(3 of 13)
"I'm not kidding. No script and no score. So I have to hire an attorney. It's funny, but it's not so funny. That's the IRS for you. Not a thing you can do about it. The way they're going to get their money is through the taxes the lawyer pays 'em after me payin' him.
"And another thing I got is the original strike orders [for the bombing], which are rather impressive. They were posted on the bulletin board in Tinian, telling us what planes to use, and when to go to breakfast, and when you take off. And the thing that gets me: you read all the way down--so many gallons of gasoline, and so on--until you get to 'Bomb: Special.' Just said 'Special.' Course, the IRS says that's worthless too. What's a country boy to do?"
From time to time the phone rings, and the country boy enters another imminent negotiation. He is trying to sell one of his four cars, a '66 Ford with 208,000 miles on it. Someone has just informed him that the car has a burned-out valve. "You still wanna buy it?"
He addresses the past again. "Did we have to drop the Bomb? You bet your life we did. I wrote an article a couple of years ago recounting my experiences as a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations General Assembly Second Session on Disarmament [June 1982]. Outside the U.S. building a group was sitting and marching in silence in memory of Hiroshima. Not Pearl Harbor but Hiroshima. No one seems to realize that without Pearl Harbor there wouldn't have been a Hiroshima." He goes back to the beginning:
"The way things really got started was in late '41, after Pearl Harbor. Actually for me, before that time. I was a student at the University of Denver. That's my hometown. And we were all signing up to join the Army Air Corps. Many of my classmates had run off to Canada. That was when you'd run off to Canada to get into a war, not stay out of one. In fact, my classmate Keith Johnson got shot down in the Battle of Britain. So we were all signing up. But a professor of mine said, 'Don't sign up in that program. I think something's happening where you can be much more useful.' That's all I knew. A couple of weeks later he said, 'You're going to Chicago.'
"In those days there were only a handful of places in the whole country that knew anything about nuclear energy--nuclear physics. It was just in '38 that Enrico Fermi got the Nobel Prize for his work with neutrons, so it was all really brand new. What happened was that the heads of the few places--Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley, Arthur Compton at Chicago, John Dunning at Columbia--they contacted all their former graduates and said, 'Come on back.' They were told that if they knew any semiliterate undergraduates, bring 'em too. It's for the war. So my professor at Denver brought me, first to Columbia, then to Chicago, to see what was going on. Not really. I don't think I knew what was going on as far as the Bomb was concerned for maybe nine months. Anyway, we went to Chicago and started building the first man-made chain reaction.