Faith Club

Johnny Got His Gun
26.3.03 00:46
(veltīts portoss)

If dead mean nothing to us [..], 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 amutees? How many will remain immobile for the rest of their days? How many hang on as decerebrated vegetables quietly beathing their lives away in small, dark, secret rooms?

Write the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Army and Naval hospitals, the Directory of Medical Sciences and 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 aputees since the beginning of the fiscal year 1968. The rest is silence.

The Annual Report of the Surgeon General: Medical Statistics of the United States Army ceased publication in 1954. The Library of Congress reports that 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 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 it's men have lost."

(no 1970 gada priekšvārda Johnny Got His Gun grāmatai (Dalton Trumbo, 1939).

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[A young American soldier, hit by a shell on the last day of the First World War, lies in a hospital bed, a quadruple amputee who has lost his eyes, ears, mouth and nose.]