Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) by Kurt Vonnegut Page A
Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
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Charles L’Enfant, who had designed yet another arbitrarily chosen capital, Washington, D.C. “John,” I said, “it is an infinitely expandable chessboard of identical squares, each block one-tenth of a mile long, with all streets running exactly east and west or north and south, and with a circle in the middle.” (Shades of the Euclidean idealism of the French Revolution, whose child I sometimes think I am.)
I used to be a halfway decent chess player (until my brains turned to tapioca). When telling John about a city he had never seen, I realized that it really was like a chessboard on which games were played out, with this piece gone and then that one (me and my big brother and my sister and our parents all leaving the board in one match). And then the pieces were set up again, but with new identities. I gave John the names of some of the more famous persons, past and present, who had been pieces on that board. “James Whitcomb Riley,” I said, “Charles Manson, Richard Lugar, Steve McQueen, Dan Quayle, Kin Hubbard, Booth Tarkington, Jane Pauley, the Reverend Jim Jones of Kool-Aid fame.” (I added that George Bush’s making Dan Quayle the custodian of our nation’s destiny, should Bush become seriously impaired, was proof to me that Bush didn’t give a damn what became of the rest of us once he himself was gone. There’s a bomber pilot for you.)
And my memories of Indianapolis are skewed now by the death of my war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare. He had a tenuous connection with Indianapolis. We met when we were soldiers at Camp Atterbury, which was located in the boondocks just south of there. The first time I saw him he was smoking and reading a biography of Clarence Darrow, the brilliant defense attorney. (The last time I saw him he was still smoking. The last time
anybody
saw him alive he was still smoking.) We had just become members of Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 423rd Regiment, 106th Infantry Division. (“Dear Mom and Dad: Guess where I am now.”) We both had some college before going into the Army. He had had Basic Training in the Infantry, bayonets and grenades and machine guns and mortars and all that. I had been trained as a virtuoso on the 240-millimeter howitzer, then the largest mobile fieldpiece. No Divisions had such humongous weapons, which were the playthings of Corps and Armies.
There were thousands upon thousands of college kids like O’Hare and me (and Norman Mailer), who were called up all at once, and who were intellectually qualified for Officer Candidate School (or to be bombardiers, for that matter). But there was no need for any more officer candidates at that time, except for those whose parents had strong political connections.
After Basic Training, nobody knew quite what to do with the likes of us. So we were sent back to college for a few months, in uniform, without hope of promotion, in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). O’Hare came to the 106th from the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, and I from Carnegie Tech and then the University of Tennessee. (Assigning us to this or that college was done in haste. In one ASTP unit I heard about, everybody’s last name began with H.)
We were yanked out of college again when what the Army needed, with the invasion of Europe in prospect, was riflemen and more riflemen. So there O’Hare and I were, striking up our first conversation just south of Indianapolis. The Army had instituted what it called the “Buddy System.” Every Private or PFC was told to pick somebody else in his squad to know about and care about, since nobody else was going to do that. The show of concern had to be reciprocal, of course, and nobody was to be left a bachelor. (The Buddy System was a lot like the mass marriages performed in Madison Square Garden much later by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.) So O’Hare and I got hitched, so to speak. A lot of couples were funnier-looking than us, believe you me.
The 106th Division, formerly of South
I used to be a halfway decent chess player (until my brains turned to tapioca). When telling John about a city he had never seen, I realized that it really was like a chessboard on which games were played out, with this piece gone and then that one (me and my big brother and my sister and our parents all leaving the board in one match). And then the pieces were set up again, but with new identities. I gave John the names of some of the more famous persons, past and present, who had been pieces on that board. “James Whitcomb Riley,” I said, “Charles Manson, Richard Lugar, Steve McQueen, Dan Quayle, Kin Hubbard, Booth Tarkington, Jane Pauley, the Reverend Jim Jones of Kool-Aid fame.” (I added that George Bush’s making Dan Quayle the custodian of our nation’s destiny, should Bush become seriously impaired, was proof to me that Bush didn’t give a damn what became of the rest of us once he himself was gone. There’s a bomber pilot for you.)
And my memories of Indianapolis are skewed now by the death of my war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare. He had a tenuous connection with Indianapolis. We met when we were soldiers at Camp Atterbury, which was located in the boondocks just south of there. The first time I saw him he was smoking and reading a biography of Clarence Darrow, the brilliant defense attorney. (The last time I saw him he was still smoking. The last time
anybody
saw him alive he was still smoking.) We had just become members of Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 423rd Regiment, 106th Infantry Division. (“Dear Mom and Dad: Guess where I am now.”) We both had some college before going into the Army. He had had Basic Training in the Infantry, bayonets and grenades and machine guns and mortars and all that. I had been trained as a virtuoso on the 240-millimeter howitzer, then the largest mobile fieldpiece. No Divisions had such humongous weapons, which were the playthings of Corps and Armies.
There were thousands upon thousands of college kids like O’Hare and me (and Norman Mailer), who were called up all at once, and who were intellectually qualified for Officer Candidate School (or to be bombardiers, for that matter). But there was no need for any more officer candidates at that time, except for those whose parents had strong political connections.
After Basic Training, nobody knew quite what to do with the likes of us. So we were sent back to college for a few months, in uniform, without hope of promotion, in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). O’Hare came to the 106th from the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, and I from Carnegie Tech and then the University of Tennessee. (Assigning us to this or that college was done in haste. In one ASTP unit I heard about, everybody’s last name began with H.)
We were yanked out of college again when what the Army needed, with the invasion of Europe in prospect, was riflemen and more riflemen. So there O’Hare and I were, striking up our first conversation just south of Indianapolis. The Army had instituted what it called the “Buddy System.” Every Private or PFC was told to pick somebody else in his squad to know about and care about, since nobody else was going to do that. The show of concern had to be reciprocal, of course, and nobody was to be left a bachelor. (The Buddy System was a lot like the mass marriages performed in Madison Square Garden much later by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.) So O’Hare and I got hitched, so to speak. A lot of couples were funnier-looking than us, believe you me.
The 106th Division, formerly of South
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