In war may things can happen sometimes this things that happen are unfortunate events. Other times there are good events and events that bring joy to a nation. There are also many things about war that we sometimes do not realize and are the things that can go really wrong. One example of the ironies of war is when Billy said: "He was Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American who had become a Nazi" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 162). This was one of the things that gave me a sense of the humor Vonnegut uses in this book. The humor he uses is not one that you can laugh about it because it rather ironical. An American that is on the enemy's side has a simple definition that is a traitor. Of the personalities a person can have the one I most hate is the one of a traitor. A traitor is a person that once had your trust and now is attacking you. The other thing is how can a person kill people from his same country? Campbell did not try to convince the American prisoners of war to this, rather he urged them to go and fight Russia that were their allies. The Americans refused this because they did not want to be remembered for ever as the American that betrayed his country. I think Vonnegut made this part very clear to show how traitors were during the war and how much he hated traitors. Since he and Billy were also part of the Americans he also wanted to show that he was a loyal American that would give anything for his country. He also did not show this directly he preferred to do this through his humor that is called irony. I really admire how Vonnegut uses irony to perfection. I tried using irony for one of the papers I had to do for a class and it is really hard.
Another part that caught my attention was when Billy told us: "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" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 180). Imagine yourself being one of those pilots. After you get to the American base or after some while you will be informed that the ones who were down there were your fellow countrymen. What would you do? You can't time travel like Billy to see the future and know that those where Americans. Fortunately the ones in this event did miss but there might be lots of other cases where the bullets did not miss. I would feel really bad and feel like if I was less Colombian if in the middle of a war by any mistake I would kill my fellow countrymen. There might also be a chance that the Americans did know this and were traitors like Campbell and Vonnegut wanted the reader to notice the many cases of treason that happened during war. Another part that made me laugh but this time it was not because it was ironic but because I had heard it in my life was when Kilgore Trout said: "You think money grows on trees" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 167)? I don't know if Vonnegut intended this to be funny or maybe it was funny for me because I had heard it previously. This is the typical phrase of a parent when you lose something. They will tell you this and the first time they told me this I was very little and it was very humorous because I imagined bills growing instead of the leaves. When I hear other parents tell that to their kids I will also laugh because it happened to me and it is in a book it probably has happened to many other people.
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