182 JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN
slips even more. Recalling his bucolic boyhood in Colorado, before his family moved
to Los Angeles, Joe remembers his mother’s religious faith and his father’s love for
his fishing pole. Awake again, Joe forces himself to explore his face from the inside
and realizes he no longer has a tongue or teeth or even a jaw. To his horror, Joe
senses he has also lost his nose, eyes, and ears; that his face is cratered from his
forehead to his throat. Joe’s thrashing prompts the nurse to sedate him, and as he
drifts off, he has a nightmare about a rat chewing on his forehead. Unable to dis-
tinguish between dreams and real ity, Joe imagines himself in Christ’s carpentry
shop, where he asks Christ for help. Each of Christ’s suggestions fail, as Joe cannot
brush the rat from his face if it is real, nor yell to awaken himself if he is having a
nightmare. Joe is awakened in the hospital by the footsteps of two nurses, and the
head nurse, angered that Joe is so isolated, insists that the shutters be opened so
that he can have sunshine and that his bed be properly made up with sheets. Joe
is thrilled by the sensory changes and constructs a scheme to track the passage of
time. A year later, Joe laments that he does not know exactly how old he is, nor
when the year he has counted began. Recalling the war, Joe relives the night he
was wounded. In a trench with some British soldiers, Joe is writing a letter to
Kareen when an officious British col o nel (Maurice Dallimore) orders Cpl. Tim-
lon (Eric Christmas) to remove the stinking corpse of an enemy soldier entangled
in barbed wire nearby and give him a decent burial. Timlon and several men, Joe
included, go out that night to bury the German soldier but they come under heavy
artillery fire and Joe is hit by a shell. Pondering his fate, Joe then recalls his family’s
visit to a carnival freak show and imagines his father as a barker, advertising Joe
as “The Self- Supporting Basket Case.” Joe’s reverie ends when a new young nurse
(Diane Varsi) enters the room. Exposing Joe’s chest, the sympathetic woman
begins to cry, and Joe is moved to feel her tears upon his skin. The nurse prompts
Joe to think of Kareen, who chastises him for leaving her pregnant and alone,
although Joe assures her that in his mind, she will stay young and beautiful for-
ever. Later, on a wintry night, the nurse begins to trace letters with her fin ger onto
Joe’s bare chest. He soon realizes that she is writing “Merry Christmas” and nods
his head in affirmation. Joe is overjoyed; he now has an exact date from which to
tell time. After hallucinating a Christmas cele bration at the bakery at which he used
to work, Joe finds himself in a forest setting where he encounters his father, who
advises him to seek help by “sending a tele gram” using the Morse code that he
and his friend Bill learned as children, and Joe realizes he can tap out a message
by nodding his head. Excited, Joe begins tapping an SOS by a series of nods, and
the young nurse realizes that this is not merely an automatic muscular response.
The doctor sedates Joe, but when Tillery visits the hospital, the nurse brings
him to Joe’s bedside. One of the other officers pres ent recognizes Joe’s SOS, and it
dawns on the shocked men that Joe is not brain dead but has been completely
conscious the whole time. The men, especially the chaplain, castigate Tillery for
condemning Joe to such a hellish existence. When asked what he wants, Joe
pleads to be exhibited to the public. The brigadier general refuses so Joe then
responds, “Kill me.” Although she has been ordered to sedate him, the nurse says
a prayer and then clamps shut Joe’s breathing tube to put him out of his misery.