The Heat of the Sun

Boy through the placid morning. Seconds passed: forty-three seconds before the explosion, 1,900 feet in the air above Hiroshima. How precisely the
scientists measured it all! It was a matter of mathematics: the 350,000 people in the city; the 4.4 square miles around ground zero devastated almost completely; the thousands or tens of thousands
killed at once, blitzed out of existence like insects in a flame – and this was to reckon without the thousands more blinded, burned, or slashed by flying glass, stumbling through field after
field of blackened corpses for hours, even days, after the explosion. Many had skin hanging from their faces in strips. Many would die later in agonies of the damned, eaten from within by atomic
radiation.
    President Truman heard about the bombing as he sailed home from the Potsdam Conference. He was elated – this, he declared to a group of sailors, was the greatest thing in history.
    The official statement from the White House was simple and direct. The Japanese, said Truman, had been repaid for their attack on Pearl Harbor. Now they must surrender or the bombing would be
ceaseless, blasting their islands into oblivion: a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on the earth.
    The story continued on the inside pages. Senator B. F. Pinkerton (Democrat, New York) was to address both houses on the President’s behalf on the morning of Thursday, August 9.
    A pulse leaped in my neck. Could I talk to the senator – make him see reason? Might he not speak out against further attacks? For years his rhetorical gifts had been the envy of the
Senate.
    I could stop nothing. I knew that. But I had to try.
    That afternoon I bought a plane ticket to Washington, DC. Flights across the continent were a long business in those days. We would put down in Salt Lake City and Des Moines,
then change planes in Chicago.
    In the air I drank whisky, ate nothing, and did my best to sleep. On the Chicago plane I sat next to a businessman from Baltimore. He wanted to talk about the bomb. ‘Can you believe
it?’ he kept saying. ‘Can you believe it?’ – overjoyed, it seemed, at this latest revelation of American know-how, as if Oppenheimer were Thomas Edison and had just invented
the light bulb. When the fellow asked me what I did in the army, I slapped my bad leg and told him I had been at Iwo Jima. He demanded to shake my hand. Later, at Washington National Airport, I saw
him in the distance, staring across the concourse, amazed, as three military policemen approached me with rifles trained, arrested me, handcuffed me, and led me away.
    I said to them, ‘You’re going to explain this?’
    The oldest one looked at me warily. The youngest twitched his mouth. The one in the middle seemed about to say something, but glances from the others made him hold off – for a time, at
least.
    ‘Traitor,’ he whispered to me, as our armoured car drew up outside the lock-up, a grim, red-brick building on a base outside Washington.
    Blankly, I let them lead me to my cell. ‘Do I get to call my lawyer?’ I asked as the door slammed behind me.
    I slumped on my cot. The cell was like Trouble’s a continent away, give or take a touch or two. No toilet bowl, only a chamber pot. No movie magazines, only a Bible. I curled on the cot,
face towards the wall, and did not much care what happened to me next.
    It was morning. Breakfast came on a tray: toast, sausages, eggs over easy.
    It was afternoon. Lunch came: lamb, potatoes, minted peas.
    It was night. Dinner: chicken, potatoes, minted peas.
    Morning again. I stood by the window. Swampily, greenly, the Potomac crawled by, and I thought of other rivers, harbours, seas. My spirit was a paper boat, buffeted on the tide.
    Questions now: ‘ Major, could you confirm... ? ’ and ‘Major, could you clarify... ? ’ and, ominously, ‘ Major, you’re sure there isn’t
more... ? ’ The military policemen were not the ones who had arrested me, but might as well have been: disguised a little, that was all. The middle one, the one who had called me traitor,
had turned into an earnest, bespectacled type, taking down my answers like a clerk of the court; the older one, heavier of frame now, led the questioning in a Voice of America voice, while his
young assistant, flush-faced, made stammering, supplementary offerings when prompted by his superior.
    I told them everything. But everything was not enough.
    When they came again, I could not think