In cases such as Norman Bowker, Vietnam had a deadly affect. Norman Bowker got out of Vietnam safely, and returned to the security of his home town. However, he spends evenings driving slowly around the lake in his town, over and over again. In a letter he writes to O’Brien, Norman explains:
“There’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam…Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him…Feels like I’m still in deep shit” (156).
All Norman wanted when he returned from the war was to embrace his home, yet like he said, he returned physically but not in actuality. The sewage of Kiowa sucked him up, consuming his soul. Although Norman imagines ways to reconnect with home, he never does, and ultimately commits suicide. Therefore, the war drives Norman insane because on his return home he can no longer relate to the people that enjoyed life while he was in a foreign country fighting a war.
Similarly to The Things They Carried, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House-Five illustrates the effects of war on combatants. The main character in this book is Billy Pilgrim, a man stuck in time. Vonnegut takes the reader on a journey involving Billy’s experiences with time travel. The core story is Billy’s experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, but Vonnegut continually interrupts its chronology to insert past events of Billy’s life. These flashbacks (in the form of time travel) demonstrate the isolation that Billy experiences as a victim of war. Slaughter-House-Five provides countless examples of how the war effected Billy Pilgrims’ connection with reality.
In the first chapter of this book, Vonnegut addressed the reader directly, without the use of Billy Pilgrim as his character. By telling us a short story about who he is and how he came to write this book, he reveals how the war affected him personally. For example, Vonnegut explains that he tried to find an old war buddy:
I had the Bell Telephone Company to find him for me. They are wonderful that way. I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.
This introductory chapter shows the reader the difficulty Vonnegut had with recovering from the war enough to write a book. He persistently talks about the struggles he had writing this book, explaining that first he did not have any ideas of what to write about, and then did not know how to write about what he wanted to write about. Consequently, the reader gains a sense of the seriousness of the war as soon as the first page of this book, expanding their understanding of the outcome of war.