June 29, 1957
Two-thirds of a Century - - though not quite two thirds (66.666666666666667), which actually will not be until February 29, 2024, but close enough to call it - - ago, Linda and I were married at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church on June 29, 1957 (disregard the note under the framed photograph in Battin Hall at HNEC, that says it was June 29, 1857). With our families (except Gina, who rebelled and kept her membership at St Andrew's Episcopal Church), we were two of the ten founding Cove resident families who, at the bishop's request, founded Holy Nativity, and Linda and I were the first couple to have our wedding there, Father David Damon officiating.
Our short honeymoon (that's us leaving our wedding reception at Linda's parent's house, 518 Bunkers Cove Road) was at the Beach, and then I was off in a flying machine to Newport, Rhode Island to begin what I had no idea at the Time would be twenty years in the U S Navy. The honeymoon continued a few months later, early fall 1957, when Linda came to Rhode Island and we lived in Kingston and Newport until December 1957, when I was commissioned a new ensign, and we drove home to Panama City for Christmas.
Linda and I had started dating five years earlier, Fall Semester 1952, when she was a junior and I was a senior at Bay High. All of that is a different story not for another Time
because it's none of your business.
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During that Time in the Navy, we lived in Japan for three years (July 1963 to July 1966), and what comes to mind this morning is that we first saw the movie "Tora Tora Tora" at a theater in Tokyo. I've watched it again a few Times, including again last night. The Japanese star characters are Genda, who is credited with planning details of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and his naval academy classmate and longtime friend Fuchida, whom Genda chose to lead the first wave of the attack. From my Cove School days I'd always only thought of the Jap Zero airplane, but the key plane in the mission was the single engine Nakajima B5N bomber, and my first clue that I was wrong on yet another subject yet one more Time again, was realizing that there were three men in Fuchida's plane and I knew the Zero had a crew of one.
Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack, to our outrage that fumed in seething anger and hatred for the next four years right through the end of World War Two, including our surprise for them at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As I have confessed here several Times, and unendingly to myself, I was formed in that hatred and anger of war news, newsreels, and propaganda, to a degree that I still fight within myself, what? eighty years later. These things are always there and always will be there; it's a matter of recognizing and struggling with it rather than denying it.
I remember the fury I unleashed on our rector in Pennsylvania when he said in a sermon that it was Time to forgive and move on, from both Pearl Harbor and Germany, the Holocaust. In my theology, forgiveness is the sole, exclusive property not of offended onlookers, but of victims: victims include the unlived lives of some six million Jews and their eternally unborn heirs and descendants forever.
Why I am wandering down this path into the briars, IDK. The film last night started it.
Another side, though, is our use of nuclear weapons to end World War Two. Along with my conclusions and moral certainty about our firebombing Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo in what became Total War, Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved thousands, a million or more, a generation of young American men, from dying in the invasion of Japan that was planned and only cancelled because we used the bomb. Again, how did I get here on this my anniversary morning?
Well, after Tora Tora Tora, researching both Genda and Fuchida, I came across this quote from a meeting of Fuchida, who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Tibbets, who piloted Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,
In 1959, Fuchida was among a group of Japanese visiting the tour of U.S. Air Force equipment given by General Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Fuchida recognized Tibbets and had a conversation with him. Tibbets said to Fuchida that "[y]ou sure did surprise us [at Pearl Harbor]" in which he replied "what do you think you did to us [at Hiroshima]?" Fuchida further told him that: