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except that was the extent of my writing) I thought of writing my war story, too. All my friends were home; they’d had wonderful adventures, too. I went down to the newspaper office, The Indianapolis News, and looked to find out what they had about Dresden. There was an item about half an inch long, which said our planes had been over Dresden and two had been lost. And so I figured, well, this really was the most minor sort of detail in World War II. Others had so much more to write about. I remember envying Andy Rooney who jumped into print at that time; I didn’t know him, but I think he was the first guy to publish his war story after the war; it was called Tail Gunner. Hell, I never had any classy adventure like that. But every so often I would meet a European and we would be talking about the war and I would say I was in Dresden; he’d be astonished that I’d been there, and he’d always want to know more. Then a book by David Irving was published about Dresden, saying it was the largest massacre in European history. I said, By God, I saw something after all! I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra and it’s not fair to future generations because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.

INTERVIEWER: That sort of shifted the whole focus …

VONNEGUT: She freed me to write about what infants we really were: 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that that was a problem.

INTERVIEWER: One more question; do you still think about the fire-bombing of Dresden at all?

VONNEGUT: I wrote a book about it, called Slaughterhouse-Five. The book is still in print, and I have to do something about it as a businessman now and then. Marcel Ophuls asked me to be in his film, A Memory of Justice. He wanted me to talk about Dresden as an atrocity. I told him to talk to my friend Bernard V. O’Hare, Mary’s husband, instead, which he did. O’Hare was a fellow battalion scout, and then a fellow prisoner of war. He’s a lawyer in Pennsylvania now.

INTERVIEWER: Why didn’t you wish to testify?

VONNEGUT: I had a German name. I didn’t want to argue with people who thought Dresden should have been bombed to hell. All I ever said in my book was that Dresden, willy-nilly, was bombed to hell.

INTERVIEWER: It was the largest massacre in European history?

VONNEGUT: It was the fastest killing of large numbers of people—one hundred and thirty-five thousand people in a matter of hours. There were slower schemes for killing, of course.

INTERVIEWER: The death camps.

VONNEGUT: Yes—in which millions were eventually killed. Many people see the Dresden massacre as correct and quite minimal revenge for what had been done by the camps. Maybe so. As I say, I never argue that point. I do note in passing that the death penalty was applied to absolutely anybody who happened to be in the undefended city—babies, old people, the zoo animals, and thousands upon thousands of rabid Nazis, of course, and, among others, my best friend Bernard V. O’Hare and me. By all rights, O’Hare and I should have been part of the body count. The more bodies, the more correct the revenge.

INTERVIEWER: The Franklin Library is bringing out a deluxe edition of Slaughterhouse-Five, I believe.

VONNEGUT: Yes. I was required to write a new introduction for it.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any new thoughts?

VONNEGUT: I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp.