Upsoaring wings: People did not like it here

I was introduced to Kurt Vonnegut by Chuck Mitchell, Joni’s ex-husband, at a performance by him at The Ice House in Pasadena. Mitchell spoke this passage from Slaughterhouse-Five as an introduction to one of his songs. I don’t recall the song, but this image has never left me:

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

“The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

“When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

Vonnegut drew on his own experiences in World War II—as a soldier and a prisoner of war—to describe the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 by British and American air forces. He lived through the bombing because the POWs had been herded into the eponymous slaughterhouse. The book is a bit of a challenge to read, because it’s non-linear; you have to focus on both nonsensical and heartbreaking topics.

You know—like life.

I was reminded of this when I read a piece by Alex Horton, a reporter for The Washington Post, this weekend. Horton used Vonnegut’s non-linear construct to frame his own experiences as a soldier in Iraq 12 years ago (nearly six years into America’s longest war). He weaves some research into his account to give context, and readers are left with the sense of fragmentation that combat veterans carry back into the world.

Like Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s a hard read. Here’s another (now more than ever), Vonnegut’s “Requiem”, published in 2005, two years before his death.

“Requiem”

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.