"War may induce side effects like alcoholism, nausea and life long trauma, check with your doctor before going to war". If war had a caution label thats what it should read. Aside from losing limbs or acctually dying, soldiers that have experienced war in its most unhuman way tend to also losse their sanity. Such disorders like PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and the Gulf Syndrome are names for having lost your mind in war and recieving one of war's most unhealeble wounds. Normally these diseases start bending your sanity when a person experiences something disturbin and horrible such as war, causing trauma in that person's psique. after deep denial and self destructive existential issues the mind lets go of the last bits of sanity. When I stopped looking at Billy Piligrim like if it was more a symbol than a man I realized that he may not be the introspective guy after all. When I came to this partial conclusion I thought, in an undermining tone, that Billy was just a poor crazy person having alucinations of time travel and aliens.
Almost inmediately I recognized how shallow my observations were and felt pitty for Billy because really he is just trying to cope with his trauma and existential issues, even if it takes aliens, which is actually fairly common since to deal with trauma an external entity with a little fiction (religion) may help ease the wound. This is a pretty accurate portraing of PTSD by Vonnegut, however, since he himself is a veteran that witnessed one of the most horifing scenes of WWII it might go a little deeper. Billy might be a representation of Vonnegut's own trauma and it would also wouldn't be a surprise if vonnegut himself might have a still present PTSD himself.
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