| One Thousand Meters From Ground Zero
I knew a man who, as a corporal in the Army, participated in the second atomic bomb test conducted by the U.S. This was made with what we now call a "dirty" bomb: its explosion would contaminate particulate matter and cast it outward through the air. My acquaintance was one thousand meters from ground zero in a Sherman tank with two other soldiers. When the bomb went off it threw a flash of intense light. My acquaintance, one hand over his eyes, the other grasping his rifle, could see the bones of the hand that covered his face, could see the metal (but not the wood) of the rifle the other skeletal hand held, could see the steel of the floor of the tank through his hands of light and bone. When, after the light, the wind came, it picked the tank up and threw it down on its side and scraped it across the sand of the desert for eight hundred meters. When the wind passed, my acquaintance and the two other soldiers climbed out of the tank through its hatch. They were blind. They could not find their weapons. My acquaintance remembered that he was supposed to locate his weapon but he was unable to do this. He did not know what else to do so he sat down by the tank. His mind, he told me, was a jumble of fragments. It was disassociating at a mile a second, faster even than that. It seemed unable to fix on a single image but would jump to the next before making sense of the first. It could not find a context for anything. My acquaintance told me that if the Army thought its soldiers could resume battle immediately following a nuclear blast it needed to think again. His sight returned after he had been sitting beside the tank for what he guessed to be forty-five minutes. He said that every year he went to an Army hospital where the doctors took a sample of his spinal fluid. So far, he said, he was fine. He was middle-aged now. He had two children who were normal, though very short. He put his hand, palm flat, about eighteen inches from the floor. Then he laughed. He was only kidding; both of his children were normal, he said. When I met him he was a lieutenant colonel. When he was a corporal he was in a Sherman tank one thousand meters from ground zero because his father had ordered him there. His father was the commanding general of the post on which the bomb test was run. When he, my acquaintance, told me this, he grinned. In his grin were many things, none of which could be easily defined. © Jerome Gold |