Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (11 page)

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 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 secondary education richer and more humane than anything I would get from any of the five universities I attended (Cornell, Butler, Carnegie Tech, Tennessee, and Chicago). It had a widespread system of free libraries whose attendants seemed to my young mind to be angels of fun with information. There were cheap movie houses and jazz joints everywhere. There was a fine symphony orchestra, and I took lessons from Ernst Michaelis, its first-chair clarinet. (A few years ago I wound up with Benny Goodman in somebody else’s car after a party. I was able to tell him truthfully, “Mr. Goodman, I used to play a little licorice-stick myself.”)

In Indianapolis back then, it was only the really
dumb
rich kids who got sent away to prep school. (I knew some of them, and after they graduated from Andover or Exeter or St. Paul’s or wherever, they were
still
dumb and rich.) So I was astonished and annoyed, when I took up permanent residence in the East, to meet so many people who thought it only common sense that they be allowed to set the moral and intellectual tone for this country because they had been to prep school. (It was my personal misfortune that so many of them had become literary critics. I’m about to be judged by Deerfield Academy? Deerfield
Academy
? Give me a break!)

Back to Bernard V. O’Hare again:

One of the several laudatory obituaries he received in newspapers in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, said (far down in the story), “Along with author Kurt Vonnegut, with whom he trained, he was imprisoned in Dresden when it was fire-bombed.” (One obituary called him “one of the most admired and colorful attorneys in Northampton County,” and another called him “feisty.”) About a month before he died, I spoke about the firebombing at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Mine was one of a series of lectures entitled “The Legacy of Strategic Bombing,” and it began as follows:

“It isn’t usual for a speech to begin with a disclaimer. The first rule of public speaking is ‘Never apologize.’

“In my case, though, since I have been asked to speak about the firebombing of a German city, and my name is obviously German in origin, it seems prudent to say that I was and remain unsympathetic to the enthusiasms of the Nazi war machine, as was my commanding general, another German-American, Dwight David Eisenhower. His German ancestors and mine became Americans decades before the Statue of Liberty was erected in New York Harbor.

“I was a battalion scout, a PFC, who was captured on the border of Germany in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge. Thus did I happen to be a laborer under guard in Dresden when it was firebombed on February 13, 1945. The Germans were in full retreat on all fronts and surrendering in ever greater numbers, and had few airplanes left, and every German city
but
Dresden had been bombed and bombed. The war would end soon, on May 7.

“When I was liberated in May, I was in the Russian zone. I spent some time with concentration camp survivors and heard their stories before returning to the American lines. I have since visited Auschwitz and Birkenau and have seen the collections there of human hair and children’s shoes and toys and so on. I know about the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel and I are friends.

“The principal reason for this disclaimer is an assertion by that A-plus student, the heavy thinker George Will, that I trivialized the Holocaust with my novel
Slaughterhouse-Five
. I find that most unhelpful, and I hope you do, too.

“There is no dearth of persons who could tell you what it is like to be unarmed in a mainly civilian population bombed or rocketed or whatever from the air. There are surely millions of us by now. The most recent initiates into our enormous club are in some of the poorer neighborhoods of Panama City. Cambodians and Vietnamese are senior members now.

“How many people in this very room here, in fact, have, while not in combat, been attacked from the air? (About twelve.)

“The firebombing of Dresden was mainly a British enterprise. Americans, several of whom I have since met, dropped high explosives in the daytime to make kindling for the thousands of incendiaries to come. The British came that night with the incendiaries. Their target? The whole city. It was hard to miss. And the city became one flame, with tornadoes dancing in the suburbs like whirling dervishes. The man who interviewed me for admission to the University of Chicago after the war was one of the Americans who attacked in the daytime, virtually unopposed. He said, ‘We hated to do it.’

“Most of the British, I think, felt otherwise. They wanted revenge for the London blitz and the leveling of Coventry and the humiliation at Dunkirk and so on. The Americans had no scores to settle. They might have felt vengeful if they had known the incredible extent of the horrors of the German death camps, but that hadn’t been discovered yet by the outside world.

“What Americans had to avenge was Pearl Harbor. They would do that, with no help from the British, in their own sweet time. Like the British, they would do it when the war was already clearly won.

“The total destruction of Hiroshima, a racist atrocity of atrocities, nonetheless had military significance. When I was in Tokyo with William Styron a few years ago, he said, ‘Thank God for the atomic bomb. If it weren’t for it, I would be dead.’ When the bomb dropped, he was a Marine in Okinawa, preparing for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. It seems certain to me that many more Americans and Japanese would have died during the invasion than were burned to crisps at Hiroshima.

“The firebombing of Dresden was an emotional event without a trace of military importance. The Germans purposely kept the city free of major war industries and arsenals and troop concentrations so that it might be a safe haven for the wounded and refugees. There were no air-raid shelters to speak of and few antiaircraft guns. It was a famous world art treasure, like Paris or Vienna or Prague, and about as sinister as a wedding cake. I will say again what I have often said in print and in speeches, that not one Allied soldier was able to advance as much as an inch because of the firebombing of Dresden. Not one prisoner of the Nazis got out of prison a microsecond earlier. Only one person on earth clearly benefited, and I am that person. I got about five dollars for each corpse, counting my fee tonight.

“Nobody ever argues with me very plausibly or very long when I say that, and I’ve said it not only here but in Britain and France and Scandinavia and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Germany. I may have said it in Mexico. I can’t remember whether or not I’ve ever said it in Mexico.

“Paradoxically, I am not only the one success of the raid but also one of its thousands of failures. Everything possible was done to make me die, but I did not die. It wasn’t as though the bombardiers knew where I was and were careful not to hurt me. They didn’t know or care who was what or where. The leaders of their nations hoped they would burn down the city and kill as many people of any sort as they could with fire or smoke or lack of oxygen, or some combination of the three.

“Same scheme as Hiroshima, but with primitive technology, and with white people down below.

“I fully understand the bombardiers’ lack of discrimination as to who or what was underneath them. They had a point: Whoever was down there, whether by actively supporting Hitler or simply failing to overthrow him, was directly or indirectly playing a part, however small, in Nazi crimes against humanity. I, and the ninety-nine other American privates in my particular labor detail there in Dresden, were working in a factory that made a malt syrup laced with vitamins which was for pregnant women, who would give birth to more heartless warriors. At least we weren’t volunteers. We were forced to work for our keep under guard, as specified by the Articles of the Geneva Convention Respecting Prisoners of War. If we had been noncoms or officers, we wouldn’t have had to work and would have been not in Dresden but in some big prison out in the countryside.