Gail sat and poured herself a second cup of coffee, then laced it with double cream. “I know he doesn’t have fond memories of the war, but I guess he wanted to see his buddies.”
“Yeah. You know something?”
“What?”
“I never knew that he had been with the 509th Composite until I was fifteen. Even then, mom was the one that told me and David. He hated the war. And he still hates the Japanese. I don’t know how visiting Japan is going to pan out.” Les sighed, and shook his head. “There was no glory in war for him. A lot of hard work. He wasn’t too crazy about war movies either. One time David and I were watching Tora, Tora, Tora with him. He was fine until he got to the Pearl Harbor attack scene. Then he got up and left. Went to cut the grass. He never said a word for at least a day after that. Geez, tough guy to figure.”
“Yeah,” she replied. “But he’s always good to me.”
He sighed. “That’s for damn sure.”
Gail was also from Phoenix, Arizona. She could have had her own career had she wanted. But she preferred to be a stay-at-home mom and the wife of US Navy fighter pilot Lieutenant Les Shilling, the man she met on a blind date. She had taken nurses’ training in Phoenix and completed the course. Once marriage and kids came along, she chose to take only part-time work in her field. On Guam she was filling in two mornings a week at the navy hospital, while her kids were in school. She enjoyed the service life and was happy that her husband was now land-based and not out to sea on a carrier some place where she wouldn’t see him for months on end.
The Shillings took advantage of what the tropical island had to offer. Along with the kids, they enjoyed swimming off the sandy beaches and windsurfing on the breezy warm waters. Les especially relished deep-sea fishing. Gail and Les usually kept to themselves, not making a habit of visiting a lot with the other couples. They still had close friends with whom they would double-date on occasion, but those times were kept to a minimum. Gail found some of the navy wives far too catty. In turn, some of the wives thought her a snob and her husband full of himself after coming back from Top Gun in May.
Piss on them, Les had said recently. He and Gail knew who their friends were.
ALBANY, NEW YORK
“Class,” the attractive young teacher stood to address her Grade Eleven summer school history class. “As you know, we’ve been studying the Second World War. Today and tomorrow, we will concentrate on the atomic bombing missions on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To gain a further insight into these events, we have with us today a resident of our city of Albany. The man who flew the world’s first atomic mission. Class, I would like to introduce retired United States Air Force pilot, Major-General Phillip K. Cameron.”
The teacher — Miss Hay — looked to the open door. Into the warm room walked a good-looking man in his early seventies. His shoes sounded heavy on the floor. He stopped in front of the teacher’s desk and eyed the classroom. He smiled and tipped his thick, horn-rimmed glasses at his grandson — who had made the necessary arrangements for his grandfather’s appearance today — near the back of the room.
Born and raised in New York State, Cameron was an international personality of note. Since piloting the bomber that dropped the first atomic weapon in history, Cameron continued in the service until his retirement in 1964, when he went into his own mail-order business, selling military memorabilia. Retired fully now, he was appreciating the time with his wife. Money was no problem. He was in hot demand for after-dinner speaking and TV and radio appearances, and would even fly the occasional vintage World War aircraft at an air show. Patriotic to the core so many years after the atomic mission, Cameron still maintained he had done the right thing in dropping the bomb, despite the left-wing, anti-nuclear element of society that had been gaining more and more converts since the war’s end. Besides, he was following orders. It brought a quick end to the war. No invasion. The bomb saved lives in the long run.
Today, Cameron had on a medium-gray business suit, with a light-gray tie. He stood straight and tall at six feet. When he dove into his brief introduction about his involvement in the atomic mission, he spoke fluently and coherently as if the mission occurred only yesterday and not 1945. After five minutes he stopped for some questions.
“General Cameron?” A chubby student in the first row held up her hand.
Smiling, Cameron looked down at her. “Yes?”
The girl stood. “Is it true that some members of your crew went crazy after the war?” Then she sat down.
“No, it’s not true,” Cameron replied, holding back a laugh. “That’s a popular misconception about us. Many years ago the left-wing press took a certain piece of information and blew it all out of proportion. It all started when one of the crewmembers who had bombed Nagasaki happened to have some emotional problems prior to joining the air force. As the commanding officer of the 509th, I knew about his problems. At the time, he was not considered a risk. However, after the war he found himself in constant trouble with the law — drunk driving and what have you — and he was in and out of jail. He even wrote out an apology to the Japanese government for his crew dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.” He paused. “Getting back to the original question, I can assure you that all the living members of my crew are still in their right minds, and I hope to see them at a 509th reunion in two weeks.”
Another girl from the front asked how much the atomic bomb project cost.
“Two billion is what I’ve heard estimated,” Cameron saw eyebrows go up, “which is small in comparison to what the US government were spending in a month to finance the entire war against Japan and Germany, which was seven billion.”
More eyebrows went up.
“General Cameron?” A boy from the back stood.
“Yes.”
“What were some of the dangers involved in your atomic flight to Hiroshima and were you scared?”
“Yes, indeed,” the retired air force vet replied, choosing to answer the second question first. “I was scared. But more scared that the mission would fail than I was scared for my life. First off, we were facing the danger of just getting the bomber off the ground with such a large bomb aboard. I had to use up every bit of the eight-thousand-foot-plus runway to take to the air. Then there was the concern of arming the bomb in mid-flight. Once armed, it was live and anything could happen.” Cameron noticed the class was listening to his every word. “Then the biggest danger of all was what would happen once we dropped the bomb. Would the shock waves destroy our aircraft? Luckily, they didn’t. But we still felt the wave when it hit us seven miles away from ground zero.”
The teacher had a question. “General Cameron, would you mind telling the class how important you felt the bomb was? Did it have to be used?”
“That’s a good question, Miss Hay.” Cameron turned to her. “And I was expecting that question from someone today.” He paused to gather his thoughts, then faced the class again. “In the early part of 1945, the United States were drawing up plans for the invasion of Japan. It was code-named Olympic. Eight hundred thousand troops were to land on the southern part of Kyushu in early November 1945. By April 1946, a second amphibious landing, called Coronet, would be deployed on the island of Honshu, near Tokyo. As a result of these two pending invasion forces, the planners were expecting American casualties to number anywhere between a half million to a million men, and the Japanese casualties to reach well over a million. Up to that time, over 300,000 Americans on all the war fronts gave their lives for their country. The Japanese were a fanatical nation. We had no choice but to crush them. To this day, I still believe we did the right thing in dropping the bombs. We ended the war in a hurry, saved lives on both sides in the long run, and brought our boys home.”