Day of the Bomb (3 page)

From the southwest, a seaplane droned two
hundred yards above the choppy waves. Pilot watched the water to
his left. Co-pilot scanned to his front and the right. They were
the only crewmembers so as to conserve fuel and lengthen their
search time. Two large thermoses of coffee kept eyes from
closing.

“Hey, there’s something down there!”

“Where?” The pilot craned his neck.

“Three o’clock.”

The pilot shifted his eyes to the blue skies
to their front. “Okay. I’ll do a 180 so we can take a closer look.”
He banked the plane to the right. After completing a long, lazy
about face, he dropped the plane to fifty yards above the water.
“Looks like a whole bunch of somethings.”

The co-pilot focused his binoculars on what
he had reported two minutes earlier. “Dolphins! A whole raft load
of them!” He cursed.

The pilot shrugged and climbed back to 200
yards above the Pacific. He scanned the gauges. “We’re down to half
a tank. Time to head back to base.”

“Yeah. I guess so. Too bad we couldn’t find
that sailor.”

“The word I heard was that the guy was a
grunt who went missing off of some transport ship.”

“Oh. Maybe he should’ve signed up for the
Army-Air Force instead. No way those Jap torpedoes or kamikaze
pilots can get to you way up here in the wild blue yonder.”

The pilot laughed. “Maybe so. But those
Zeroes sure can do some damage.” He ran his hand over the patched
cockpit, which had been riddled by enemy bullets three times and
then stretched his left leg, through which one of the bullets had
traveled. Since then the leg either ached or throbbed, depending on
the temperature and humidity.

At first Jason thought the seaplane was a
bird. But when it passed overhead 800 yards to his left he heard
its twin engines. Too weak to wave his arms, he yelled at his
rescuers instead. “Hey! Over here! About time you flyboys showed
up.”

But the plane droned back to base, search and
rescue slowly ending after two days of trying to spot a tiny dot in
a sea of blue that stretched to every horizon. After the first
three hours of staring at the water and listening to the engines’
nonstop drone, even the best of searchers were lulled into a state
of being semi-hypnotized. As the plane continued to shrink back to
what looked like a bird, Jason ran out of time to curse, cry, or
pray. Now he was in the middle of the dolphins’ pod. One of its
more inquisitive members bumped him with his long nose. The fins of
his fellow dolphins terrified Jason.

“Ahh! Sharks!” Every story Jason had heard
about the predators and the mangled remains recovered after one of
their feeding frenzies paraded through his sleep-deprived mind.
Some of the storytellers claimed it was better to take in
lungs-full of water and drown than be torn limb from limb by razor
sharp teeth. “Oh, God! Please let it be over quick!”

Fear, dehydration, and mania quickly
exhausted the last of his reserves and he slipped into
semi-consciousness. For the next hour, the most rambunctious of the
dolphins played a game of water polo by using Jason as a ball.
Their goal was a small island two miles distant; one that Jason
would have passed by if not for the impromptu game. The dolphins
decided the game was over when they left their unconscious ball 120
yards from shore. Three-foot waves pushed Jason onto the beach.

***

“
You’ve got to snap out of it, boy!
I can’t have any of my crew walking around like zombies all the
time. You’ll either get yourself or the rest of us killed. It’s
been weeks now since you lost your best friend. War is nasty. I’ve
lost more friends since Pearl Harbor than I have fingers.” Captain
Uley sat. “Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“You gave that up, too? You still doing
penance because you think your method of winning at cards killed
him?”

“No. I guess coffee just doesn’t taste as
good anymore is all.”

“I need your help, son.”

He raised his head further. This was the
first time in almost two years of service to Captain Uley that he
had heard such a request, or from any superior officer for that
matter.

“Yes, sir?”

“What do you know about atomic bombs?”

“Not a whole lot. I took physics in college.
That professor lectured a lot about Einstein’s theory of energy. He
talked like he actually understood it. Einstein was his patron
saint.”

“Do you think the ones we dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki really did as much damage as the reports
we’ve heard about? It doesn’t seem possible for just two bombs to
destroy two whole cities.”

“I don’t know. I…” He looked down at the
floor again.

“Stay with me, ensign. No drifting off back
into your dream world. In another couple of days we’ll be docking
in Nagasaki. I’m going to send you ashore to visit at least one of
those two cities that we blew to kingdom come with those atomic
bombs just so you can see what happened first hand.”

“But why, sir?”

“Word is that they’re going to be doing some
more tests on atomic bombs now that the war is all over. They’re
going to need more than a few Navy ships for it from what I’ve been
told by the Admiral. It would mean that you would have to extend
for a while; my guess is probably for a year. Best I can tell it
would be best for you to do it.”

“Extend? Why me? I just want to go home.
Isn’t that all everybody wants to do now?”

“Ensign Rhinehardt, you’re still a certified
basket case. I’ve seen what you’re going through happen to at least
twenty of my men during this war. You need time to pull yourself
back together. You’re not Humpty Dumpty. You’re a man. But you
still are probably going to need a whole lot of time judging by the
way you’ve been acting. You’re even losing weight.”

“I am?”

“Yes. Look, I’m telling you all this as a
friend. I can’t order you to extend but I think you really need to
decompress slowly back into being a civilian. Lord only knows
you’re not meant to make the Navy a career. But to be fair I want
you to see the aftermath of an A-bomb before you decide one way or
the other on whether to extend.”

***

Kong had been the first one to welcome Jason
to Monkey Island. When he did, the rest of his troop screeched and
hollered warnings to not get close to the species that had
kidnapped their ancestors from lush jungle filled with many fruits
and then abandoned them on this tiny island of sand and coral.

In the 1800s a Spanish galleon sailing from
Mexico to the Philippines had made an unscheduled stop on the
island to conduct a funeral. Diego Luis Salvador Esperanza Vargas’
appendix had burst during the voyage. Try as he might, the ship’s
surgeon’s operation failed to save him. Diego’s wife Lucia blanched
at the thought of her husband being buried at sea until the captain
agreed to put ashore for a burial. “Oh thank you, captain! Now the
fishes won’t eat my husband.” She left the two monkeys her husband
had bought in Mexico on the island because, “they serve no other
purpose than reminding me of my dearly departed Diego.”

A male and female, the monkeys survived on
the coconuts and breadfruit that grew high up in the trees. They
formed a loose alliance with birds that nested in them. Together,
they battled rats, the only other mammals that inhabited the
island. Survivors, the rats would scale the trees in search of
eggs, baby birds, and later on, baby monkeys to devour. But the
growing band of monkeys hated the vermin and enjoyed knocking them
to the ground. After high tides receded, the rats gobbled up
anything edible left on the beaches. Always resourceful, the rats
dug up Diego’s corpse and feasted on it. Crabs that came ashore at
high tide finished off what little the rats left.

Generations of monkeys later and two years
before PFC Jason Dalrumple washed up on shore, a PT boat crew had
been temporarily marooned on the island. A squadron of Japanese
Zeroes used the PT boat for target practice until it ran aground on
a reef a hundred yards from the nearest beach. The crew spent two
weeks on the island before being spotted by a flight of P-47
Thunderbolts who were returning to base. What first drew the
American pilots’ attention was the lone Zero that was strafing the
island. Two of the P-47s peeled off from their formation and
approached the Zero from ten o’clock high and two o’clock high, the
favorite tactic of their two pilots. Whenever they did so, the
enemy aircraft in their sights was caught in a deadly crossfire and
either ended up as a statistic painted on the sides of the
Thunderbolts or if lucky, limped back to base.

After sending the flaming Zero into the
Pacific, the two pilots buzzed the island to see why the enemy
aircraft had strafed it. When the surviving PT boat crew waved from
a beach, the two P-47 pilots dipped their planes’ wings in response
and radioed base to launch a rescue of the survivors. Later, one of
the pilots died during the liberation of the Philippines, the other
went to work for the airlines after the war ended and retired from
the cockpits of Boeing 707s.

The monkeys on the island rejoiced at the
rescue of the PT boat crew’s survivors, who had overstayed their
welcome by hunting down some of its inhabitants. Eleven of the
monkeys died as hungry sailors shot them for the meat on their
bones. That was why the remaining troop of simians chattered and
screeched fiercely as Kong approached the waterlogged Jason, who
lay unconscious on the beach and bruised from the dolphins’ game of
water polo.

One yelled at Kong in the
language understood by their kind. The noise partially roused
Jason. He thought he heard the monkey say, “
Don’t do it! He looks like those who killed and ate some of
us. The two-legged creatures are worse than the rats.”

Convinced he had been sentenced to a
netherworld where animals ruled over humans, Jason let his head
plop back on the wet sand and drifted back into unconsciousness.
The monkeys continued their chatter.

Kong ignored them. Innately curious, he had
to know if the human in their midst was alive and what treasures he
had brought to Monkey Island. Kong noticed one of the man’s pockets
bulged so he slid his paw into it and retrieved $207 in U.S. paper
currency soaked in saltwater. The bills tasted bland so Kong spit
out what he had bitten off and took the money to the troop, which
quickly tore the ones, fives, tens, and twenties into bits as they
fought over the booty. Their pandemonium caused the invader to
stir.

“Water…got to have water.”

The movement and words caused the monkeys who
had ventured within ten feet of Jason to scatter as they renewed
their warnings to Kong.

Kong retreated five paces but the man’s
pleading expression made him linger.

“Water…water.”

Kong understood the repeated word to mean
breadfruit. So he scampered to the nearest tree, climbed it, and
knocked a plump breadfruit to the ground. Then he rolled it to
Jason’s side. The fall had split the ripe fruit and the smell of
the pulp wafted up the famished man’s nose. He forced his body into
a sitting position and scooped the mushy pulp into his mouth. Ten
minutes later the only creature on the island willing to help him
rolled a coconut to him. Jason smashed it on the largest rock
within reach until he could drain its liquid through a crack into
his parched mouth. Revived somewhat, he turned to his new friend
and named him.

“Thanks, Kong.” Jason finished breaking the
coconut into pieces. He tossed a chunk to Kong and they gnawed at
the white flesh of the nut. The monkey liked this human, the first
who had not tried to shoot him so that he could be barbequed on a
spit.

He chattered to his troop that this human was
different.

Jason watched the monkeys communicating.
“Yeah, you’re Kong all right. The king of Monkey Island. So what’s
it like living here? Any friendly natives around, Kong?”

Kong cocked his head.

“You know. Me Tarzan. You Kong. Where’s
Jane?” Jason traced the outline of the female of his species.

Kong scratched his head.

“Never mind. I got to figure out how best to
get off of this piece of rock.” As Jason stood, Kong ran back to
his own kind. “See you later, Kong.” He waved. “Find water first.”
He repeated the Professor’s words. “You can last for weeks without
food but only days without water. Shoot, what I wouldn’t give for a
K-ration right now.”

Ah, K-rations, color coded meals known the
world over to GI Joes. Brown boxes were for breakfast, the green
ones for supper, and blue boxes for dinner. Yummy for your tummy.
That is if you’re stuck on some island in the middle of the Pacific
and they are the only food available. Take your pick: canned meat,
biscuits, cereal bars, powdered coffee, fruit bars, chewing gum,
sugar, cheese product, bouillon, candy. Yes sir, complete meals in
a box with wooden spoons, water-purification tablets, can openers,
cigarettes, and matches, what more could you ask for? The supper
boxes even came with toilet paper. Did not need it too often though
because the tropical heat dehydrated you so much that regular bowel
movements became a thing of the past. Jason had considered writing
the War Department to include laxative in the K-rations but his
lieutenant had refused to find out the address of the Pentagon.

Walking the perimeter of the
island took a half hour. During his trek, Jason spotted the hulk of
the PT boat, abandoned after it had been officially classified as
“not worth repairing” by a salvage crew sent to recover it. The
sight of it removed only a little of the aloneness that he
felt.
If push comes to shove, I can use
wood from it to start a big enough fire to bring a rescue ship or
plane to save me.
Tired after his hike and
still hungry, he hunted for coconuts that had fallen to the ground.
After finding and eating two of them, he sat down to “think this
thing through.” That was what Pop had always said: “Son, remember
the four Ts whenever you get yourself into a fix. Think the thing
through before you do anything dumb. If you don’t, I can guarantee
that you’ll end up regretting whatever you end on up
doing.”