Dresden 101

In an upcoming week I'm having some of my first-year students read about the bombing of Dresden (in this book), which has brought this beautiful passage (from Vonnegut's Slaugherhouse Five) back to mind:

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War 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.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

Beautiful. P & i wept when we heard this on audiobook (beautifully read by Ethan Hawke) some several weeks ago.

My brother's a military pilot. Thanks be to God he was assigned a rescue plane and not a fighter (which they all seem to want). He's been to and from Iraq & other middle Eastern parts somewhat unknown twice now, and it looks like he's going back again this summer. He has a new baby, and he's going back. It's probably less dangerous for him now than it was in previous times, but it's never exactly safe, you know? Once, before the baby came, during a visit to his place, he told me a bit about what he'd seen, and about nearly life-ending events. It was late one night, we were out putting out this fire, everyone else had gone off to bed... He told me about his nightmares, about having had to kill some men who were shooting at him.... men who he knows had families and kids of their own. He was nearly crying. How can he profess to be a good father, he wondered, when he'd done these things? I'm sure he told me only because of the lateness of the hour, and the free-flowingness of the beer from a bit earlier in the night... He doesn't talk about this with his wife, he said. He doesn't want to put those images into her head.

I think they'll always be in mine.

There's so much that disturbs me about this country I live in. So much dangerous bullshit.