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...irst time. He sees all of his life in one sweep. Billy is transported with other privates to the city of Dresden. There, the prisoners are made to work for their stay. They are kept in a former slaughterhouse. Allied forces bomb the city, then drop gasoline to create a firestorm that sucks most of the oxygen into the blaze, suffocating or burning 130,000 people. Billy and his fellow POWs survive in an airtight meat locker. They emerge to find, "a moonscape of destruction". Several days later, Russian forces capture the city and Billy's help in the war is over. He returns to Ilium and finishes optometry school. He gets engaged to the daughter of the founder of the school. After a nervous breakdown, for which he given shock treatment at a veterans' hospital (where he is also introduced to the science fiction of Kilgore Trout by a fellow patient), Billy gets married. His rich father-in-law sets him up in the optometry business. Billy and his wife raise two children. One day in 1967, as he later claims on a radio talk show and in a letter to the editor, Billy is kidnapped by two-foot high aliens whose body shape looks like an upside down toilet plunger. These are the Tralfamadorians. They take him to Tralfamadore where they mate him with the actress Montana Wildhack and keep both earthlings in a zoo. They also explain to him their perception of time, they explain that all time exists for them simultaneously in the fourth dimension. When someone dies he is simply dead at a particular time. Somewhere else and at a different time he is alive and...