Several hundred men watched the first atomic explosion in history from the base camp at ten miles, and their accounts fill shelves; they describe the sky. The account below describes the ground, its author having spent the occasion face down upon a crate of the recording detachment's rehearsal returns, in a posture the reader saw him assume in the last number and will find photographed, to lasting effect, in this one. The notes deal with the photograph. —Ed.
The voice took the last numbers away one at a time, as flatly as it had taken all the others. I lay in the open across the crate with my face in the recording detachment's paperwork and my arms crossed over the back of my neck; Marcum's letter to his mother in Joplin was pressed between my chest and the lid, and the square of welder's glass had found its way out of my shirt pocket into my right fist at some point I do not remember, where orders said it should be raised at the proper moment, and where it stayed, unraised. My nose, which has given me two days' notice of every fire of my life and a name as the last man out of each, had nothing for me and had had nothing since June; there is no early door out of a disaster that publishes its schedule. So for once I was present, and punctual, while the voice went down through the small numbers toward a moment I now know to have been twenty-nine minutes and forty-five seconds past five in the morning, and which no man on his face in that camp knew any closer than now.1
At the end the voice said a word that was not a number, and the light came.
It came with no sound at all — that is the first thing, and the accounts that lead with the noise have it back to front. It came through my crossed arms and through my shut lids, and the inside of my eyelids went white; not bright — white; brightness has an edge somewhere and this had none. I opened my eyes, and I do not claim that as a decision. An inch away, a return that had worked loose under the lid lay printed plainer than noon — I could read the typed line under my chin and the pencilled initials beside it — and my own shadow was not on it. I lay the whole length of myself over that sheet, and there was no shadow of me anywhere upon it. The light was not falling on the ground from any place; it was in everything at once, the way water is in a flooded field, and sideways along the ground, as far as a man can see without raising his head, the desert lay white, flat, and shadowless, every pebble and bootprint made of the same white. And it stayed. Lightning goes. Sunrise moves. This stood over us and went on standing while I lay under it with my mouth against other men's paperwork.
Then the heat came, one beat behind, on the back of my neck and the backs of my hands. Not a wind — nothing moved, not one paper under my face — but a warmth laid on me all at once, the way a hand is laid flat on a table, and about that heavy, and no hotter than June sun. It had come ten miles across the dark to lie on the back of my neck like a hand, and it was gentle, and I heard myself make a sound into the crate that I have not made since and will not spell here.
After the light and the heat there was nothing. No report, no thunder, no dog, no voice. I could hear the paper taking my breath. Around me in the silence men began to get up — boots, cloth, and not one word — and I turned my cheek onto the lid, which is the whole of the courage I found that morning, and looked out along the ground the way every man was facing. Out on the flat where the dark had been, a column of fire stood on the desert and climbed. I will not dress it up. It stood, and went up into itself, turning over as it rose, lit from the inside as nothing else I ever saw is lit, and the men of the camp stood black against it, still as fenceposts, the welder's glass hanging unused from their hands. Somewhere near me a voice said, "God," very quietly, the way a man answers a question. Nobody added to it. Somewhere behind me another man counted seconds aloud, lost his place, and began again.
The sound arrived at last — it had taken the better part of a minute to cross what the heat had crossed in a beat — and it came in two pieces: a crack, once, hard, like a howitzer fired at the end of the street, so that the crate jumped under me, or I did; and then the roll. The roll went out to the mountains, and the mountains would not keep it. It came back off one range and then another and crossed itself coming and going, longer than any thunder I ever sat through, and it had not entirely finished when the cheering began. Out in front of the crowd the Italian had been on his feet before it hit, letting torn scraps of paper fall from his hand to see what the air would do when it came; it snatched them sideways, and he paced off the ground to where they lay and looked satisfied.
The cheering was thin at first, like a ballgame heard from over a fence, and then it was not thin. Men pounded one another; two of the young doctors danced an actual jig in the dirt; the two Hungarians stood in the mess doorway saying nothing in any language, a thing I never saw before or after. One professor sat down where he had been standing, as though his legs had been sent for elsewhere. Behind the cook-shack a man was being sick while another held his helmet, and I never did learn which mess he ate at. The brass came out of the ranch house shaking hands with the brass. "Hang the next one over Tokyo by the weekend," somebody said, "and save the Navy the boat ride" — and it drew the kind of laugh that is mostly breath. All the while the thing went up, through its own smoke, spreading at the top, and the top of it caught the sun before the sun had come to us, so that the first sunrise of that morning happened a few miles up, to a cloud, while the camp still stood in the grey. The Director was a little apart, a dead cigarette in his fingers, and I was near enough to see his lips move and not near enough to hear, and I did not move nearer. I knew the symptoms from Fuller Lodge; it was verse again.2 And nobody — I set this down as an instrument reading — nobody spoke to me of my betting book that morning, nor for three days after, and there was money in it.
Men stood up all around me, and I did not. I would like to write that I was too moved. Whatever it is that lifts a man off his face had been spent out of me, and I stayed wrapped the length of that crate, knees drawn up, arms over the lid, fist still shut on the glass, watching the morning arrive between men's boots. Cobb came down the line putting the camp back into the shape of an army, and stood over me longer than he stood over anybody.
"It's done, mister. On your feet."
"Directly, Sergeant," I said into the paperwork, and did not move; and he let it go, which was the only charity I ever had out of Cobb, and went on down the line.
The proper sun came up shortly, and with it, working the camp with the last plates of the night, came a photographer — the Army had loosed several on the site that week, and the doctors had cameras of their own besides. He was collecting faces: men looking up, men with the flash still in their eyes. What he collected, when he came level with the cook-shack, was me. I heard the shutter go once. He said nothing to me, nor I to him, and he moved along; and so far as I supposed anything at all, I supposed I had been recorded for the police.
The forward crews came back over the next days with their instruments and their stories, and the first word they brought was that at the south shelter they had felt the heat of it on the backs of their necks — which Marcum had been promising since June and will be retailing yet, if there is a porch in Joplin with him on it. He came for his letter on the Tuesday, as contracted, and took it back a little sheepish, the way a man takes back a will he made in a storm. "Told you, Corporal," he said. "Right on our necks. Like a stove door swung open." I said he had called it, and he had. The parties that went out toward the tower brought back the other thing: the ground out there, where the tower had mostly stopped existing, had turned to glass — green glass, lying on the desert like something poured and cooled — and men were prying it up for souvenirs before anyone could rule on the practice.3
I saw the print before the month was out, pinned in the orderly tent; by autumn it had a caption, and in time a frame. The picture shows the grey light, the wet ground, the corner of the cook-shack, and an enlisted man face down, curled the whole length of himself around a crate of records, arms over it, one fist shut against the lid. It has never read but one way: a man who threw himself across the recording detachment's irreplaceable returns and shielded them with his body while the thing went off at his unprotected back. Deems sent a print up the line with a minute attached, and the word "commendation" was used in my hearing before the summer was out; I made no motion to correct anybody, correction forming no part of my trade.4 That photograph has since been reproduced in more books than I have; it was framed in the Pentagon before it was framed anywhere else; it has hung, at one time and another, in three museums, and I have stood before it in two of them, and in one listened to a lady in a good coat tell her boy what it had felt like to be the man in the picture. She had it word for word off the wall text, and the wall text had it off the caption, and the caption had it off the shape of me, and every one of them reads it the same: a man covering the records with his body.
Here is what the shape was, once, flatly, and never again. Marcum's letter was against my chest because I had been too frightened to remember I carried it. The glass was shut in my fist because I never meant to look. The returns under me had been rain-pulp since three that morning, worth nothing to anybody, as the detachment's own inventory recorded within the week and no caption has recorded since. And I was not covering that crate. I was trying to get under it.
The device was fired at 5:29:45 a.m., Mountain War Time, on 16 July 1945, and the author's figure is exact. His order of events — light, heat, a long silence, then the report — is the order every competent account gives; the sound needed some forty seconds to reach base camp, and more than one memoir records men counting the interval aloud and losing the count. On the light the witnesses are for once unanimous: many times brighter than noon, and, in a phrase that recurs across a dozen accounts otherwise agreeing on nothing, a light that seemed to come from everywhere at once. A blind girl riding in a motorcar many miles to the north is said to have asked what the flash had been. Every history repeats the story; the editor repeats it too, and corroborates it no further than that. —Ed.
The reactions the author reports are documented in kind if not in name: there was cheering, there was dancing, there was a long silence in some quarters, and there was at least one man sick, the accounts differing as to who held the helmet. The Italian and his torn paper are historical; the scraps were a measurement, and from where they fell he produced, on the spot, an estimate of a kind these notes will not be reproducing. As for the Director: years afterward, before a newsreel camera, he said that the moment had brought to his mind a line of Hindu scripture, and he recited it, and the line has toured ever since; his brother, who stood beside him at the moment itself, remembered him saying only "It worked." The author, face down at the same camp, heard nothing whatever, and is on this one point the morning's least contaminated witness. —Ed.
The glass is real. The heat of the shot fused the desert crust around the tower's footing into a sheet of pale green glass, later christened trinitite; it was pried up, pocketed, posted home, and set into rings and watch charms in quantities that eventually required orders on the subject, and it may be bought today, in small lawful grams, from mineral dealers. The author's own dealings in the commodity are a matter for a later number. —Ed.
The photograph exists and is as described: grey light, wet ground, an enlisted man curled around a crate, one fist closed against the lid. It ran in the press within weeks of the war's end over the caption "HE THOUGHT OF THE RECORDS," and it has been reproduced under variants of that sentiment ever since; at this writing it hangs in three museums, two of which name the soldier. The reader of the last number holds the recording detachment's inventory (No. 20, note 4), which lists the contents of the crate as ruined by rain some hours before the exposure was made; no caption has yet carried the inventory. The commendation that grew from the photograph is dealt with in its place. As between the version on the museum walls and the version above, the editor observes that they agree on every physical particular — the man, the crate, the arms, the shut fist — and differ only as to the direction of the intended motion. —Ed.