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.
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