Hiroshima

Just realized it's August 6 - the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. My dad worked on the A-bomb in WWII at Los Alamos; he worked on "Fat Man" which was dropped on Nagasaki 3 days after Hiroshima.

He's always been somewhat reticent about his experience, though we got him to talk for the video camera about 15 years ago and I show that tape to my students when I teach about the A-bomb. He's always felt that the U.S. should have used the Bomb because it forestalled the invasion of Japan.

He's now in a nursing home, and on our last visit I saw him get emotional about this for the first time in my life as he talked with the hospice chaplain about his life.

The history of the Bomb is really a history of war - we try to set "rules" (no civilian populations will be bombed from the air without warning, for example) and then when we get more involved the "rules" go out the window. From my own experience in war, the only "rule" is kill or be killed. Pretty sad...