In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the bombs created temperature of 3,600 degrees, some of the victims were simply vaporized. On the big museum screen, there is wild American celebrating as the war comes to an end. I don't know if the two Japanese men in front of me feel the same way. 'You had a job to do, and you did it,' she said. She'd been in Hiroshima when it was leveled. If it hadn't been for the bomb, I'd have had to go into Japan.' Or the Japanese woman who approached him in 1985, at services marking the 40th anniversary of the bomb. What helped sustain him were the others who approached him: the Americans who told him, 'You saved my life.
Sometimes there were face-to-face confrontations. Killer, someone anonymous would call him. Sometimes there were late-night telephone calls. He spent the rest of his life, though, describing not only the terrible things that he saw but the reasons they had to happen.
