On the morning of 6 August 1945 the Technical Area loudspeaker made the Hill's work public in one sentence, and the Hill spent the rest of the day, and some of the century, deciding what it thought. The author's account of the celebrations, and of the party that failed, is corroborated at nearly every point; his account of his own part is taken up in note 3. —Ed.
I came up from the south toward the end of July with a sunburn, a duffel of laundry, and a reputation I had done nothing to earn except get photographed acquiring it. The story rode north on the same buses I did: the corporal who had gone flat over the recording detachment's returns with the sky coming apart, shielding the paper with his body. Men I had never met stood me beer at the PX, and I denied everything modestly, with the troubled frown, and watched the shrine go up on schedule. The Army meanwhile did with its minor hero what it does with every man back from anywhere: fatigue. I put in a week on the Tech Area loading dock with a clipboard, checking other men's crates onto other men's trucks and initialing the tally sheets — clerk's work a man could do asleep, and I nearly did.
Then it was Monday the sixth of August, and midmorning the Technical Area loudspeaker clicked alive and said, flat as a man reading a train time: "Attention, please. Attention, please. One of our units has just been successfully dropped on Japan."1
There were three seconds while the best-informed town in America worked out one sentence. Then a yell went up from the far end of T-building, and the Hill caught building by building, like a string of firecrackers. In the mess at noon it was boots on benches and a machinist up among the trays shouting "One bomb! One lousy bomb!"; the radios had the President's statement on repeat all afternoon; and by four o'clock every telephone in the dormitories was trying to raise La Fonda for a table, Santa Fe not having seen celebration ordered on that scale since the conquistadors. By supper the radio had given the town underneath a name, which sounded like a sneeze, and nobody tried it twice.
I will set down exactly what we felt, because it has been reported since chiefly by men who were not there and would not have cared for it. The first feeling was: it works. We had known since July that it went off; now it had worked as merchandise, and every hod-carrier on that mesa stood taller by the difference. The second was arithmetic. Every man in that mess had a number he carried quietly — a brother staged for the beaches, a cousin mending from Okinawa, his own name on a list — and a master sergeant with a boy in the Marines said, "That's the beach off the books," and cried into his coffee, and nobody ragged him for it. And under both, where visitors have since fished for horror, there was none to catch. I will be honest about the town now that the tax people have lost interest in me: it cost me not one wink that night and has cost me none since. The Jap had been shopping for that morning since Pearl Harbor, and the bill came at last with no American boy wading ashore to deliver it; a Jap city that August stood to American feeling about as a wasps' nest stands to a man already stung — a man was glad it was burned out, and gladder nobody had to climb to it. I had that feeling in company with several thousand of the finest minds of the century, whatever their memoirs got around to saying in the cool of the sixties.
That evening they packed the big theater. The Director came down the aisle from the back, and at the front clasped his hands over his head like a prizefighter taking the decision. The boys stamped the floorboards. It was too early to know the results, he said, but the Japanese didn't like it — the roof came off — and his one regret was that we hadn't had it in time for the Germans, and the roof went further off. I roared with the rest; I have always been a good audience. A month before, in the storm, you could have read a weather map through the man. That night he was a hat and a victory.
I left in full voice and was sober by dormitory row, and not from the drink running out. Behind the men's dorm a chemist I knew slightly was being sick into the zinnias some wife had defended all summer — and the drinking hadn't rightly started; he was doing it on the news alone, which struck me as wasteful. On the T-building steps one of the computing girls sat with the day's tapes in her lap, crying without noise. "Bad news from home?" I asked, the only crying I could account for that day. She looked at me, then down at the tapes as though they were somebody else's, and said nothing; I put her down as overtired and went along to the party.
Recreation had it organized in the big mess hall by eight: a banner run up that afternoon reading ON TO TOKYO, the SED dance band on the stand, the punch reinforced from under more than one counter. Every part of a party was present and reporting — drink, noise, a full room, girls. And nobody danced.2
The band opened fast and played it to bare boards. The leader, a T/4 with a trombone, took them into something slow next, on the sound theory that slow needs less agreeing to. Bare boards. The couples stood the whole rim of that floor holding cups, like a crowd at a rail crossing waiting on a train nobody could see. The recreation officer, a captain who held fun as his assigned sector, went to the stand.
"Play something they can dance to."
"Sir, I've played three things they can dance to."
"Play a fourth."
The fourth was a jump number that would have raised the dead on any Saturday of the war. Two couples were all but ordered onto the boards, shuffled half a chorus at attention, and came off like swimmers finding the water what they feared.
I did my part. There was a big cheerful girl out of the motor pool who had never been known to decline a floor, and I gave her my best "Dance?" and got "Not tonight, Corporal." "It's a victory party," I said. "You go on and have it," she said, and looked past me at the empty middle of the floor like a rancher watching weather build. The WACs had gone nunnish in a body, which the Army had never managed by order; and the wives had come in their good dresses and stood in them wearing faces off a war memorial — the same faces that had gone to the knife all winter over bathtubs — and I noticed the mourning ran deepest where the dress was best. Pomeroy stood me a drink and said the section had a right to be proud, and then stood looking into his cup as if he had dropped something in it.
Toward ten the zinnia chemist got me by the sleeve, white as the banner and drinking without visible effect. "A city, Klipspringer," he said. "It was a whole city." And I heard my answer arrive finished, the way the good ones do: "And Washington dropped it, friend — not you, and not me. I kept minutes. I ran no part of that, no more than the smith who shod Sheridan's horse ran the battle." He went off holding his cup in both hands, and I stood admiring the sentence, built in under a second and still selling in the next century. The band gave up at half past ten and cased the horns with the punch still half a bowl deep — the only Army party I ever saw where the liquor outlasted the thirst. The banner was down before the trombone was; I never saw who took it, and nobody asked.
Three days on, the loudspeaker did it again — another unit, another town — and the mess cheered the way men cheer the second running of a trick, and nobody organized so much as a toast. Bunny's letter came at the end of that week, posted the sixth: the news was too thrilling; Daddy said it would all be over by Labor Day and the club should have its autumn dance after all; Clipper was sound again and jumping beautifully. The censor had passed it beaming, as they passed them all. I have heard letters of that kind called heartless — mostly by me, and admiringly: whatever floor stood empty on our mesa, Lake Forest would get its dancing in; that class dances through anything, it being the one drill they are bred to from the cradle.
Fisk poured at nine on the Sunday and let me get the first swallow down. I tried the sentence on him — it had worn well all week — the minutes, the logs, Sheridan's smith, no part of it mine. He listened the way he listens, fetched the current notebook, wrote one line standing, dated first, and closed the book. "Well?" I said. "Put me down innocent, did you?" "I put down what you said," he said, and we took the rest of the pot on the weather.
I have been asked since when the remorse arrived — by two committees, by journalists at every anniversary ending in zero, and once by a dinner guest worth forty million whose whole employment had been feeling things. I have given them all what I gave the chemist, in the same words, kept oiled: I was a corporal. I kept minutes. I added other men's figures and kept other men's logs. I counted nothing but paper. I ran no part of that.3 The sentence has not failed me once in fifty-five years, and I have never gone into why it works.
The green glass began coming up from the south about the middle of the month, in pockets and mess kits. Where the tower had stood, the fire had cooked the desert floor to glass — a lake of it, bottle-green — and the recovery details chipped it up like ice off a pond; I had this from men who saw it. Inside a fortnight the machinists were setting chips in silver — a ring for your girl, a pendant for your wife, the price doubling once the supply sergeants organized the trade — and pieces went east in registered mail. I took a piece the size of a poker chip and set it in nothing. A man keeps the program from his best show, and that summer was mine: the photograph, the commendation working through channels, the beer of strangers. It is on this desk now, holding the pads down while I write. It has ridden every desk I have owned; readers with old numbers of the business magazines may have seen it by the pen tray, out of focus — Fortune once captioned it jade, and I let Fortune keep its jade.4
The surrender came on the fourteenth, sirens and horns and every jeep discovering its klaxon, and that night there was dancing — I looked. And the work ran on regardless, in the Tech Area and down the canyons, which nobody found strange, least of all me; the shop had orders. I had taken to dropping in at one of the canyon labs of an evening — the young men there liked having the man from the photograph about, and I liked being had — with cigarettes for the company and a lighter I was vain about. The lighter gets a number of its own.
The announcement is preserved, with trifling variations, in a dozen memoirs: "Attention, please. Attention, please. One of our units has just been successfully dropped on Japan." No unit named, no town, the grammar a quartermaster's. The President's statement, released in Washington at eleven that morning, supplied the town; the Hill's radios supplied the rest of the day. The evening assembly is equally well attested — the entrance through the back of the theater, the hands clasped overhead like a winner in the ring, the remark that it was too early to know the results "but the Japanese didn't like it," and the regret concerning Germany, which by every account drew the loudest cheer of the evening. The author's report of the sixth requires no correction, a thing the editor does not often get to record, and records here without pleasure. —Ed.
The party is documented from all sides, the sides disagreeing only in degree. There was a celebration organized that evening; there was a band; there was drink in quantity, some of it official. One participant's diary gives the night entire: "Big party. Nobody danced. Home by ten." A memoir of 1960 insists the dancing was merely thin; an oral history of 1972, that there was none at all; on the state of the punch bowl at the end, the record is unanimous. More than one account likewise preserves a man being sick in the shrubbery at an hour too early for the drink to be blamed. Both demonstrations — the cheering and the shrubbery — were made by the same town, on the same evening, over the same news. No memoir finds this strange. —Ed.
In the second number of these Papers, closing the account of Dr. Millikan's prophecy, the author wrote that "the manner of his being wrong killed seventy thousand people at a stroke, though I ran no part of that and will be at pains, in these pages, to prove it." The sentence above discharges that undertaking by repetition, which has been the author's leading method of proof throughout. The editor exhibits instead Manifest 53-C, Special Shipment, Site Y to Kirtland Field, 26 July 1945: nineteen crates, weights entered to the pound, moved south by closed truck under escort and flown west out of Kirtland the same day to a destination the manifest gives only as a number. The number was an island. What was in the crates the manifest does not say; manifests never do. It says who counted them. The checker's column carries the initials J.K. against each of the nineteen lines, and at the foot, above the transport officer's countersignature: "Checked and counted correct — KLIPSPRINGER, J., Cpl., SED." The author gives that week one sentence in his first paragraph, as clerk's work a man could do asleep. The cargo was expended over Japan at a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August, local time. He ran no part of it. He counted it, and he certified the count, and the count was correct. —Ed.
The trade in glass from the crater is historical. The fused mineral — it has since acquired the name trinitite — was carried north by the pocketful within weeks of the test and was in the windows of Santa Fe jewelers, set in silver, before the surrender was signed. It is mildly radioactive, a property the trade treated from the first as a certificate of origin. Collection at the site was eventually prohibited, by which time the supply had largely left in pockets. A piece answering the author's description came to the editor with the papers: green, the size of a poker chip, its edges worn smooth in the way of a thing handled daily over a long period. The Fortune photograph of March 1998 shows it at the author's elbow, captioned as jade. It is not jade. It has been put back on the pads. —Ed.