“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”

Those words were among the concluding lines of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” finished within days of Robert Kennedy’s assassination.

Every college student in the 1960’s and 1970’s was at least familiar with Vonnegut, if not within an arm’s reach of one of his 14 novels at all times.

From the NYT:

 

Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday night in Manhattan at the age of 84.

So it goes.