As he gradually realizes his horrible fate, the central character in Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun—whose actual name is Joe, but it hardly matters—thinks of himself, “He had no legs and no arms and no eyes and no ears and no nose and no mouth and no tongue. What a hell of a dream. It must be a dream.” But it is not. This saga of a young soldier so terribly wounded he would be better off dead was set in World War I, released at the outset of World War II and never more relevant than today.