I Felt It Change Me.

The Departed is a 2006 American crime thriller directed by Martin Scorsese about a boy who is introduced to organized crime at a young age through an Irish mobster named Frank Costello. Frank dedicates his life to training this boy who eventually becomes a police officer and serves as his mole inside the Massachusetts State Police: Special Investigations Unit. At the same time, Billy Costigan, a man who was training to become a police officer, is hired by the the chief of the Special Investigations Unit to drop out of the Police Academy, do time in prison for an assault, gain credibility, and make it into Costello's internal "click" to serve as an undercover informant. Eventually both teams find out that there is a leak in their unit and the movie becomes a battle to discover each others "rats."

You might be asking yourself how this ties into Slaughterhouse-Five. Well due to the fact that Costigan remains on probation once he is sent free from jail, he is forced to meet with psychiatrist Madolyn Madden on a weekly bases. Costigan begins his undercover job as what seems to be an ordinary person. He then passes through a depressive stage in which he becomes overwhelmed of the massive murders which go on in his daily life as a worker of Costello and attempts to commit suicide. As the movie progresses though, one is able to see how Costigan has gone from being a average man with sentiments, to an insensitive person who has become immune to violence. 

"You sit there with a mass murderer, your heart rate is jacked. Yet your hand is steady. Thats something I noticed about myself, my hand now is always steady." - Billy Costigan

This made me think of war and its victims. Maybe Billy Pilgrim isn't as insane as one sees him. At first soldiers are just average people who sign up with hopes of serving, bettering, and bringing justice to their country. Once soldiers have been summated to the carnage and experience wars crude reality, they come back nothing but collateral damage. Putting aside ones physiological state, where depression, personality disorders, and the posttraumatic stress kicks in, once the war is over what do they do? The war has become their routine. Their life. It consumes them and there is no turning back. We are addicted.