Photo by Kilian Karger on Unsplash
Trinity. A code word for a part of The Manhattan Project and also for the unity of The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost. I learned about the latter Trinity in an amalgam of the Catholic church and the Episcopal church as a child.
My dad was Catholic. My mother had just married an Episcopalian, my stepfather. He worked on The Manhattan Project but I didn’t know that until later. It was wartime. World War Two and I was a little boy who spent a lot of time visiting, living with, various grandparents. Three sets of them. My mother and stepfather were off and running. “Traipsing,” as one grandparent put it.
I’ll call him The Atomic Guy. Sometimes he was at Oak Ridge and other times he was at Los Alamos. She was with him a lot and those had to be pretty exciting times. I know they were in Reno from the red dice and ashtrays I saw. That’s probably where she divorced my dad. Whatever they did, wherever they went, they didn’t have to explain anything to anyone. It was all secret. Top Secret. I imagine that added some spice to the traipsing. I recall, quite clearly, a fringed, bright red buckskin jacket my mother wore in those days. Bucking broncs were embroidered on it. Joshua cactus. It was the sort of go-to-hell statement people made back then. She had a bag to match. The Atomic Guy wore cowboy boots.
Every year, and there have been a lot of them, as the long hot summer nears my birthday in August, the whole Atomic Bomb thing rears its death’s head. It’s time for The Media to drum up anniversarial articles about nukes in general and, at this time of year, the specific war ender, the last two words being key. It did end the war, after all. At horrific human cost. But not ours, not this time. War is hell as The Greatest Generation discovered, and as our own hawkish last few administrations should know but act like it’s a requirement of government. Few recall how close the Nazis were to their own totenkopf bombe and they would have pulled out all the stops to use it. We got there first. And, in any case, The Reich got thoroughly vanquished in May of 1945. A few months later we exploded Pandora’s Box to hell and gone. We had to.
August 6th, 1945, the U.S. dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. Then, August 9th we bombed Nagasaki with “Fat Man.” A third bombing planned for August 19th, according to declassified documents, another “Fat Man,” became unnecessary. The location for that bombing is unknown. But that wasn’t to be the end of it. Not by a long shot. As many as seven more bombs (on the order of Fat Man) were in the pipeline to be used by the end of October, had the Japanese not surrendered.
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August 12th, 1945, I celebrated my seventh birthday, blissfully unaware that children my age had been imprinted on floors of leveled buildings in Japan. Nor did I know the physical weight of Little Boy. The plane, Enola Gay, jumped ten feet after dropping the innocuously named load. Let that sink in. I know many things about those days now. I read a lot.
Fifty years ago, in the basement of my folks’ house, while looking through file cabinets for a birth certificate for passport purposes, I came upon a polished wood plaque. Twenty-two names on it. One of the names was that of my stepfather. The inscription above the names thanked the list for their part in “the surrender of Japan in WWII.” and the signature was, I believe, that of Harry Truman. Of course it was not his real signature; it was all embossed and, probably, state of the art plaquewise; today it would have been polished steel or chrome with plexiglas. After my mother died, my stepfather remarried and I imagine the plaque found its way to ebay or some such place. I won’t go into what became of the considerable fortune he’d amassed, some of it my mother’s inheritance.
Back in the 1950’s I began to notice that my stepfather became a morose drunk around the time of my birthday. It was unusual for him to get so blotto back then. I sometimes saw it as a sort of humanity trying to submerge the horror of the event, but that wars with another strong thought; that he was beginning to see, in the day-to-day, that there would never again be as exhilarating a time as there was in the all-out race of The Manhattan Project, a marathon for which he was uniquely suited. Never would he feel so expressly alive and...necessary. This is the thought that wins, knowing him as I did. His arrogance may have come from entering college at fifteen with a stratospherical I.Q. compared to his teen peers. And a rebelliousness against goody-goodness and his father, an Episcopal minister.
He once told me an overkill story about shooting ducks in Delaware from a yacht of some kind; the ducks came in waves and he and his friends kept killing them. Retrieved with small boats, they hung them from the rails on the sides of the big boat until there was nowhere else to hang them so they piled them on the deck. The point of the story, if there was one, was lost on me. The killing, the marksmanship, seemed to be the essence here, the admirable thing. I didn’t ask what happened to the bounty, but I should have. I know the hunters sailed into port triumphantly laden with ducks and proud to show them. I was, by no means, a conservationist when told about this, but I registered a sort of puzzled shame, a bit of heat in my face. I still do when this floats to my consciousness. But WTF is my thought now.
He taught me to hunt, where the safety was on the Ithaca 16 gauge pump he gave me when I turned twelve. How to lead a pheasant or a duck. How to get through a barbed wire fence with a gun safely. How to shoot in your zone, and into a sky situation. Never command another man’s bird dog, etc.
Some time in my twenties, he asked for the gun back, to give to a friend’s son, I think. He said, “You know, that Ithaca pump I lent you.” I said I’d look for it. Of course, around the atomic anniversary and my birthday he was tanked again; he forgot giving it to me with a “You’re old enough, now, Butch...” speech. It still hangs in a gun rack at the farm today, unused for sixty years. I quit hunting one day in Nebraska and never went back. I still walked the fields. That was the part I liked. When he died, I got a Remington 12 gauge, nothing more. I hadn’t expected even the gun. Another WTF thought. Or, is this a joke?
We lived in Tulsa when I was twelve. The Atomic Guy now worked in the oil business, an electrical engineer. Suddenly we were speaking Spanish as much as possible as a family, trying to learn the language as we were anticipating a move to Caracas, Venezuela. I recall hearing Rum and Coca-Cola (workin’ for the Yankee dollah) at high volume at house parties, the rugs rolled back for dancing. I think they were trying to recreate that old wartime frenzy and no tomorrow atmosphere. I thought it was fine. I was given orange juice glasses of beer and got into the spirit, presaging my own battle with booze to come. We moved back to Kansas City rather than Venezuela. As a teen entering high school it was just as strange a move to me. After attending a dozen grade schools, the Tulsa interlude had been a relatively stable few years.
I’ve said nothing of my real dad here; that’s another story, and he deserves much more space than this one will provide. He came home from service as a radioman on a ship, in a sailor suit. I dug the look. He was a good, kind man. A sharp dresser, he worked in haberdashery a while, then settled into a government job in air traffic control which he despised until the day he finally retired. I know that he identified with a Robert Service poem, The Men Who Don’t Fit In, much like so many who returned from the war in the forties and found assimilation to the boomtime fifties confusing and alien, not to mention PTSD, of which nothing was known at the time. The overall feeling was something described by Hunter Thompson, or at least ascribed to him, years later, as “All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.” I know my dad would agree. I know I get it. He puttered with radios a while, some kit he sent for on the back of a matchbook cover. It didn’t take. He taught me some Morse Code on a telegraph key he had. S.O.S. for one thing. Dit dit dit, dah dah dah, dit dit dit. Nobody came to save us. He had gone to college at Creighton and was captain of the track team, a dash man. His time in the 100-yard dash was one-one hundreth off of Jesse Owens’ time. He quit college and track, abruptly. No explanation.
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Trinity. The first (but waaayyy short of the last) test of a radioactive bomb. Alamagordo. The Atomic Guy may or may not have been there. He was in New Mexico in those days. The story is Robert Oppenheimer named the first tested bomb Trinity because of a John Donne poem he admired. The poem has nothing to do with trinity. Another Donne poem barely touches on the Holy Trinity by mentioning “the three-personned God.”. Anyway, what’s in a name? The globelike device was called “Gadget.” They set it off at Jornada Del Muerto. There’s a name for you; it translates to English, roughly, as Journey of the Dead Man.
The blast produced the infamous mushroom cloud that ascended to 38,000 feet. The thing was a stupendous and fiery success that elicited a quote from the well-read Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad-Gita, a long line that ended in, “Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Kenneth Bainbridge, the test director, was more plain-spoken. “Now we are all sons of bitches.” But all this is known and reiterated in August, the tons of TNT equivalencies, the awe, the brightness and heat, the kayo-ing thump for miles—it’s all, at last, indescribable in human terms. May the Father and The Son and The Holy Ghost protect us all. Amen.
There were no evacuations. It was a secret of the highest order, so no one was warned. People died from the longtime effects. Cows ate contaminated grass while radioactivce ash settled on their backs. People ate the cows. Drank the milk. Some looked directly at the fireball and lost their sight for a time, some seeing only in a reverse-negative-tintype sort of visualizing for days, weeks, never to fully regain the sight they’d had before. Stories abound. Official and unofficial. New ones will surface. We can’t get enough of the horror. The tests continued, as we know, after the war, let the ashes fall where they may.
Picture this. The Atomic Guy and my mother in her red fringed buckskin. They are sitting on the hood of Liberace’s pink Cadillac convertible in the desert near Las Vegas. It is just before dawn and they are being served mimosas. I don’t know how this dreamlike diorama came about, but I know it did. I was told about it. They are there to witness a nuclear test north of Las Vegas. They are allowed closer than most tourists due to some finagling. The Atomic Guy lights a cigarette with a flourish of his Zippo, clacks it shut. He says, “Watch this. Nothing like it.” He is living an American Dream of Victory. Necessity. Do or die. For some reason the soundtrack in my head is The Chordettes, Mr. Sandman.
Guinotte Wise writes and welds steel sculpture on a farm in Resume Speed, Kansas. His short story collection (Night Train, Cold Beer) won publication by a university press and enough money to fix the soffits. Five more books since. A 5-time Pushcart nominee, his fiction and poetry have been published in numerous literary journals including Atticus, The MacGuffin, Southern Humanities Review, Rattle and The American Journal of Poetry. His wife has an honest job in the city and drives 100 miles a day to keep it. Some work is at http://www.wisesculpture.com