Mercy

and murderous it was. Mine was Vietnam; I didn’t love the

soldiers but I loved the boys who didn’t go. M y daddy’s war

was World War II. Everyone had their own piece o f that war.

There’s Iwo Jim a, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima; Vichy and the

French Resistance; sadists, soldier boys, S . S., in Europe. M y

daddy was in the Army. M y daddy was being sent to the Pacific

when Truman dropped the bomb; the bomb. He says it saved

his life. Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved his life. I never saw

him wish anyone harm, except maybe Strom Thurm an and

Jesse Helms and Bull Connor, but he thought it was okay,

hell, necessary, for all those Japanese to die so he could live. He

thought he was worth it, even if it was just a chance he would

die. I felt otherwise. He had an unreasonable anger against me.

I would have died, he said, I would have died. He was peace-

loving but nothing could shake his faith that Hiroshima was

right, not the mass death, not the radiation, not the pollution,

not the suffering later, not the people burned, their skin

burned right o ff them; not the children, then or later. The

mushroom cloud didn’t make him afraid. To him it always

meant he wasn’t dead. I was ashamed o f him for not caring, or

for caring so much about himself, but I found what I thought

was common ground. I said it was proved Truman didn’t have

to do it. In other words, I could think it was wrong to drop the

bomb and still love m y father but he thought I had insufficient

respect and he had good intuition because I couldn’t see w hy

his life was worth more than all those millions. I couldn’t

reconcile it, how this very patient, very kind, quite meek guy

could think he was more important than all the people. It

wasn’t that he thought the bomb would stop Jew s from being

massacred in Europe; it was that he, from N ew Jersey, would

live. He didn’t understand that I was born in the shadow o f the

crime, a shadow that covered the whole earth every day from

then on. We just were born into knowing w e’d be totally

erased; someday; inevitably. M y daddy used to be beat up by

other boys at school when he was grow ing up. He was a

bookworm , a Je w , and the other boys beat the shit out o f him;

he didn’t want to fight; he got called a sissie and a kike and a

faggot, sheenie, all the names; they beat the shit out o f him,

and yes, one did become the chief o f police in the Amerikan

way; and then, somehow, an adult man, he knows he’s worth

all the Japanese who died; and I wondered how he learned it,

because I have never learned anything like it yet. He was

humble and patient and I learned a kind o f personal pacifism

from him; he went into the A rm y, he was a soldier, but all his.

life he hated fighting and conflict and he would not fight with