The Philadelphia Inquirer -- Opinion -- Monday, August 5, 1996

A-bomb: Speaking about the unspeakable
Hiroshima runs like a fissure, but also like an attracting current, a secret unity, through our lives.

By Tom Engelhardt

As last year's acrimonious showdown at the Smithsonian Institution made clear, Americans can't seem to come to terms with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Still, at a personal level, I'd like to try again to lay out the pieces of a story that evidently none of us can yet tell. In my story, there are three characters and no dialogue, mostly silence.

There is my father, who immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, at age 35, volunteered for the Army Air Corps, fought in Burma, was painfully silent on his wartime experiences, and died on Pearl Harbor Day 13 years ago.

There is myself, growing up in a world in which my father's war was everywhere glorified, in which my play fantasies in any park ran to mowing down Japanese, but my dreams were of nuclear destruction.

Finally, there is a Japanese boy whose name I've forgotten and whose fate is unknown to me.

* * * * *

The very idea of nuclear destruction seemed not to touch my father. Like other schoolchildren, I went through nuclear attack drills with sirens howling outside, but I had no doubt that he continued to work unfazed in his office. It was I who went to the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour where I was shocked by my first sight of the human casualties of the bombing, and to On the Beach to catch a glimpse of how the world might end. It was I who saw the mushroom cloud rise in my dreams. Of all this I said not a word to him, nor he to me.

On his erstwhile enemies, however, my father was not silent. He hated the Japanese with a war-bred passion. They had, he told me, "done things" which couldn't be discussed.

The hatred of all things Japanese was not a ruling passion of my childhood only because they were so absent from our lives. There was nothing Japanese in our house (one did not buy their products); we avoided the only Japanese restaurant in our part of town, and no Japanese ever came to visit.

In the end, I followed my own path to Hiroshima, drawn perhaps to the world my father so vehemently rejected. In 1979, as an editor, I published Unforgettable Fire, the drawings of Hiroshima residents who had lived through that day. It was, I suspect, the first time any sizable number of images of the human damage there made it into mainstream American culture. In 1982, I visited Japan, thanks to the book's Japanese editor, who took me to Hiroshima, an experience I found myself unable to talk about on my return. This, too, became part of the silences my father and I shared.

To make a story, thus far, would then seem relatively simple. Two generations face each other across the chasm of a war and an act that divided them. It is the story we all know. And yet, there is my third character, that Japanese boy, who drifted into my consciousness this year after an absence of almost four decades. I no longer remember--I can't even imagine--how he and I were put in contact sometime in the mid-1950s.

Like me, my Japanese pen pal must then have been 11 or 12 years old. If we exchanged photos I have no memory of his face, nor does a name come to mind. Like me, he had undoubtedly been born during World War II. Perhaps in his first year of life he had been evacuated from one of Japan's charred cities. For him, the aftermath of that disastrous war would be a vivid reality.

I have a faint memory of the feel of his letters, a crinkly thinness undoubtedly meant to save infinitesimal amounts of weight--and so money--then. We wrote, of course, in English, but of the content I remember little. What I most remember are the exotic-looking stamps that arrived on (or in) his letters, for I was--with my father--an avid stamp collector. On Sunday afternoons my father and I would prepare and mount our stamps, consult our Scott's Catalog, and paste them in. In this way the Japan section of our album was filled with that boy's offerings, without comment but also without protest.

We exchanged letters for a year or two and then who knows what interest of mine (or his?) overcame us--perhaps only the resistance boys can have to writing letters. In any case, he, too, entered a realm of silence. Only now, remembering him, and remembering those quiet moments of closeness when my father and I bent over our albums, do I note that he existed briefly and without discussion in our lives. He existed, for both of us perhaps, in the ambiguous space that silence can create.

And now I wonder sometimes what kinds of nuclear dreams my father had.

* * * * *

For all of us, in a sense, the earth was knocked off its axis on Aug. 6, 1945. In that one moment, my father's war ended and my war, the Cold War, began (as many historians of the dropping of the first atomic bomb now argue). But, in my terms, it seems so much messier than that, for we--and that boy--continued to live in the same world together, for a long time, accepting and embroidering each other's silences.

The bomb runs like a fissure, but also like an attracting current, a secret unity, through our lives. The rent it tore in history was deep and the generational divide--the experiences of those growing up on either side of it--profound. But any story would also have to hold the ways, even deeper and harder to fathom, in which we lived through it all together in pain, hatred, love, and most of all silence; as well as our failure to understand how that might have been so.

In this 51st year after Hiroshima, a year charged with no meaning, perhaps we'll think a little about the stories we can't tell and about the subterranean stream of emotional horror that unites us, that won't go away, whether we exhibit the Enola Gay as a glorious icon or bury it deep in the earth with a stake through its metallic heart.

Of course, for my particular story, the one I've never quite been able to tell, there is that Japanese boy, who perhaps lives today with his own memories. When I think of him right now, when I realize that he, my father, and I still can't inhabit the same story, except in silence, a strange kind of emotion rushes up in me.


Tom Engelhardt, the author of The End of Victory Culture (1995), is co-editor of the new book, History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, published by Metropolitan Books.


Philadelphia Online -- The Philadelphia Inquirer, Opinion -- Copyright Monday, August 5, 1996


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