Accounting for the innumerable ways that a mild-mannered businessman is distinct from a best-selling author, I always felt that my father had more than a few things in common with Kurt Vonnegut.
Both were Midwesterners (Vonnegut was from Indiana, my father from Ohio). Each had a trenchant sense of humor (Vonnegut’s won him fortune and glory, my father’s won him a few laughs around the homestead), and each expressed extreme dubiousness about American participation in forever wars—the sort of skepticism of feckless engagements that only those who served in uniform, as both my father and Vonnegut had, can muster. (Of course, Vonnegut’s experience in the Second World War became the basis for his great novel Slaughterhouse-Five; my father had a rather less notable eight-year career as an Air Force officer at the time of the Cold War.)
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