HIROSHIMA POSTSCRIPT: CLAUDE EATHERLY'S DARK STAR
Dugger, Ronnie
Hiroshima Postscript Claude Eatherly's Dark Star by RONNIE DUGGER /"occasionally a person embodies ^-^ much of the anguish and crisis of his times in the accidents of his own life. Story-tellers...
...Since then fragments and figments of his story have been told many times in many countries...
...There was no argument...
...This event in him—however it came to pass, for whatever complex, variously selfish and idealistic reasons —helped us understand that mass killing is subject to personal as well as official blame...
...He fixed them sandwiches and when she was in a bind he baby-sat with them...
...He was a good looking man, as a pilot is expected to be, but he was a little slumped...
...Huie asserts, as if he knew it, that "Every one of the 1800 men of the 509th [the atomic group] . . . . are proud because they think they 'ended the war.' " Defensively nationalistic, then, on the issues central to the Eatherly case, Huie asserts as fact about Eatherly that which he could not possibly know, to wit: ". . . between 1945 and 1957...
...He went to work as a pilot for a company supposedly engaged in extracting mahogany logs from Central American jungles but actually dealing with surplus military weapons...
...Yeah," Tibbets told me in Washington, "there was no question about that...
...Our politics are similar, so we got along on those subjects...
...How did Eatherly qualify for service-connected compensation six years after he was expelled from the Air Force...
...He thought if we would trust the Russians, they might trust us back...
...Everyone associated with Hiroshima has to answer anew for his part, and everyone associated with the shiny new apparatuses of mass death must more vividly consider whether, in some soon time, in some small circle around a fire of broken boards in a radioactive wasteland, he will stand up, turn his back, and say, "I had a choice...
...he was denied his glory again...
...we leveled...
...Clau-die was the youngest and his mother's favorite...
...he was let go...
...This was new in history, the horror in comparison with which the decision "was made to drop the atomic bombs...
...a prankster, full of horseplay...
...Sauntering back into the sprawl of the nation, too wild so soon to be plain again, bitter and disconsolate and gamer than ever to try almost anything, most of all he wanted excitement...
...Might not his story provoke some thinking of value...
...He didn't do anything but look at weather...
...that in 1955 his lawyer in New Orleans advanced to him the idea that his errant behavior was in fact caused by his seeking punishment for Hiroshima...
...Who can control his own motives, darting out in him from their psychic dens...
...If he is a hero, he is a hero not of courage but of radical personal despair, not of moral grandeur but of lament for his own misappropriated honor, not of national glory but of the larger human cause...
...In 1943 he married a movie starlet, and the next year they had a child...
...His articles have appeared in Harper's, Commentary, The New Republic, The Nation, and Texas Quarterly...
...I said to him, 'Well Bob, you certainly shouldn't have any personal feelings, because it was a job, and after all you certainly shouldn't have those feelings.'" (They called him Bob, after his middle name Robert, in this period...
...I like him a lot...
...In reaction, a stony antithesis has been advanced about Eatherly, an agRONNIE DUGGER is the editor of The Texas Observer, an independent liberal biweekly...
...Looking up from television one evening he said, "You've got to go all out...
...In the jail in Galveston he seemed a bit dazed at first, but came to himself after we had passed fewer than a dozen words...
...He just sorta made a remark that he was instrumental in the attack—I think that kinda played on his mind just a little bit...
...After special training in B-29's, the sleek new bombers that weighed sixty tons when loaded, he was assigned to the 504th bombardment group in the 393rd squadron, which became the nucleus of the group that dropped the atomic bombs...
...Perhaps what is true of a man is true of the nations...
...We had to park way out on the runway apron on the west where the wind was blowing off Kwajalein...
...in due time Eatherly received his oak leaves...
...it is another weakness he has suffered...
...That, a man of limited verbal skill undertaking to dramatize his almost incredible life, he exaggerated, simplified, and misstated some of its cirsumstances, and that in this he was influenced to some extent by what was written about him, is directly relevant to the question of his sincerity, but it does not, in my opinion, invalidate what has happened to him...
...and no psychiatrist or anyone else had considered it...
...Doesn't it help," I asked, "that so many people from around the world have written to you that they feel guilty, too, and want to share your guilt...
...neither he nor anyone else had ever suggested that Hiroshima had contributed to his difficulties...
...He told me some private things about his life, and I him about mine...
...Claude's story speaks to fervent nationalists everywhere because it helps us understand how men have become willing to do these things...
...Two doctors agreed that his guilt feelings about Hiroshima were one cause of his chronic schizophrenia...
...Buck decided he would stay on for the atomic tests at Bikini atoll, but his crew lost out in the bombing accuracy contest there...
...The United Press reported that "both aircraft were found to be drenched with radioactivity and ground crews were unable to handle them...
...Subsequently he was charged with trying to hold up two Galveston grocery stores and taking $10 from a motel—he was arrested at a club with a toy pistol in his pocket...
...Eatherly had never had one Hiroshima nightmare...
...Oleinick Pavlovitch Constantine, and recites irrelevant stories in an old student newspaper in which Dr...
...In his defense it was brought out that he had told his psychiatrist that he felt responsible for killing 100,000 people at Hiroshima...
...yet whatever happened to him happened, like the comings and absences of fog...
...But perhaps he has had a low tolerance for setbacks so that, when he was brooding, racked, down and out, his personality seeped through its filament of confidence until he became a desperate and impulsive man...
...But a sheriff showed me the gun Eatherly had used in several of these highly dangerous robberies: the firing pin was broken...
...Tibbets, the pilot of the plane that bombed Hiroshima, told me in Washington: "I'd have to stretch things real far to see how he could arrive at a guilt complex...
...At the moment his life was conjoined with the atomic age, he was twenty-five...
...The official Air Force history says that the weather report that was radioed from Eatherly's Straight Flush over Hiroshima to Tibbets in the bomb-bearing plane "sealed the city's doom...
...Broke, he went to work as a grease monkey at one of Texaco's filling stations in Houston...
...His home was a Christian one, and he attended the First Baptist Church in Van Alstyne, where one might suppose that they taught him he was sinful and he was guilty...
...I'm responsible...
...He had nothing to do with the decision making...
...In this new situation, he no longer a patient, I no longer an interviewer, we were two men in a coast town...
...He then uses this point of view of his to discredit the VA's certification that Eatherly has a 100 per cent service-connected disability...
...he judged the weather clear...
...In any case, it is sufficient for Eatherly's relevance to our times as a nuclear penitent that, during the late Forties and the Fifties, remorse about Hiroshima contributed to the deformation of his personality and his life...
...With me it's completely impersonal...
...I sensed some cynicism in him as to means, but not about this goal...
...Buck Eatherly recalls that he made no attempt to move his plane off from the shock wave...
...I believe he believes what he says he believes...
...He who had helped mass kill was still there in that tawdry island city, enjoying life, or some of it, trying to say that his experience does mean something...
...He did not object when the crook who was leading him into the post office escapade left his, Eatherly's, name on a money order with the postmistress who was to be robbed—left his name with her after they had cased her place, causing her to become suspicious...
...His sports shirt was hanging loose outside his khaki pants...
...In easy stages to which he had been almost oblivious, he had been swept along until he heard what he thought was a call to glory...
...he barked...
...Shut from the world of structured belonging, he felt he had no one...
...He spoke plainly and calmly, looking down as a man naturally does when he's talking or thinking, or looking me straight in my eyes...
...Eatherly's bombardier, Kenneth Wey, says that when the atomic cloud "found us," their Geigers went wild and they tried to get out of it, but they circled and turned "a good fifteen minutes" before they did...
...Fifty miles west of home, Claude went to North Texas State Teachers College...
...I generally support the nuclear policies of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy...
...On one of their warm-up missions, their scheduled target socked in, Eatherly opted to bomb Tokyo, and the bomb nearly hit the Imperial Palace, which was supposed to be left alone because the Emperor was a moderate about the war...
...Glancing at his watch for a second time, he said, "I think the remind' that people have given me of this thing—they keep re-mindin' me of it, and remindin' me of it, and never will let it die...
...He was committed to the hospital indefinitely and against his will in 1961, and he became a folk hero in a nuclear legend that was told and retold all around the world...
...Sometimes a mother who did not have a husband then brought her two boys over to his apartment and woke him up...
...If we go ahead and not trust 'em, we're going into war for sure," he said...
...I was gonna drop the third one," Eatherly says...
...It is his importance in history (quite a different thing from his personal circumstances) that he, a responsible officer with a significant discretionary role in selecting Hiroshima as the target for extermination, since then has said, "No, wait...
...he's a phony...
...Nine ships sank...
...But guilt is not readily acknowledged or easily borne, and supporters of nuclear deterrence do not propose to be put to rout by the life of one man...
...In the glass cabinet of glory these were paltry charms...
...When he was fourteen or fifteen his father brought a white saddle pony from Mexico and gave it to him...
...Major Eatherly's plane at Bikini, the Top Secret, flew a course parallel to the first bomb-carrying plane, giving Eatherly a bird's view of the explosion that sank five ships and heavily damaged others...
...He also added it wasn't just him personally, but also the whole crew...
...It has been the thesis of his case that he sought punishment for Hiroshima by committing illegal acts for which he would be punished...
...For their missions against Japan members of the crew of the Straight Flush were given Air Medals...
...He is a guilty hero to be received in sadness as one receives one's own impurity and lonely confusion...
...I helped do it...
...The sheriff had kept it there in the safe near his desk for six years...
...He was not working, as his pension is substantial, and he and his wife watched the evening programs a lot, drank beer, and took care of the baby...
...he is not a martyr, he is not a felon...
...Gowan says that sitting there in the jailhouse in New Orleans, Eatherly would not accept the idea...
...He says that sometimes he woke up screaming, and he would sit on the side of the bed in a sweat, the horror still with him...
...and that VA doctors were telling outsiders late in 1956, as these outsiders have told me, that Hiroshima might be a cause of his troubles...
...on the level of personal intuition where there is no evidence, I was convinced this determination was sincere...
...Eatherly was jealous of Sweeney, and he was disappointed that he did not get to fly the third atomic mission—so I have concluded from all that he, his officers, and each of the members of his crew have told me...
...Kenneth Wey remembers receiving a letter or card from Mrs...
...A good old boy levels with you, he is a good sport, he sticks by his friends...
...Claude Eatherly, on the other hand, has taken his stand with the victims and offered himself to us, that we may examine him...
...The next day (thinking, in fact, of another matter that was then much in the news) I asked Tibbets: Does a private, personal responsibility never supercede a military responsibility...
...I suppose Tibbets speaks for most of the men of the 393rd...
...Eatherly says that sometime in 1959, as he began expressing himself in letters and the press against nuclear war, the dream about Hiroshima stopped...
...Gowan told him so and urged him to advance the idea in his own defense...
...he is not a cynic...
...he is not a saint, he is not a sinner...
...In 1959 these acts came to a stop, and he began speaking out against nuclear warmaking...
...He was responsible in action, for the report sent from his plane doomed Hiroshima, but he was even more responsible than this, for he wanted on his own responsibility to drop an atomic bomb on a city, and he had only the defense: If I don't, somebody else will...
...but it seems to me to be doubtful, when most of the elements in the story are true and when you are dealing with a man whom doctors, the VA, and juries have certified to be sick, to hold him hard to account by normal standards of lucidity and veracity...
...I saw in him a good fellow-ness that cannot be feigned...
...Was the star perhaps a dark one...
...In effect, he clearly implies, it is a welfare racket...
...Seems to me we sat out there thirty or forty minutes before they told us to come out of there...
...There is stress on brotherhood in this church today, but the brotherhood of the province, of this time and this place...
...There was this curious recurring carelessness about being shot or caught...
...Edmund Wilson has a chapter about him in The Cold War and the Income Tax...
...He's a good guy...
...I am responsible...
...Tibbets would drop the first atomic bomb...
...Who would get the glory of ending the war for everyone...
...His psychiatrist testified that twelve years after Hiroshima, Eartherly seemed to enjoy pain: He wanted punishment...
...And if you do, they cut you to pieces...
...He tried night law school, quit it...
...The considerate, the selfish, other-concern and self-concern, coexist in him as they do in me...
...It is a brotherhood that is not meant to include too many or to be carried too far...
...William Bradford Huie, in preparing his book, told one of Eatherly's doctors, "I'm interested only in facts," and he probably thought he was, but no man can even approach as complex and elusive a subject as another man, especially one who was an important figure in, and disavows, one of the gravest deeds of our time, with objectivity...
...His fellow workers soon sensed something was bothering him...
...He was given another sanity hearing, and the jury committed him to Rusk State Hospital in East Texas for an indefinite period...
...government closed in before the revolution was launched from Gulfport, Mississippi, and while three of the plotters got a year and a day in jail, Eatherly went free...
...I've thought about it—hell, I've thought about it, even before I went to the Pacific, over in Europe," Tibbets replied, "but on the other hand, I've never let things like that bother me too long...
...I found him clear-minded and cogent: he seemed normal...
...he's a weak man who saw in the peace bit an easy way out of his real troubles...
...Eatherly had not been introduced and inured, by combat, to killing from on high: This was his chance to prove his mettle...
...Eatherly about 1947, 1948, or 1949 in which (she says she is sure, after some indecision) Eatherly's " 'terrific nightmares' " were mentioned...
...Apparently armed, he frightened store people and took money from them...
...Another 80,000 to 100,000 human beings were injured...
...He is not all kindness...
...Huie's book on Eatherly suggests, to me, the flaws of objectivity as a working ideal for journalism: its impossibility of attainment, its easy-as-pie impressment into the service of values, its intrinsic tendency to metamorphose into cruelty that is anything but objective, its insufficiency to complex subjects—which most important subjects are...
...The night after this, he and another pilot were ordered to fly their planes out across the darkened Pacific, find the atomic cloud, and take samples of the radioactive air with precipitrons carried outside the B-29's pressurized compartments...
...One is as innocent of horror as one is of sex," said Celine...
...The Air Force decided to let him go, and he was given an honorable discharge...
...In June the supersecret atomic squadron, first detouring across Salt Lake City and buzzing down the Wasatch Valley to let the girls know they were leaving, flew over the...
...Buck and his crew named their plane the Straight Flush, painting on its nose Uncle Sam's bespangled arm flushing a Japanese soldier down a commode...
...We sat in his room for long spells, talking...
...Four square miles of the city were crushed and burned out by this one bomb...
...How shall the facts be selected and arranged...
...Claude settled down with a sweet-natured young woman, and she was expecting a child...
...Huie says he told Eatherly, "I believe there are evils worse than war— worse than death—worse than the death of a city or a nation...
...mis-seen, mis-said, mis-remembered, misunderstood, misrepresented, mis-reported, the facts do not permit a simple theme...
...Although he had become, himself, indissociably responsible for the world's first atomic warfare, he had been denied the notoriety that might have thrust him immediately into a stance defensive of what he had helped do, and then he was shunted out of the Air Force...
...In effect and in tone, it is Huie's theme that Eatherly's doctors, the Veterans' Administration, the juries that have held him not guilty, and those who find his case ethically disturbing are all wrong: that this is no hero but a ne'er-do-well with a fail-safe psychiatric alibi...
...In later affidavits members of his family and others asserted that it was along about then, toward the last part of his military service, that he began to undergo a definite personality change, a decline that proceeded apace from then on...
...In New Orleans he found it...
...After examination, the county doctor indicated that Eatherly had been upset...
...When they landed, Wey says, "They had the field cleared...
...One of his superiors says Eatherly never said anything in the slightest degree philosophical, profound, or even serious...
...He did not expect to have much effect, but if he could move things just one degree—what would the rest matter...
...Was it a potent defense for illegal acts, or a way of looking at his life that gave him a hope for redemption—or both...
...Participating in the reconsideration of mankind since Hiroshima by forcing us to reconsider him since then, Eatherly has come to have a symbolic function...
...If a man is trying to do something you think is good, as Claude had been trying to do something I thought good, the real question seems to be, is he doing it mainly from self-interest, or mainly because he thinks it is good...
...The engine cowling and oil splashes were found to be particularly radioactive...
...We talked a long time...
...We drifted about Galveston together, from club to club, drinking...
...O. P. Constan-tine, Huie identifies him as Russian-born, three times gives the doctor's full name, Dr...
...Since, in Christian doctrine, guilt occurs in the intention, according to his upbringing Eatherly was guilty before he started...
...Make the least of this one can, still it is not routine...
...Obviously, Hiroshima was not the only possible cause of Eatherly's troubles...
...He played this part in these deaths...
...In this way I will receive a great benefit and feel relief for my guilt...
...Eatherly made two passes over the city...
...You have a bomb, a hydrogen bomb, that can kill so many people...
...I can say that and think nothing more about it, due to the fact that here we had a military situation...
...though being a person, he is of these...
...He was set upon by horrible dreams about Hiroshima and tried to kill himself...
...When four years ago I realized that Claude Eatherly of Lincoln Park, Texas, was such a person, I decided that, being a Texas reporter, I should find out about him...
...The last Saturday of July, 1961, I met him for the first time on the grounds of the VA hospital in Waco...
...George Meyer, marketing manager of the company, remembers Eatherly told him he figured he had been damaged by radioactivity...
...In his book, The Hiroshima Pilot, Huie quotes Eatherly as admitting to him that he knowingly lied to somebody when he said that he saw the blast at Hiroshima and then flew through the bomb cloud...
...Eatherly's assignment for the first mission was to assess the weather over the primary, the most desired target, Hiroshima...
...There did seem to be something shady about the Marsalis Construction Company...
...The firebomb raids that were already being mounted from the Marianas against Japan were designed to destroy, not specific military targets, but areas of cities, and therefore the people of the cities...
...The fact that qualified psychiatrists, practicing their profession as they are licensed to do, certified that Eatherly was 100 per cent mentally disabled by service-connected illness seems somehow to have made good its escape from the argument of this seeker after the facts...
...We decided that neither of us wanted to con or use the other...
...Golden Gate Bridge toward Tinian Island in the Marianas...
...Although he was quiet in style and mostly serious, he had a ready enough sideways smile...
...After the Christmas of 1940 he joined the Army Air Force in Dallas, and he was commissioned as a pilot four months before Pearl Harbor...
...I've been a military man, taking orders...
...Do not some people so angrily debunk Eatherly precisely because he and his case challenge placing nationality ahead of humanity when that choice must be made...
...He was a daring pilot—that swashbuckling air he had...
...Nearly all the doctors and nurses were killed or incapacitated, their hospitals razed...
...Because we are afraid and fascinated, we have accepted...
...To an extent difficult to determine in retrospect, Eatherly's accounts forward from 1957 are touched with fantasy...
...With psychiatrists saying that the causes and processes of schizophrenia are still essentially unknown, one must admit into the list of such possible causes the basic personality Eatherly has been, all that we do not know, the untimely death of his mother, his soured Air Force career, his habit of expensive fun-seeking as it may have given form to his postwar needs, a status insecurity...
...Five agencies of the U.S...
...We may as reasonably hope to find clues for the treatment of a schizophrenic humanity in the tormented life of a nuclear pilot as in the crafty drafts of disarmament treaties or the sham concessions and cynical indignations that daily stain the front pages of the world...
...He saw children running in and out of the fires, screaming...
...In Texas the phrase, "a good old boy," means more than it seems to...
...not for money nor fame, but because of the responsibility I owe everyone...
...Yet one cannot answer this question for oneself, much less for another, and perhaps there is no satisfying answer for anyone...
...Constantine was identified as "Constantine Oleinick...
...gregate of skepticism: He's a nut...
...But he loved kids, and they loved him because he never made them do anything...
...I'm one of those kinds of guys that if a thing gets to be bothering him, he has the faculty of shoving it in the back of his mind...
...He ran guns for a Central American revolution...
...he's a Communist dupe...
...he is not an idealist...
...He said he thought the guilt theory of his case made sense, and that when he was thrown in jail a great relief came over him, but it did not last long, and was succeeded by shame that he had sunk so low...
...The cashier he had robbed said Eatherly had been well known to him for several years...
...I did exactly what I was told to do...
...Perhaps Claude Eatherly's was...
...I am sure I apprehended in him those times in Galveston a fierce determination to use his dramatic life for good, to help alarm the people of the world about nuclear war...
...This article is adapted from Mr...
...The explosion looked, for a moment the photographs saved, like Satan's crown, a fluffy corona with a garland of horns: then it columned and blurred, boiling into spray and smoke...
...He was belligerent when I asked if he still felt guilty about Hiroshima...
...Many have contended that Eatherly's role was routine, but the report that he ordered to be sent meant that the first atomic bomb used in warfare was going to blast, crush, burn, and radiate to death about 100,000 men, women, and children in Hiroshima instead of tens of thousands of others in some other city...
...I was trying to use the best crews I had...
...Sure enough, the alert went out, and when he was captured, apparently he had no ammunition with the gun...
...The special circumstances of his life seem to sound, plumb lines haphazardly dropped, the features of what Edward Teller calls with inadvertent irony "our nuclear future...
...He was jailed in Dallas and Houston, and he served nine months in a New Orleans prison...
...In 1955 in New Orleans, an eccentric, intellectual lawyer, Joseph Gow-an, concluded that Eatherly had been seeking punishment for his part at Hiroshima...
...He learned to go grabbling in the creek, getting in the water, muddying it up, and reaching in a hole and grabbing for fish, and he and his brothers or his pals went hunting across the fields and down in the wooded hollows for squirrels and fox, rabbit, quail, possum, and what have you...
...Claude Eatherly was born into a Unionist family in the North Texas country community of Lincoln Park, three miles through the fields from the town of Van Alstyne, where he went to school...
...At the end of the summer of 1949 Eatherly went to work for Ada Oil Company as a salesman handling a group of Phillips service stations in Houston...
...Gowan's Hiroshima hypothesis fascinated the prosecutor, a Louisiana liberal named Edward Baldwin, who told me in New Orleans, "I kinda shared his guilt...
...Story-tellers confuse and embellish his story and there are songs and poems...
...And he chose Captain Eatherly, the red-hot pilot from Texas, to drop the third...
...his eyes, blue, were alive with a sparkle that was alternately thoughtful and gauging...
...The facts, multifarious, overlooked, forgotten, never known, or hidden by the word "mental...
...Among much else, there is something in him trying to be like Robin Hood—a man rebelling against a society that is not doing right...
...A country boy," he was regular featured, his jaw acute and muscular, and he had dark wavy hair, a small forelock in front curling back on itself...
...Unfortunately for his thesis, Huie did not happen upon the information that before 1950, according to co-workers of Eatherly's in Houston, Eatherly expressed a feeling that he was personally responsible for what happened at Hiroshima...
...He looked at me and asked, "How can they share it...
...In one of his letters to the German philosopher, Gunther Anders, Eatherly said, "If the experiences of my life can be used for the benefit of the human race, then that is the way it will be used...
...Indignant to the tips of his italics, Huie asks, "Who gave Claude Eatherly service-connected compensation...
...There appeared in him, about this time, a casually defiant, happy-go-lucky way of being...
...A phantom of a man, fading in and out of shadows, he was treated at the same mental hospital nine times, the meanwhile forging checks, breaking into the post offices, and holding up grocery stores —once with a broken and unloaded gun, once leaving the money behind in a sack on the counter...
...He seemed not to have looked closely at a texture, a landscape, or the Gulf beyond his shuttered windows, but he looked very closely at people and formed fast opinions...
...A European named Gunther Anders brought out a book of correspondence with him, Bertrand Russell hailed him, John Wain wrote a poem about him, and the world's press reported what he had said and was said to have said, what had happened to him and what was said to have happened...
...In African Genesis Robert Ardrey wrote, "I walk the high savannah and catch glimpses of stars that vanish when I bring my eyes to focus...
...He chose Major Sweeney, the squadron commander, to drop the second...
...The story began to gather force after he was tried in Abilene, Texas, in 1957 on a charge that he broke into two post offices at night to steal government property...
...In The Hiroshima Pilot, William Bradford Huie, author of The Revolt of Mamie Stover, 3 Lives for Mississippi, and other books, prosecuted Eatherly as only a journalist armored in his own apparent objectivity can...
...He had ordered to be radioed, from his airplane above Hiroshima to the Enola Gay an hour behind him, the weather report that meant, "Bomb Primary...
...His grades were just fair, but he was a graceful, courtly fellow with the girls...
...In each of the years 1947 and 1948, he says, his wife had a miscarriage, and after the second one, a private doctor told him he had defective sperm cells...
...They had Geiger counters, but not protective gear...
...The Top Secret was aloft again when the second bomb was exploded at Bikini...
...Later in 1946, passed by for permanent rank as major and entered in an Air Force school, he cheated on an examination and was caught...
...Might not the life he has led—the daily, nightly, now here, now there, up, down, around and about life he has really led—help bring to selfrecognition those in Russia, the United States, Britain, China, France, who can give the orders or press the buttons or toggle the bombs to kill tens of millions of us...
...Yeah...
...How does Tibbets feel, himself...
...Then Sweeney took out Nagasaki, and the war stumbled to a stop...
...He got money and goods and services from merchants on false pretenses...
...What about things there is no way of knowing...
...How shall they be construed...
...It was publicized that he had a series of troubles after the war...
...Gowan and Baldwin in effect added their feelings of guilt to Eatherly's and propelled him toward what was to come, and as the years passed many others came forward to his case, newspapermen, doctors, judges, jurors, pacifists, writers, splicing their ideas and their guilts to his with unravelable knottings of consience, psychiatry, and ideology...
...In discussing Eatherly's main psychiatrist with the VA, Dr...
...It is possible, too, that his part in the Hiroshima bombing, made more personal to him by his own quite plausible fear of genetic damage during the Bikini tests, so radically changed his idea of himself—subtly or swiftly, who could say—that he became a fundamentally different man, so deeply disturbed in the instinctual springs where motives rise that he was himself a victim of Hiroshima...
...I read in the Austin newspaper that Eatherly had robbed a store with a toy pistol...
...For instance, Huie criticizes the Veterans' Administration on grounds that qualifying for free medical care has become "big business" among many veterans...
...he has come to signify guilt itself, not only the guilt of the man who obeys an order to help cause mass death, but also the guilt of the man who cannot forswear, as if he had no self, his chances to better his own situation...
...It could be argued pretty well, I think, that the exploited and manipulated people of our time are the citizens of the great nations, hostages to the governmental aristocracies of the world, and that Claude turned against these aristocracies because now that they are armed and arming more with nuclear weapons, they menace us all...
...And by what right...
...I've got a standard answer on that," he said...
...Eatherly says a dream came, and came back, kept coming back, and was always the same, and did not leave him for twelve years...
...Mrs...
...Might we not see ourselves more truthfully in him...
...The hydrogen bombs and the new means of delivering them create serious doubt that we have enough time to change...
...The killings, the unnecessary killings, of children, women—defenseless people," he said...
...The publicity, which was inaccurate from the first, began with Eatherly's arraignment for the postal break-ins in 1957...
...I believe that it is better to admit that one's point of view affects one's work and that the truth is anybody's guess and to try rather for fairness...
...then he helped train pilots in the States...
...To Paul Tibbets, his group commander, he seemed "a very entertaining fellow...
...He filed a claim with the Veterans Administration for injuries received from atomic radiation at Bikini, but the claim was denied on grounds that no residuals of radiation could be found on physical examination...
...Eatherly was in the top flight...
...the government had granted him a disability pension, 100 per cei ; and service-connected...
...He had picked up the nickname, "Buck," and it suited him...
...That was his spirit...
...They were washed down, and their radioactivity gauged with Geigers...
...I feel that I can say that Claude has seen an ideal and has sought to give it voice through his experience...
...Paul Orlopp, the vice president in charge of sales under whom Eatherly worked, says he heard from someone else at the time that Eatherly felt guilty about the bombing of Hiroshima...
...What about all the reporter does not find out...
...What would you have thought in Eatherly's situation...
...My wife and I visited him and his wife in Galveston...
...It seemed to kind of prey on his conscience just a little...
...What of the reporter's own attitudes...
...Huie's book appeared in condensed form in a magazine...
...He read John Her-sey's Hiroshima when it came out...
...The night before another holdup, Eatherly went to his home town and bought a .22 pistol from a man who knew him and his trouble and was bound to report him...
...He wanted to run into the fires, and he would start to, but every time he would weaken, and would not...
...It was a clear, dark, temperate night, with stars...
...He lived a flashy, rootless life of dames, liquor, apartments...
...he quit Texaco, although he had been promoted, and went into business with another man, who says bitterly that Eatherly forged a check on their firm, ending that...
...Dugger's book-length manuscript on the subject...
...He spent a year flying bombers on antisubmarine and shipping patrols throughout the western area of the Caribbean...
...Claude Eatherly is not a strength, he is not a weakness...
...The family got up when it was light enough to get the harnesses on the mules and went to bed when it was so dark they couldn't see...
...Actually Eatherly was the chief among four pilots who were to bomb military points near Havana and touch off a Cuban revolution for which the Marsalis group was also providing pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns, ammunition, hand grenades, landing craft, armored cars, Sherman tanks, and 500 men recruited in New Orleans to do anything for $50 a day and expenses...
...Willis (Bud) Hough, who worked with him, told me: ". . . he (Eatherly) told me that when he dropped that, he visualized in his mind that he was more or less personally responsible for the death of lots and lots of people...
...Did Gowan's idea once explain and justify the disaster of Eatherly's life...
...The atomic bombings and the jelly-fire bombings before them stunned the conscience of man and forced us all back to the question of what we are...
...he is not fancy or pompous or a stickler for rules made by women and churches for the taming and harnessing of men...
...Eatherly as a pilot was very dependable, very capable...
...Within him those potentials for freedom and for calamity, autonomy of conscience, and disdain for hypocrisy, may have dissolved into a belief that more can be justified than most people think...
...Yeah, he'd a been it...
...The jury in Abilene decided that he was not guilty because he was sick...
...Soon thereafter, Eatherly's mother died...
...One day in 1962 he telephoned me, and I drove down to Galveston, where he had been living alone since his wife divorced him...
...He was piloting his plane above the city, and then he was on the ground in the city among the fires...
...Claude was a good old country boy...
...The VA administration refuses to dispel this mystery...
...Breaking into that and another country post office that night, one of the three men in on the escapades later testified, Eatherly was crazily and clatteringly indifferent to waking up the neighbors...
...The last question I had was, "Through all this, what's bugged you the worst...
...His fun-seeking and his despair raddled now into a tangled run of hot checks, forgeries, and robberies...
...Tibbets says, "As soon as they said Hiroshima was clear we were on our way to Hiroshima...
...These are words to weigh...
...He was released from there, went back to Galveston, moved to San Angelo...
...In one man's shame, if it is a true shame, abides his hope for self-forgiveness and the return of his strength for the love of others...
...You take one of 'em dropped on New York, why, goodness, you have people that don't have anything to do with the war...
Vol. 30 • August 1966 • No. 8
