American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off
backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German
fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell
fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. . . .The bombers opened
their bomb-bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the
fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the
containers into the bellies of the planes.
The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long
steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen
and planes.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were
taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America,
where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the
cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals.
Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were
then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to
put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never
hurt anybody ever again.
--Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five
