Day of the Bomb Read Online Free PDF

ought to know
because my old man works construction. He wouldn’t believe his eyes
the way they throw up buildings and scratch out airfields on chunks
of coral that don’t look big enough for any plane to land or take
off from. Invade Japan? It’ll be the marines who go in first, as
usual. Semper fi, first to die. Make the folks back home start to
cry. Then us grunts will go in next singing:
    Over hill,
    Over dale,
    The Japs hit us without fail
    As the dogfaces go rolling along.
    With a hi, hi, hee,
    They kill us with glee
    And banzai their way to glory!
    Think this thing through. You were right,
Pop. The more I think about it the less I like the sounds of it.
Don’t forget I enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor got blown to
hell. We got guys back on that boat who’ve only been GIs for less
than a year. ‘Cruits is what we call them, short for recruits.
There’s got to be at least one of them willing to die in my place
when we invade Japan.
    Come to think about it, what
about the Professor and those other college boys? They told him to
finish up college first. That way he didn’t have to put on his
uniform until the summer of 1942. Me? I was on a ship headed across
the Pacific by that time. Lord, have mercy; I can’t even remember
the names of all the islands we took away from the Japs. The worst
of all was the Philippines. Too many damn civilians and prisoners
of war that you had to be careful not to kill. How are you supposed
to liberate an island as big as Leyte or Mindanao or Luzon when
it’s crawling with civilians? Oh, sure.
They were sure glad to see us. “Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!” That’s all we
heard for months and months. But the worst of it was seeing the
dead prisoners there in Manila. No, I take that back. Even worse
than that was the big POW camp north of Manila where they held all
the American troops that survived after the Japs invaded the
Philippines. The ones that survived? They looked to be more dead
than alive to me. God, I still hate thinking about their stories
about that death march from Bataan. If any of them fell down or
lagged behind they stuck them with their bayonets or cut off
their heads probably just to save bullets!
From what I saw at that POW camp, there were more graves than
survivors. You’re right. Thanks, Pop. You told me life is all about
being a survivor.
    One of Mom’s admonitions surfaced: “If you
get in a fix, Jason, pray.”
    He prayed aloud, certain God
was more likely to hear him. “Our Father, Who art in Heaven…” By
the time he had prayed “Thy will be done…” he stopped. Wait a minute, is it God’s will I die in this
stinking war or that I survive it somehow?
    A day and night of thinking
slowly convinced Jason that any rescue of him would only serve to
make him part of the invasion of Japan, which in turn might make
him a part of a telegram sent back home informing his family that
“We regret to inform you…” Or maybe
they’ll send out one or two guys in their Class-A dress uniforms to
tell Mom and Pop in person. All that’s left to do after that is to
switch the blue star flag in the window to a red star flag. That
way anybody passing by the house will know I’m not coming
back.
    No thanks, President Truman
and Uncle Samuel. I think I’ll sit the big one out. Let’s see now.
The Professor said it would probably take another year for the war
to finally end. He turned and etched the
date into the trunk of an eighty-foot tall breadfruit tree: 8/7/45.
Tomorrow he would make a notch, followed by one for each succeeding
day. When he reached four notches, on the fifth day he planned to
scratch a diagonal line through the first four. On and on the
notches would continue until… Let’s see,
what’s 365 divided by five… He did the math
by using the sand as a tablet and his finger as a pencil. Okay, seventy-three groups of five days and then
I’ll build the bonfire so they can come and finally rescue my sorry
butt. Until then, it’s me and Kong against