World War II was the dominant fact of my childhood years. On December 7, 1941, we were living in Panama, and the jitters of the adults about possible attack affected all we kids. My father was an army officer. Throughout the war, in Seattle, I followed it on my big console radio and read the newspapers about it. Propaganda made me think the absolute worst of the Japanese.

The family had been camping on the Hood Canal near Seattle when in 1945 the two atomic bombs were dropped. We had driven to a rural grocery store to get supplies and food. We were told that it had taken one mighty bomb to destroy each of two cities in Japan. Everyone was acting delighted. All I thought of was that war might end soon. When we got back to the cabin, I told my mother what we had learned. I was surprised that she cried and mourned for all the people who must have died. I had been still thinking of them as enemy. It gave me pause.

My father was sent to Korea by the U.S. Army right after the war. The family joined him in 1946 in Seoul, and a short time later my father and I went together to Japan. I was almost 11 years old. Still a boy, but very alive to the world. There was a thrill of apprehension about actually getting to see the enemy homeland. I carried all sorts of ideas I had been given from wartime propaganda.

Perhaps it was one of the first shocks of growing up. I quickly found that everything I had heard and read about the Japanese people was wrong. I found the people to be on the whole more cultivated and civilized than we were. It was impossible to reconcile that fact with how they had been depicted. Mainly, I could no longer think of “us” and “them.”

As we traveled by train through Japan, I saw enormous war damage. Crashed airplanes were everywhere. There were bomb craters and ruined buildings and public works. We were given the news that we had permission to be the first train into Hiroshima since the war. That city! I did not know what to expect.

A mile away, the train slowed down, and as we got closer, the train slowed more and more until it was just creeping along. The first thing I noticed was that wood tended to be scorched here and there, scorched always on the side facing the city. As we crept in closer the burns became charcoal, including the railroad ties beneath us and all the telephone poles and the trunks of trees still standing.

Approaching what had been the city, there was blast damage. To say it was severe is not to tell the story. Stone and brick had been thrown outward, walls having fallen outwards from the city. It looked like some giant had smashed everything down and knocked it about. Then set an enormous blaze that incinerated what was left.

I looked and I saw all this, through the window of the slowly moving train car. It was beyond anything I had could have imagined. Rubble was strewn as far as we could see, broken only by occasional pieces of wall, and, ironically, tall smokestacks and various tall poles. My father explained that the blast had been in the air, and the shock waves did not topple tall structures. Rather, underneath the blast, everything has been pushed down flat.

When we got to the center of the city, the train stopped and we got out and walked and climbed the junkyard of what had been a large city. There were a few people quietly, with dignity, going through the ruins, digging out things. Here and there, a few tin shacks had been built. There were actually very few people to be seen.

By then I was feeling awed and shocked and very sad for the people. A feeling began growing that this had been wrong. Nothing could justify this. I had grown up believing that everything my country did was right. But seeing what had been done, I had the powerful feeling it had not been right to destroy this city. That was the ember that smoldered deep in my heart the rest of my life.

We walked over to what I think had been the railroad station. From the outside it looked like there had not been much damage. The walls looked intact. But as we approached, and then entered where doors had been, we saw that the entire structure had been smashed straight down, the roof and upper floors heaped into a huge pile of debris.

It was very quiet in Hiroshima. People spoke in hushed tones and only the occasional clank of shovels could be heard around the desolate city. The subdued mood was as true of the American soldiers from the train as it was of the few people who were trying to clear away some of the ruins.

After a while, we had to get back onto the train and it slowly edged out of the city. What we had seen as we entered was reversed. Everything burned and knocked about, then a little less rubble but signs of enormous heat and then less and less of that for a mile outwards. I think what most affected me the burned wood. I knew heat that burned wood did the same to people.

Those years in Asia changed me. I came to love the people and the culture and learned all I could. I always wanted to return. I did not get to go back to Asia until I was in my 60’s. And then it was to Kyoto, which had been spared, and Nagasaki, which had not. I was moved by how graciously the people of Nagasaki had rebuilt – in the old style. At Peace Park, the epicenter, where a Catholic cathedral had been used as the aiming point, I felt very apologetic and said so to our guides. They did not dismiss my feelings. They acknowledged it and said let us work to never let this happen again.

I had been in Hiroshima when it was still in ruins some fifty years earlier. Now, in Nagasaki, with a tourist group, I think I had stronger feelings than any of the other Americans I was with because of that. But what astonished me most was the Japanese bore no ill will, and I was amazed. I loved them for that, for their love. It is the kind of love that is not deserved, just given. And I learned from that it is war to hate, not those who end up fighting it.

The whole war was terrible. I knew the statistics. I had followed it on the radio and in the newspapers. The empire’s soldiers had fought with fierce courage and determination. In adulthood, I had come to the realization that is the nature of war, and the horror of it, that in war good people do very bad things. In the Iraq war, I saw on television wonderful young men and women nonetheless doing their duty of killing. Once a war is started, this is what it has to be like. But what a stupid way to solve problems.

In 1946 it was believed that war had become so horrible there could never be another. In 2003 it seems war is becoming a routine application of politics. Hiroshima’s impression on this young man at the edge of adolescence led to my thinking this way.

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