October 12: End of the War, Children, Old White Men

American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving.  They saw Billy and the rest moving down there.  The planes sprayed them with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets missed.  Then they saw some other people moving down by the riverside and they shot at them.  They hit some of them.  So it goes.

The idea was to hasten the end of the war.

Nobody was supposed to be alive.  The attack on Dresden was supposed to kill everything and everyone, thereby proving the superiority of the Allied forces and encouraging the Germans to surrender.  Of course, it took two nuclear bombs to convince Japan to give up.  In three months, Hitler will be dead, and the Nazis will wave the white flag.  Dresden, I suppose, was the beginning of the end.

I'm not sure if the American forces knew that Dresden was housing American prisoners of war.  If they did, then the bombing is not just an attack on German civilians.  It's an attack on our own soldiers.  Don't get me wrong--the lives of prisoners of war are not any more important than the lives of innocent women and children. 

Warfare is ugly.  That's one of the facts that I think Vonnegut is trying to drive home in Slaughterhouse.  When war happens, children are harmed.  After all, Vonnegut subtitled the novel "The Children's Crusade."  Wars aren't fought by old people.  They're fought by young men and women who have barely stepped out of their graduation caps and gowns.

Now, the world is in great turmoil.  Great Britain is preparing for possible armed conflict with North Korea.  The President of the United States keeps hinting at something big coming.  It's terrifying to think that old white men are making decisions that may cause the deaths of an entire generation of human beings.

Certainly, not all wars are unjustified.  The Nazis needed to be stopped.  Slavery in the United States needed to come to an end.  That doesn't change the fact that wars are horrifying events, full of tragedy and sorrow.  And the leaders who call for war sit back in their homes, completely safe and worry-free.

Saint Marty thinks that if a leader of any country declares war, his family needs to be sent to the front lines to fight.  It may mean less war, more negotiation.  And chocolate chip cookies.