While we’re on the subject, don’t miss this terrific 4-part interview with legendary American writer Kurt Vonnegut for The Paris Review. I don’t want to spoil it too much for you, so I’ll just say that among many interesting things, he talks at length about his experience as a soldier in World War II:

In the same boxcars that had brought up the troops that captured us—probably in the same boxcars that had delivered Jews and Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses and so on to the extermination camps. Rolling stock is rolling stock. British mosquito bombers attacked us at night a few times. I guess they thought we were strategic materials of some kind. They hit a car containing most of the officers from our battalion. Every time I say I hate officers, which I still do fairly frequently, I have to remind myself that practically none of the officers I served under survived. Christmas was in there somewhere.

Let this be a lesson to you: whatever you do in life, you do not want to piss off a great writer.