American prisoners were put to work immediately after the bombing, excavating bodies from the rubble.[25] He described the activity as a "terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt".[24]The American prisoners of war were evacuated on foot to the border of Saxony and Czechoslovakia after General George S. Pattoncaptured Leipzig. With the captives abandoned by their guards, Vonnegut reached a prisoner-of-war repatriation camp in Le Havre, France, before the end of May, 1945, with the aid of the Soviets.[23] He returned to the United States and continued to serve in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, typing discharge papers for other soldiers.[26] Soon after he was awarded a Purple Heart about which he remarked "I myself was awarded my country's second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frost-bite."[27] He was discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to Indianapolis.[28]Marriage and early employment[edit]After he returned to the United States, 22-year-old Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, his high school girlfriend and classmate since kindergarten, on September 1, 1945. The pair relocated to Chicago, where Vonnegut enrolled in the University of Chicago as a graduate anthropology student, courtesy of the G.I. Bill, and worked for the Chicago City News Bureau at night. Jane accepted a scholarship from the university to study Russian at a graduate level. Neither of them finished their degrees. Jane dropped out of the school after becoming pregnant with the couple's first child, Mark (born May 1947), and after Kurt's master's thesis, which analyzed the Ghost Dance religious movement among Native Americans, was unanimously rejected, he left the university without his degree.[d]General Electric (GE) hired Vonnegut as a publicist for the company's Schenectady, New York research laboratory. The job had required a college education, and, despite dropping out of his program, Vonnegut lied that he had a master's in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Kurt's brother Bernard had worked at GE since 1945, contributing significantly to an iodine-based cloud seeding project. In 1949, Kurt and Jane had a daughter named Edith. Still working for GE, Vonnegut had his first piece, titled "Report on the Barnhouse Effect", published in the February 11, 1950 issue of Collier's, for which he received $750.[30] Vonnegut wrote another story, after being coached by the fiction editor at Collier's, Knox Burger, and again sold it to the magazine, this time for $950. Burger suggested he quit GE, a course he had contemplated before. Vonnegut moved with his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts to write full-time, and left GE in 1951.[31]First novel[edit]On Cape Cod, Vonnegut made most of his money writing pieces for magazines such as Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and Cosmopolitan. He also did a stint as an English teacher, wrote copy for an advertising agency, and opened the first American Saab dealership, which eventually failed. In 1952, Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, was published by Scribner's. The novel has a post-third world war setting, in which factory workers have been replaced by machines.[32]Player Piano draws upon Vonnegut's experience as a young executive at GE. He satirizes the drive to climb the corporate ladder, one that in Player Piano is