Operation Detachment

                                      

Junior year I did a project on my grandpa and his experience on Iwo Jima. Listening to him tell of the battle of Iwo Jima also known as "Operation Detachment" (what a name for a mission...) < February- March 26 1945 > was a lot to take in, disturbing really-- his experience, daunting memories of barely sleeping at night in the fox hole, closing his eyes to sounds of bombshells and gunfire ringing in his ears. One day he woke up to a dead Japanese soldier outside his fox hole, grasping a hand grenade in his lifeless fingers. 

How do you take this information? When it comes from someone you know and love and not from a text book or teacher standing awkwardly before a slideshow presentation? And how do I take his opinion on it?

-->My grandfather was a cryptographic technician, he interpreted codes and relayed messages during his time on the Pacific Island. He decoded one of the messages confirming the drop of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He was so relieved. He knew the fighting was going to stop. That he would make it home. My grandfather also witnessed the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi from his fox hole...

This was interesting to hear from his perspective--> he claimed to anyone that was against the dropping of the bomb, that they should have smelled the rotting corpses of his fellow soldiers on Iwo Jima. There were more casualties on Iwo Jima than on D-Day and the American casualties from the battle surpassed the number of Japanese casualties in the battle as well. 

....I am torn on what to feel. On one of the most significant and infamous moments of mankind...what can I think?  

My grandfather has a point...his experience was terrifying. My grandmother has said he would awake in the night with dreams of his days on Iwo Jima, screaming, sweating with fear that he was back on the grim Island breathing in its dusty atmosphere of volcanic ash and dirt. 

But I have also read accounts of those that were on Hiroshima during the dropping of the bomb. Mothers searching for their children in the aftermath of radiation. finding them with little skin left. crying. Gosh some of the interviews were so terrible...And my sister, who studied abroad in Japan got the chance to visit Hiroshima Peace Memorial left with disgust, and sadness for those that died from the destructive fission. 

Yes it is the past. It was around 66 years ago. I store my notes on the project from Junior year away. Quotes from the interview with my grandpa lay in a pile under fashion magazines in my room at home. His old war pictures saved in a folder on my mom's computer that is rarely opened...

"I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me."

----from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close