“Tell me,” Kurt Vonnegut asks Jane Marie Cox, his future wife, “would you enjoy living with me, sleeping with me, leading a carnival life?”

He writes from Camp Atterbury in 1944, where he is an enlisted 22-year-old intelligence trainee in the 106th infantry division. “My new job is to cover my face and hands with soot and crawl into enemy lines to see what in the hell they’ve got,” he explains.