Superfortress

“It’s my duty, sir, yes, but what have they done?”

“They, Captain, are the supporters of our demise. They are the women who breed the soldiers. They are the children that grow up to be the scoundrels who kill our men. Don’t look at them as citizens, by God, that won’t do you any good. To you, they are specks of sand. They are ants on your picnic blanket. If you grant them a sliver of the same humanity you give to your local barber or bank teller, then you’re going to give your brain a helluva racking for nothing. These are not civilians, they are strategic targets whose destruction will lead us to victory. Their deaths will not affect you in the least bit, but you can sure as hell bet that those miserable yellow bastards will feel like we just took away every reason for them to keep fighting. Dehumanization. Demoralization. The assassination of the soul. That’s our job, Captain. First and foremost, five minutes from now, that’ll be your job. Do you copy?”

“I copy, sir.”

“Godspeed.”

The line goes dead as the buzzing syncs with the engines’ rumbling. I turn to my co-pilot, Roy. His head is sunk into his chest, eyes closed, lips moving without any accompanying sound. He’s praying. I should be too, but I reckon it’s a waste of time given our mission.

“Roy?”

Roy lifts his head with a turtle’s speed. We keep our eyes on the sky.

“Roy, will you be able to live with yourself after this? Are you going be able to sleep? Will you still smile at your wife and neighbors knowing what you’ve done? Will you be able to go back and tell your kids about this one day, saying you did it in the name of God and country?”

Roy looks out the window in front of him, scanning with his eyes the brightly-lit cirrus clouds. He’s waiting for an answer from a higher being so that he does not have to feel this mission’s morality is up to him.

“I can’t say I’m doing this to serve the Lord, only my country. There’s a big difference between what my country expects of me and what God expects of me. I just hope He understands that. I hope He understands that and forgives me for those compromises.”

They’re the words I needed to hear to silence my second-guessing, but they may just be a temporary mend to the major, perhaps irreparable, damage I’ll experience after the job is over. A job, that’s all it is. My mission is to exterminate a city full of ants. I’ll be a hero for it. Roy will get a medal of valor. Our bombardier will be on the front page of his hometown newspaper when he gets back to the States. All the kids will ask him what it was like to fly. He’ll tell them it was like being an angel up in that there clouds. What goddamn liars we’ll be.

“Roy? Roy, will everything be okay?”

“For country, we have to say it will be. Don’t let this be the end of your wits, all right? You can’t let this haunt you. You’ll have to live after this. Every generation suffers their own brand of sacrifice. This is ours.”

“For country?”

Roy turns to me and nods, understanding the bitterness of our particular pill. We’re in a Superfortress miles in the heavens, loaded with bombs so heavy that they make the miracle of flight all the more astounding. They’re specialized bombs for a specific target. Wooden homes, wooden buildings, and wooden bridges. Our bombardier Joey’s elsewhere in the plane peering down a scope from the 20th-century’s greatest creation onto a 19th century city of hundreds of thousands of ants. Our intent is clear: we will drop tons of incendiary explosives with the hopes of killing as many as possible. The resulting firestorm will whip through the city in a flurry of hell on earth. The winds will be ablaze and lash the bodies of every man, woman and child who dare be caught in it. These specks of sand will be pummeled into such fine grain ash that they will become part of the air that’s breathed. The Japanese will inhale their own people rather than bury them. Their capital, their empire, will cease to exist as anything but a smoke plume. This is the hardened mentality I have to trick myself into. I know Roy does the same. I can see the furrow of his brow begin to take shape as the thoughts strengthen his resolve. He forgets the psalms and Jesus’ teachings and remembers the repetitive drills and propaganda. If only Sunday school might’ve been more like the US Army Air Corps boot camp, the lessons learned may have kept him from taking off today.

“Don?”

“Yeah, Roy?”

“Those are people down there. No matter what the higher-ups tell us, even if it ends up making nights hard to sleep through, we can’t forget that those are human beings on the ground. God knows we’re going to kill every last one we can, because that’s our duty, but you sure as hell better ask God to forgive you for this. There’re things we do, Don, for our family’s sake, and others’ family’s sake, that the Bible don’t preach, but that doesn’t make it wholly wrong. You hear me? This is for everyone back home, so they can live safe, but goddamnit, we gotta do some real terrible, unthinkable things to ensure that safety. You gotta strike a balance between forgetting this day and remembering the lives of those you’re about to incinerate. And fuck no will my kids never hear about this day. Not from me anyhow. Now, we’re approaching. You gotta hit the button. Do you understand what I said, Don?”

“I got it, Roy.”

Roy put his hand out for me to grasp. I accepted it because I needed the human contact at the moment, and he knew I did.

“Hold on, keep your eyes forward, and let Joey give you the signal. It’s that easy, Don. We’ll be turning back in ten minutes.”

“Roy, what’s the difference between us and the people down there?”

Roy wasn’t smiling, but I could tell he thought his answer was a smart one.

“The military would say that those Japs are backwards and deserve what’s coming to them. That those slanty-eyed mongrels are two steps above dogs and just as ugly. Of course, that’s as bullshit as any other garbage they say to help us do what we do. The real answer is that there’s no real difference. Different culture, beliefs, looks, so on, but that could be applied to you and I just the same. They still got morals though, hearts, minds, and all that. Most of them live Christian lives under a different banner and a different God, but that don’t make them bad. Some of them did bad things that doomed the rest of them. Those bad seeds are why we’re here. We’re the men who gotta put a mortgage on our mental health, and leave our conscious on hold in order to deliver that doom.”

“It’s all fucked, Roy. FUBAR through and through.”

My headset buzzes back to life.

“Hey, Donny? Donny, you there?”

“Yeah, Joey. What do you got?”

“Target is spotted. Ready to deploy.”

“Thanks, Joey.”

The sound of electric haze returns as Joey disconnects.

“Joey gave you the signal, Don.”

I looked at Roy. A walking-talking contradiction that wasn’t even aware of it. He was a melting pot of military brainwashing, spiritual enlightenment, rational thought, and unreasonable reasoning. He was the perfect pilot. He should’ve been in my seat. He was too wrapped up in his conflicting morals and understandings in order to be affected emotionally by any of what was to come. He would look at the situation later from four different viewpoints, all his own, and not be fully leveled by the circumstances from any four. He was as inscrutable as our B-29 to everyone but me, and had the steel nerves to go through with such a mission; yet here I was, with my thumb unconsciously hovering over the red button.

“Don, when you push that button, you can’t undo it. The pushing of that button will result in the deaths of thousands who probably didn’t deserve this fate. But we can’t go back. It has to be done. For country, Don.”

At the sound of my name, my thumb made contact with the button and firmly pressed it down, triggering the release of the bomb hatch. The squealing of the scraping metal made me want to cry and punch Roy clean in his check for making me do it. The plane felt as light as a feather with the dropping of the incendiary bombs. I let go of the red button and Roy let go of my other hand. Joey’s electronic voice cackled in my ears.

“Bombs away. All on target. Let’s turn ‘er around.”

Roy still didn’t smile even at the news of the success. He stayed solemn, empathetic to the man who ultimately had to deploy death from above. I continued to look ahead as I banked left and a low, caustic rumbling became audible far below. That was the moment, if any, that I secured my ticket to Hell. The city would burn all night and entrap nearly a million people in wall of flames. Children would burn. Women would burn. Men would burn. Their flesh would melt and their bones would char. For country. For my family, I yelled at myself. For my family, for my country!

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My granddaughter would one day show me a photo of a mother who had attempted to carry her child away as the firebombing reached the residential areas. She had the child (determining whether it was boy or girl was impossible) firmly on her back as she raced through the narrow streets to find whatever safety there may be. Finding none, and surrounded by the scorching gusts and choking smoke, she collapsed with child in tow. They both died horrifically, becoming hardened and blackened statues by daytime. The child, still clung to its mother, eventually fell off. Much later, after the fires disappeared, a person snapped a picture of that mother and child. The mother’s back, where the child had been when the flames and smoke took their lives, was untouched by the fire’s charring effect, rather baring a toddler-shaped imprint of the child who now lay burnt beside her. I had never forgotten that raid on Tokyo, but I had been able to absolve the assumed details of what happened after I had pressed that red button. It wasn’t until she showed me that photo she found in a magazine that I recalled what Roy told me to always remember.

My granddaughter asked me if this is what I did in the war.

I looked at her and felt the tears filling up my eyes. They were the tears I wanted to cry the moment my stupid thumb hit that button and nothing could be taken back.

“Yes, I did. I did it for you, honey. I did it for you. I also did it for your father and your grandmother. I did it for myself and the guy next to me. I did it for everyone I knew and loved back home. I did it for our country, honey. And every day, I have to ask God to forgive me for doing it.”