SEVENTEEN
AFTER MEETING WITH Captain Parsons, I walked back to my quarters alone, turning over in my mind the details of the mission and the work to be done the next day in preparation for the flight. A nagging need to talk through my beliefs intruded on my thoughts. My faith and belief in God were the core of who I was. Since I was a child I had found guidance in the teachings of Jesus and the Church. Jesus taught us to love. He turned the other cheek. Where would He draw the line?
I borrowed a jeep and drove over to one of the other groups of the 313th Bombardment Wing, our neighbors on Tinian. Although I could have met with Captain Downey, a Lutheran minister assigned to the 509th, I wanted to speak with a priest. I took Riverside Drive along the ocean instead of the more direct route down Eighth Avenue. To my right, the last yellow light of day cast a broad beam stretching from the horizon across the smooth, blue, glassy surface of the Pacific.
After a number of inquiries I found the priest. We walked over to the open-air theater where Sunday services were held. He couldn’t have been much older than I was, but he had that way about him, common to most clerics, of seeming older than his years. We found two straight-back metal chairs off to one side and sat facing each other.
I’m sure he recognized that I was from the 509th, and by now he knew what the 509th’s mission had been the day before. But he made no comment about that and neither did I. He began by asking me what I would like to talk about.
Now that I sat there looking at him, I wasn’t quite sure what he could do for me or what I wanted from him. He offered in a quiet tone, “Do you feel the need to confess?” The question helped focus me. No, I didn’t feel the need to confess. I felt a need to talk about the teachings of my church and the world in which I found myself that evening. In time of war there is precious little opportunity to reflect upon or even entertain deep philosophical or theological questions. But that night I needed to understand the Church’s position on the war. I needed to pursue the meaning behind its teachings that under certain circumstances war may be “justified.”
I posed the question, “Is it a sin to wage war, Father?”
To my slight relief the young priest said, “This is a question I have spent considerable time thinking about myself. For here I am, a cleric, in uniform, in a war.”
“But you’re not a combatant, Father. You simply tend to the spiritual needs of those called to fight,” I pointed out to him.
“That is true. But I bless the men and their airplanes that fly off to kill and be killed. I condone their actions by my blessings. So it is not that simple. Fortunately, our faith recognizes that man is a thinking being endowed with intellect. God wants us to think, to reason about the consequences of our actions and inactions. For me, then, whether this is a just war is not an academic exercise. I have to consider the circumstances and measure them against the moral teachings of the Church and then reach a personal conclusion, as must you and every Christian.” He paused for a moment. “Someone far more saintly than you or I, Thomas Aquinas, struggled with this same question.”
I recalled some of Thomas Aquinas’s teachings from my earlier religious readings. Thomas Aquinas had recognized the unity of intellect and faith. He’d brought his intellect to bear upon real-world dilemmas that plague the human condition, like the anomaly of war. He had concluded that in the real world there were situations that render a war “just.”
“Thomas believed that under certain circumstances war is justified,” Father continued. “First, he said, the cause must be just. Secondly, the intention must be to advance the common good—to secure peace and punish evil. And, finally, a just war must be declared by the lawful sovereign in defense of the common good. The absence of any one of these elements would make the act of war a sin.”
The priest and I talked at length about these conditions. How had we gotten into the war? What was our objective? What was our intent?
I believed that the last thing the overwhelming majority of our generation had wanted was a war. America is not a nation of warriors. Americans don’t subscribe to the code of the samurai or believe they are a master race.
While the United States was struggling through the Great Depression, Japan was embarking on the conquest of its neighbors. Imperial Japan saw itself as a nation destined to rule all of Asia, enslaving its people into service, possessing its natural resources, and occupying its lands. It called the undertaking the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, an innocuous name to cover hideous intentions. Co-prosperity was to be achieved by first waging total war against China and Manchuria. Without a shred of moral conscience or the slightest hesitation, the Japanese army had proceeded to slaughter innocent men, women, and children. In the infamous Rape of Nanking, Japanese soldiers had butchered up to 300,000 unarmed civilians.
In the plan to fulfill its divine destiny in Asia, Japan had determined that the only real impediment was the United States. It had launched a carefully conceived sneak attack on our Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Timed for a Sunday morning, the attack had been intended to inflict the maximum loss of ships and human lives, dealing a blow to the American fleet from which it could not soon recover. As the priest and I sat together in the dying light of dusk talking about the start of the war, hundreds of sailors were still entombed in the hull of the USS Arizona, sitting on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Thus, the war had been thrust upon us.
During the years following Pearl Harbor, the actions of the Japanese military had done nothing to disabuse the world of their intentions—and of the means they would use to achieve them. Always, they would fight to the death. They would use any means, even if it meant their own deaths. By war’s end the Japanese forces would have killed twenty million of their Asian neighbors and over one hundred thirty thousand Allied troops.
What, then, was our cause? Our intention?
Our intention in the Pacific was to stop the Japanese aggression, to eradicate the evil that festered in Japan, and to restore peace—just as in Europe we had to stop the Nazis. To stand by and allow the slaughter to continue would have been a repudiation of the sanctity of life.
I did not mention Hiroshima or the mission scheduled for August 9. But I asked, “What about weapons of mass destruction? Are they justified?”
The priest considered this for what seemed a long time before answering. “War as we know it today is mass destruction. The weapons may become more fearsome, but the moral issues are the same. The death of a single person is no less a tragedy than the death of ten thousand. Will greater weapons bring a quicker end to the war? I don’t know. But you must be certain of your cause and your intentions, because the nature of modern weapons makes the stakes much higher.”
Neither of us had noticed that we were sitting in almost complete darkness, the only light coming from the window of an adjoining hut. He blessed me, wished me well, and said he hoped he had helped. I assured him he had.
I was at peace with myself.