His duties with the newspaper, then one of the few daily high school newspapers in the country, offered Vonnegut a unique opportunity to write for a large audience of fellow students. Vonnegut noted that, " just turned out I could write better than a lot of other people. Each person has something he can do easily and can't understand why everybody else has so much trouble doing it," in this case writing. After graduation from Shortridge High School, Vonnegut attended Cornell University where he majored in biochemistry and biology (3,1). Kurt had called Cornell a "boozy dream" due to the alcohol he imbibed; however he found success outside of the classroom working for the Cornell Daily Sun (2,5). After attending Cornell University, he enlisted in the United States army serving in WWII (4,1). Kurt was somewhat delighted to join the war since he was flunking everything by the middle of his junior year (2). He has first been rejected for health reasons, but was later selected and placed into the Specialized Training Program, sending him to study mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and at the University of Tennessee (2,6). Vonnegut ended up as a battalion intelligence scout in the 106th Infantry Division, based just south of Indianapolis. On Mother's Day 1944 he received leave from his duties and returned home to find that his mother had committed suicide the previous evening (5,1). This and several other extraordinary events that have occurred in Vonnegut's life have undoubtedly influenced in vision of the fantastic in daily life, which appears in his writings (5,2). Almost 30 years after his mother's suicide, he finally expressed his painful feelings in Breakfast of Champions (1). Three months after his mother's suicide, he was called back into service just in time to be captured during the last German offensive of the war - the Battle of the Bulge (3,2).