Twenty-five years after arriving in Dresden, Billy boards a plane from Ilium to Montreal, even though he knows it will crash. His father-in-law, Lionel, is on the plane next to him, and his wife, Valencia, is waving goodbye to them as she eats a candy bar. A barbershop quartet entertains the passengers with ribald comic songs and, as they are singing, the plane crashes into the top of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. Everyone except Billy is killed. He sustains a fractured skull but is rescued by some Austrian ski instructors from the resort nearby. When they ask his address, he replies: Schlachthöf-funf.

While Billy is in the hospital, he has millions of dreams, some of which are his real experiences of time-travel. In Dresden in 1944, one of his German guards was a sixteen year-old boy named Werner Gluck. Once, when Gluck was taking Billy and Derby to the kitchen, they saw a group of girls showering. Neither Gluck nor Billy had seen naked women before. When they reached the kitchen, an old woman saw the three of them, one too old to fight and the others too young, and said: “All the real soldiers are dead.”