I was born on the third anniversary of the dropping of the Bomb at Hiroshima. It turns every birthday into a sad occasion. If you are not familiar with the particulars, try to find and read Sir Thomas Merton's Original Child Bomb... not an easy book to find, but deeply moving.
Ow. Happy Birthday anyway, Steve. I read up on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki along with the WWII soldier and concentration camp stories when I was a teenager. Judgement at Nuremberg scared the shit out of me and I spent a lot of time trying to get a handle on war crimes and other horrors.
Never did, actually. I know my father was preparing to be sent from the European theater over to the Pacific when the bombs were dropped.
Easy in hindsight to ask the questions that should have been asked before we did such a horrific thing....
"Never did, actually. I know my father was preparing to be sent from the European theater over to the Pacific when the bombs were dropped."
My father as well. He was gunnery officer for a troop landing ship; he'd have been right in the thick of the landing. In our (very civil) debates on the subject, Dad pointed out that I might never have been born if America had not dropped The Bomb. I pointed out that most analysis today shows that the war was already won by the time the Bomb was dropped, that Truman and Churchill knew that, and some think it was mainly a demonstration for the Soviets. I kindly did not point out that if tens of thousands of Japanese people were not incinerated, and I were never born, I'd consider that a more than fair trade.
Dad did what he believed was right, though he never came to love war the way some men do. I cannot fault him, because I know the decision to participate was a conscious moral decision for him.
The problem is violence must be hardwired in our lizard brains. Only those who know how to recognize the ancient Viking berserker in themselves are able to resist it. Others drool over the next bigger than the other guys' best shiny deadly bunker buster bomb...
4 comments:
I was born on the third anniversary of the dropping of the Bomb at Hiroshima. It turns every birthday into a sad occasion. If you are not familiar with the particulars, try to find and read Sir Thomas Merton's Original Child Bomb... not an easy book to find, but deeply moving.
Ow. Happy Birthday anyway, Steve. I read up on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki along with the WWII soldier and concentration camp stories when I was a teenager. Judgement at Nuremberg scared the shit out of me and I spent a lot of time trying to get a handle on war crimes and other horrors.
Never did, actually. I know my father was preparing to be sent from the European theater over to the Pacific when the bombs were dropped.
Easy in hindsight to ask the questions that should have been asked before we did such a horrific thing....
"Never did, actually. I know my father was preparing to be sent from the European theater over to the Pacific when the bombs were dropped."
My father as well. He was gunnery officer for a troop landing ship; he'd have been right in the thick of the landing. In our (very civil) debates on the subject, Dad pointed out that I might never have been born if America had not dropped The Bomb. I pointed out that most analysis today shows that the war was already won by the time the Bomb was dropped, that Truman and Churchill knew that, and some think it was mainly a demonstration for the Soviets. I kindly did not point out that if tens of thousands of Japanese people were not incinerated, and I were never born, I'd consider that a more than fair trade.
Dad did what he believed was right, though he never came to love war the way some men do. I cannot fault him, because I know the decision to participate was a conscious moral decision for him.
I like you dad.
The problem is violence must be hardwired in our lizard brains. Only those who know how to recognize the ancient Viking berserker in themselves are able to resist it. Others drool over the next bigger than the other guys' best shiny deadly bunker buster bomb...
Post a Comment