War interrupts my road trip. How rude!

I didn't have to search at all for a spot near Ashland's Lithia Park, and the best thing was that it was shaded by trees.  I grabbed my lunch box, the fruit bag, and the water bottle, and sought out a place in the park.

On the way, I passed a table with a whole lot of posters and brochures and books, marking the horrible anniversary of the dropping of atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The pacifist that I am, I didn't need any additional selling on this idea of banning nuclear weapons. 

War is hell, as Hemingway so pithily described in A Farewell to Arms, and anybody who thinks otherwise is not human. As Catch-22 showed us, war and the military are simply insane as hell!  But then, what other sentiments do you expect from a guy who routinely tells students on Memorial Day about never ever having held a gun in his life, right?

Anyway, I have been off-the road for more than a few hours now and, of course, here I am reading and blogging about those A-bombs in Japan.

This one, in particular, had me thinking a lot about the hell that war is, and why I am so ready to condemn any politician or commentator who talks about war as if it is just yet another activity.  (One of the most troubling aspects with my favorite public intellectual, Christopher Hitchens, was his rah-rah support of the Iraq War.  But, at least he made up for it by subjecting himself to waterboarding!)

This horrifying image shows a young boy scarred by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. Almost unbelievably, he would not only survive, but live into the 21st century.

The U.S. military shot miles of color film documenting the effects of atomic bombs on residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then classified the footage as secret and locked it away until the 1980s. On the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the Bomb, the Sundance Channel ran the documentary Original Child Bomb, which brought some of the long-suppressed images to a wide audience for the first time. That same month, in response to legal action taken by the watchdog group the National Security Archive, the Pentagon released several dozen uncensored photos of flag-draped coffins of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and agreed to comply "as expeditiously as possible" with future Freedom of Information Act requests for images of casualties.

If you can stand to search for it in the melted flesh of the boy's back, you may find the reason why all governments try to conceal the human costs of war. Even on those rare occasions when the cause is unambiguously just, such images represent a blurred, nightmare landscape in which easy patriotism disappears.

Yes, those "easy" patriots would so quickly become pacifists if only they experienced the brutal horror of war!

What was the experience of that young boy in the photo?

Q: So how were you rescued? How did you survive?
Taniguchi: I was rescued after three days and sent to the country clinic about 18 miles away from Nagasaki. I was laid on the floor of a primary school. It was August 11th, so there was no medication, but I was given food. After another three days, my wounds started to bleed and I started to feel some pain, but not too much. I was moved from one school clinic to another. In mid-September, I was moved to a primary school clinic in Nagasaki city, where patients were being treated by the University Hospital team. After I was transferred there , the first proper medical treatment I received was a blood transfusion. But my body couldn't take it. I suffered badly from anemia, and became just skin and bones.
Q: What happened to the patients around you?
Taniguchi: Well, very few patients were crying out in pain. They just died one after the other. I thought it was strange that no one said "ittai "["it hurts"]. Maybe our nerve systems were affected. We didn't bleed because perhaps even the function to produce blood was affected by radiation. So the first medical treatment at the University Hospital was blood transfusion, but as I said, even that didn't work.
From that time on -- about a month after the bomb exploded -- my wounds started to rot and run. My living body was burnt, but only after a month did it start to rot. While I was lying on my stomach, I had old cloths to my sides which became soaked with pus and had to be replaced several times a day. Most victims of the A-bomb said that they became infested with maggots, but it took me over a year to have flies lay eggs on me. Even a small fly could not dare to come near my body. A professor of biochemistry said that maybe my body exerted a kind of smell that repelled the flies.

On days like this, I wonder whether my life would be better off if I didn't spend time thinking about such things.

Nope.  That would be a tremendous disservice to all those who died in wars for no fault of their own.