Wayne and Sinatra in Slaughterhouse-Five?

I was reading through an interview with Kurt Vonnegut in the online version of the Paris Review (the link is at the bottom) and saw that Vonnegut had originally intended to tell his story as "a classy adventure". He really did intend to create a book that would be have roles for Frank Sinatra and John Wayne at the beginning of the writing process:

Others had so much more to write about. I remember envying Andy Rooney, who jumped into print at that time; I didn't know him, but I think he was the first guy to publish his war story after the war; it was called Air Gunner. Hell, I never had any classy adventure like that...Then a book by David Irving was published about Dresden, saying it was the largest massacre in European history. I said, By God, I saw something after all! I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.

It surprised me that Vonnegut actually thought that he would right the typical war novel; it wasn't really even his intention to write an antiwar novel when he began. The first chapter had not given me that impression at all. I was also surprised that his conversation with Mary O'hare was true. The first chapter is Vonnegut speaking about his experience, but I didn't realize the extent to which he is present. Even the name Mary O'Hare is the same. Another comment interested me as well, all about his experience in the war. When the interviewer asked "What did you do when you got to the front?", he answered, "I imitated various war movies I’d seen."
These two statements made me realize that Slaughterhouse-Five would have been very different if Vonnegut had written it earlier on, just after he had come out of the war. Most of the war books and movies of the time starred soldiers who were patriotic, brave, masculine, and eager to fight on the front lines for their countries (and usually featuring large weapons to demonstrate the power of the United States and the other Allies). If Vonnegut had written Slaughterhouse-Five while he was caught up in the feeling of success of the postwar years, I think he might have written it like a war movie. I wouldn't want to say that he wasn't deeply affected and disturbed by the war at that time; he probably was--I think it would be hard to come back from the war without being kind of messed up. But he was still very young when he came back, and did not, even according to him, fully understand the gravity of what he had witnessed in Dresden.

When the city was demolished I had no idea of the scale of the thing . . . Whether this was what Bremen looked like or Hamburg, Coventry . . . I’d never seen Coventry, so I had no scale except for what I’d seen in movies.

Vonnegut waited all the way until 1968-1969 to write Slaughterhouse-Five. This was right before the Vietnam war, and there was a lot of anti-war protesting at the time which also might have influenced him to write about his experiences from an anti-war perspective. As an older adult, he better understood how young he was when he went to war, especially after he talked to Mary O'Hare. 

She freed me to write about what infants we really were: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that that was a problem. 

I don't that Vonnegut could have seen that if he was writing the book in his twenties, because people cannot see how naive and young they are--they can only look back and realize how little they knew and understood in the past. We would undoubtedly be reading a very different book if Vonnegut had written Slaughterhouse-Five in the forties; in fact, I don't think we would be reading it, because it would most likely be less controversial and less creative in its approach.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3605/the-art-of-fiction-no-64-kurt-vonnegut