Other editions of book Slaughterhouse Five or, The Children's Crusade, A Duty-Dance with Death

Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim is a disoriented, fatalistic, and ill-trained American soldier. He does not like wars & he is captured by Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans put Billy & his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse / animal carcasses hanging in the underground shelter in Dresden. Their building is known as Slaughterhouse number 5. The POWs & German guards alike hide in a deep cellar; & are some of the few survivors of the firestorm during the Bombing of Dresden. Billy is "unstuck in time"& experiences past & future events out of sequence & repetitively, in nonlinear time & ia kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. Billy lives in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, & Billy becomes convinced of the veracity of their theories. As Billy travels forward & backward in time, he relives his life, real & fantasy. He spends time on Tralfamadore, in Dresden, in the War, walking in deep snow before his German capture, in his mundane post-war married life in the U.S.A. of the 1950s and early 1960s, and in the moment of his murder by a petty thief named Paul Lazzaro.