My favorite novel of the late Kurt Vonnegut is Slaughterhouse Five, the haunting, semi-biographical story of a U.S. prisoner-of-war who endured the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany near the end of World War II.

I was reminded of Vonnegut and his fine novel by one of the most interesting sites that I’ve come across this year — Letters of Note, which passes along "correspondence deserving of a wider audience."

This Letters of Note post provides Vonnegut’s first letter to his parents that got through to the U.S. after he had been captured by the Nazis in 1944 and then freed by the Russians in 1945. It is a fascinating tale of his capture, the suffering he and his fellow prisoners endured as POW’s, and his almost as harrowing repatriation.

An appropriate story to reflect upon as our federal government commits even more of our soldiers to a far off land.