It was 1966 and I was 12 years old. I was aware that the Vietnam war was happening and that it wasn't going well. I was in a conservative family, and attended San Francisco's Cathedral School for Boys. I would walk from middle school past a book store to the bus station and occasionally pick up a paperback - usually science fiction, a western, or a war story. One time I picked up Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun. I was in for a shock.
The protagonist, Joe, is from a typical family in a small town in Colorado; we meet his family, friends, and girlfriend before he heads off to World War 1 and meets the shell with his name on it. He wakes in a hospital bed and slowly realizes that he can neither hear nor see, and has no arms or legs. He taps out morse code with his head to a nurse who doesn't understand and sedates him. Finally he finds one who understands. He asks to be put in a glass box and carried to schools to show what actually happens in war time, only to be answered by morse taps that "what you ask is against regulations." Trumbo drops the pretense that it is Joe tapping morse code on his pillow and speaks directly to the reader: "Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots, you fierce ones, you spawners of hate, you inventors of slogans... We are men of peace, we are men who work and we want to quarrel. But if you destroy our peace, if you take away our work... we will know what to do... we will use the guns you force on us... the menace to our lives does not lie on the other side of a no man's land that was set apart without our consent, it lies within our own boundaries here and now... you plan the wars, you masters of men -- plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun."
To one raised on the rightness of the then escalating war it was a shock. I have never looked at war, or "credibility" or any other excuse for war with anything but disdain since. It was only later I learned that Dalton Trumbo was the screenwriter responsible for Spartacus among other movies in the '50s, even though he had been blacklisted for much of that time due to Communist associations.