the complicated futility of ignorance

I had never tasted blackberry brandy before. I never want to taste it again. It did bad things to me.It made me a crybaby about the war. That is something I swore I would never be.

If I could order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one. That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the air conditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me.

His name? Rob Roy.

*

"Professor Hartke," Jason Wilder said to me gently, reasonably, when the tape had reached its end, "why on Earth would you want to tell such tales to young people who need to love their country?"

"I'm telling them history," I said, "and I had had a little too much to drink. I usually don't drink that much."

-K. Vonnegut, Jr.