless things about biology and accounting for the sins he never did understand. But he and I both know no man with a beard can ever be trusted, and the melodious trinket in his pocket should be at the bottom of the river as sure as mine should be in the belly of a fish, all ready to be served at the banquet that is never going to happen.