Those wheels weren't off the ground 10 seconds before I was asleep. Ordinary: Beser, 59, an electromechanical engineer in Baltimore, who flew as a radar man on the Enola Gay, said: 'I'd worked for 27 straight hours before we took off. It was too incredible, it was too ordinary. It wasn't like that, they all kept saying. They didn't even have any ironies to offer. Surio Shimodoi, head of the Hiroshima Survivors Association, had come to Washington to be with the men of the 509th Composite Group as they convened here for a reunion over the weekend. The western Pacific or a Smithsonian warehouse in Silver Hill, Md. Thirty-five years ago and last Friday, both, Jacob Beser climbed aboard the Enola Gay, the B-29 chosen to drop the first atom bomb.Īnd Surio Shimodoi stood looking at it, a citizen of Hiroshima watching a silvery glint in the light of an August morning. But it wasn't like that - either 35 years ago or last Friday. You listened for tales of madness, lost souls, cursed lives and nightmares.
