Slaughterhouse-five: Little Billy (2)

I had a hard time understanding this chapter since the time keeps flipping from present to past with little or no warning. This second chapter talks about one of the members of the army: Billy. Billy is thin and awkward and pretty much dead weight in the battlefield. He's not much of an athlete and in mentally unstable. But war is just the tip of the ice berg: Billy has gone though a lot of internal wreck throughout his life. Starting at his childhood, when his father pushed him into the pool in a "sink-or-swim" technique to teach him how to swim. Even after Billy gets married and has children, and survives a plane accident, only to lose his wife in another kind of mishap. He undergoes electro-shock therapy as an attempt to make him a 'normal' person, only resulting in a Billy that firmly believes he was once abducted by aliens. Little Billy sure is one miserable man.