Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) by Kurt Vonnegut Page B
Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
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Carolina, had been stripped of all its Privates and PFCs, who had been shipped overseas as replacements. But it still had all its officers and noncoms, every last one of them. All it needed was more bodies of the lowest grade. In we came by the busload, all college kids. As in the ASTP, there was no way to get promoted. (Next to the firebombing of Dresden, that might have been the most instructive thing that happened to me in World War II.)
O’Hare and I were made battalion intelligence scouts, of which there were six in each battalion. We were supposed to sneak out ahead of our lines in combat and steal peeks at the enemy without their catching us. O’Hare got the job because he had been taught how to do that during Basic. I got it, I think, because my dossier from Cornell ROTC had come right along with me, because I was wholly unfamiliar with Infantry weapons and techniques, and because I was practically invisible, being only six feet, three inches tall. I never told anybody but O’Hare about my lack of Infantry training, since somebody might have decided that I’d better have some, and it would have been unpleasant. Besides, I didn’t want to leave O’Hare.
One nice thing: Camp Atterbury was so close to Indianapolis that I was able to sleep in my own bedroom and use the family car on weekends. But Mother died on one of those. My sister Alice gave birth to Mother’s first grandchild (whom I would adopt along with his two brothers when he was fourteen) maybe six weekends after that, about the time of the D Day landings in France.
So our fucked-up division finally went overseas, and wound up defending seventy-five miles of front in a snowstorm against the last big German attack of the war. The Germans wore white, while we were very easy to spot, since our uniforms were the color of dogshit. We didn’t have much to fight with. We were supposed to get combat boots, but they never came. The only grenades I could find were incendiaries, making O’Hare and me a couple of potential firebugs. I never saw one of our own tanks or planes. We might as well have been the Polish Cavalry fighting a blitzkrieg back in 1939. So we lost. (What else
could
we do?)
Many years later, Irwin Shaw, who had written a great novel about the war in Europe,
The Young Lions
(but who never made it into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters), said to me with all possible frankness that he had never even
heard
of my division. He had sure heard of all the rest of them. But we were big news in Indianapolis, which felt that we were sort of
its
division, since we had trained so close by. We were heroes there.
(Other Indianapolis heroes: the brave crewmen of the Cruiser
Indianapolis,
which delivered to Guam the first atomic bomb, which was then dropped on Hiroshima. The
Indianapolis
was then sunk by Japanese suicide planes, and a large number of the survivors were eaten alive by sharks. How was
that
for war, when compared with the show business attacks on little countries staged by Reagan and Bush to take our minds off the crimes of their closest friends and biggest campaign contributors?)
So O’Hare and I remained a happily married couple throughout our prisoner-of-war experience. (There are pictures in the Appendix of how we looked at the very end of that. Everybody in them is a college kid who wound up as a badly beaten and wholly unarmed and leaderless former rifleman.) After the war, and although we married women, each of us continued to care about where the other one was, and how the other one was, and what he was doing and so on, and make jokes, until a little past midnight on June 9, 1990, a date which for me will live forever in infamy. That is when my buddy died.
A little more about Indianapolis, not the Cruiser but the city:
I was lucky to have been born there. (Charles Manson
wasn’t
lucky to have been born there. Like so many people, he wasn’t lucky to have been born anywhere.) That city gave me a free primary and
O’Hare and I were made battalion intelligence scouts, of which there were six in each battalion. We were supposed to sneak out ahead of our lines in combat and steal peeks at the enemy without their catching us. O’Hare got the job because he had been taught how to do that during Basic. I got it, I think, because my dossier from Cornell ROTC had come right along with me, because I was wholly unfamiliar with Infantry weapons and techniques, and because I was practically invisible, being only six feet, three inches tall. I never told anybody but O’Hare about my lack of Infantry training, since somebody might have decided that I’d better have some, and it would have been unpleasant. Besides, I didn’t want to leave O’Hare.
One nice thing: Camp Atterbury was so close to Indianapolis that I was able to sleep in my own bedroom and use the family car on weekends. But Mother died on one of those. My sister Alice gave birth to Mother’s first grandchild (whom I would adopt along with his two brothers when he was fourteen) maybe six weekends after that, about the time of the D Day landings in France.
So our fucked-up division finally went overseas, and wound up defending seventy-five miles of front in a snowstorm against the last big German attack of the war. The Germans wore white, while we were very easy to spot, since our uniforms were the color of dogshit. We didn’t have much to fight with. We were supposed to get combat boots, but they never came. The only grenades I could find were incendiaries, making O’Hare and me a couple of potential firebugs. I never saw one of our own tanks or planes. We might as well have been the Polish Cavalry fighting a blitzkrieg back in 1939. So we lost. (What else
could
we do?)
Many years later, Irwin Shaw, who had written a great novel about the war in Europe,
The Young Lions
(but who never made it into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters), said to me with all possible frankness that he had never even
heard
of my division. He had sure heard of all the rest of them. But we were big news in Indianapolis, which felt that we were sort of
its
division, since we had trained so close by. We were heroes there.
(Other Indianapolis heroes: the brave crewmen of the Cruiser
Indianapolis,
which delivered to Guam the first atomic bomb, which was then dropped on Hiroshima. The
Indianapolis
was then sunk by Japanese suicide planes, and a large number of the survivors were eaten alive by sharks. How was
that
for war, when compared with the show business attacks on little countries staged by Reagan and Bush to take our minds off the crimes of their closest friends and biggest campaign contributors?)
So O’Hare and I remained a happily married couple throughout our prisoner-of-war experience. (There are pictures in the Appendix of how we looked at the very end of that. Everybody in them is a college kid who wound up as a badly beaten and wholly unarmed and leaderless former rifleman.) After the war, and although we married women, each of us continued to care about where the other one was, and how the other one was, and what he was doing and so on, and make jokes, until a little past midnight on June 9, 1990, a date which for me will live forever in infamy. That is when my buddy died.
A little more about Indianapolis, not the Cruiser but the city:
I was lucky to have been born there. (Charles Manson
wasn’t
lucky to have been born there. Like so many people, he wasn’t lucky to have been born anywhere.) That city gave me a free primary and
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