12 April 2007
Slaughterhouse Five
So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84. It is an appropriately gray day in Washington to hear the news that the author of “Slaughterhouse Five” has left us.
I have the book on my desk right now. It is a fancy edition form the Folio Society, on acid-free paper and a slip cover suitable for archival purposes. The book meant that much to me, that I wanted a museum quality edition. At least it did at the time, and I guess it still calls to me. It is all wrong though. It should be one of those paperbacks printed on cheap pulp paper, wonderfully flexible when new, but brittle and crumbling now with age. I still have that one, but I cannot open it without it flaking away.
Like all of us. So it goes.
I fancied myself a knock-off Kilgore Trout, a failed science fiction author. I would write my way out of things, figuring it out as I went along.
That was how pivotal his work was. His paperbacks appeared as a revelation in the lives of the Baby Boomers. He was kind enough to show us the epiphany that comes on the road to Hell, or Damascus, and he was legitimately unstuck in time. The protagonist in Slaughterhouse was a fellow named Billy Pilgrim, who lived life in non-linear segments, sometimes in the underground bunker, and sometimes in a cage at the Zoo on the planet Trafalmadore with the luscious pornographic movie star Montana Wildhack.
It certainly resonated at the time. None of us knew what was lurking out there beyond the shelter of college, our own little refuge from the flames that burned the cities as the war went on overseas. Vietnam was a nasty echo of the big one that had snagged him. Crucial in the global strategy of the long war with the Russians. Crushingly brutal to those who had to carry it out.
Kurt- and I think I may be permitted the familiarity, considering how much vicarious time I spent with him- had been caught up in the Big One late in the third reel. He was a college kid, suddenly transformed into a ground-pounder, a grunt with a rifle. He wound up with the 106th Infantry as an advance scout when the German panzers boiled out in their last great offensive in the West.
Cut off by the rapid advance, he wandered behind the lines for days before being formally captured. Cold. Hungry. He was transferred to the East, where Hitler was preparing for Gotterdammerung.
Early in 1945, the Joint Intelligence Committee in London was assessing how best the Allies could support the advancing shock armies of the Soviet Union. They considered massive strategic air power the best way, and they had support. Winston Churchill considered the great cities of eastern Germany to be attractive targets, though they should not distract from the effort against oil production facilities, jet aircraft production and submarine construction.
Area bombing has great support in RAF Bomber Command, and a joint offensive with the US Army Air Force was directed against Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin and Chemnitz, just as soon as meteorological conditions and moon phase were favorable.
Kurt was in Dresden in mid-February of 1945. So was the anonymous man who once owned the copy of “The Mighty Eighth War Diary” that is on my shelf, not far from where “Slaughterhouse” resides now. I took it down this morning. My uncle had left the squadron months before, and the purple post-it notes with which I marked his missions cease in October of 1944, with the last awful trip to the fire over the refinery at Merseburg.
Yellow hi-lighter, applied by the ghost, marks later missions. One of them shows his participation in the raid on the 15th of that month.
On the ground, Kurt was one of seven American POWs known to have survived, since they were held in an underground meatpacking cellar that protected them from the fiery pyre that engulfed the city, fed by incendiary bombs that rained down around the clock.
When it was over, the Nazis put him to work gathering bodies for mass burial, but there were too many. More fire was the answer, and he watched them use flamethrowers to incinerate the casualties.
In later years, I drifted apart from Kurt. Perhaps it was because I had become part of the madness that he despised, though I had my reasons. I continued to purchase his works in tribute to his astonishing talent.
He took a bad fall a few weeks ago at his home, and the complications killed him yesterday. It surely was coincidence that the Secretary of Defense was on the podium at the Pentagon, announcing that future Army deployments in Iraq would be extended to fifteen months. “Our forces are stretched,” he said, “there's no question about that.”
I feel for the folks that are there now, and for those who will follow in the months to come. There is a possibility that their sacrifice will buy enough time for the Sunnis and the Shias to sort themselves out, and begin to deal with the outsiders on their own terms.
Kurt Vonnegut knew something about sacrifice, and sacrificial events of epic proportion. The only way to endure it is with sardonic fatalism.
It was not until I followed on a little ways with Kurt that I realized how profoundly he understood the human condition.
“I knew getting old was going to be bad,” one of his characters says in a Doctor's office. “But I had no idea it would be this bad.”
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com