I owe an immense debt to so many authors whose military service influenced their writing, which in turn expanded my perspective not only on war but on the nature of life itself. Among this group Kurt Vonnegut--born on this day in 1922--continues to stand out as an inspiration. As a POW in 1945, Vonnegut survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden because he and his comrades were being housed in a former slaughterhouse, and they were able to find refuge in a meat locker located several stories below ground--an experience later memorialized in his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five. From a letter to his family dated May 29, 1945:
I've been a prisoner of war since December 19th, 1944, when our division was cut to ribbons by Hitler's last desperate thrust through Luxemburg and Belgium. Seven Fanatical Panzer Divisions hit us and cut us off from the rest of Hodges' First Army. The other American Divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks: Our ammunition, food and medical supplies gave out and our casualties out-numbered those who could still fight - so we gave up. The 106th got a Presidential Citation and some British Decoration from Montgomery for it, I'm told, but I'll be damned if it was worth it. I was one of the few who weren't wounded. For that much thank God...
On about February 14th the [American bombers] came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden--possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me.
After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.
After the war Vonnegut moved to Chicago, where he pursued a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago while also working as a police reporter. His thesis was rejected, which led him to leave school and take a job as a publicist for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, where he began submitting stories to magazines. [1] In 1952 he published his first novel, Player Piano, a dystopian tale set in the near future, where intensive mechanization has rendered the working class redundant and led to an extreme gap between rich and poor.
I encountered Vonnegut as a middle-school student, and I absolutely adored the way he wove contemporary social commentary into what were essentially works of science fiction. I haven't read one of his novels in years, but I find that many of his themes--his skepticism toward authority, his fatalistic optimism in the face of cruelty and mendacity, the importance of free expression--remain meaningful to me today. From "The First Amendment," an essay in his wonderful 1981 collection Palm Sunday:
I am a member of what I believe to be the last recognizable generation of full-time, life-time American novelists. We appear to be standing more or less in a row. It was the Great Depression which made us similarly edgy and watchful. It was World War II which lined us up so nicely, whether we were ever in uniform or not...
And let it here be noted that the best-known members of my literary generation, if they wrote about war, almost unanimously despised officers and made heroes of sketchily educated, aggressively unaristocratic enlisted men...
It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment. Our American heirs may find it incredible, as most foreigners do right now, that a nation would want to enforce as a law something which sounds more like a dream, which reads as follows:
"Congress shall make no new law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
How could a nation with such a law raise its children in an atmosphere of decency? It couldn't--it can't. So the law will surely be repealed soon for the sake of children...
What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.
Thank you, Mr. Vonnegut. Thank you, veterans.
[1] Vonnegut's early life is discussed in "Slaughterhouse-Five: Kurt Vonnegut Jr." by Ray Boomhower, published in the Spring 1999 edition of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History.
Thank You, Veterans (2017)
Thank You, Veterans (2012)
Portrait of Kurt Vonnegut by Xandriss.
