Paul Tibbets dies at 92

[Strangler Lewis]

Easy to feel bad about one dead cricket. Harder to get one's mind around tens of thousands of civilians. It's also probably impossible to attain a nuanced peace of mind by parsing out the people that it was appropriate to nuke from those that it wasn't. Either you go mad or you put it out of your mind.

My dad was part of a flamethrower unit on "anything that moved" duty around the caves of Okinawa. He didn't care for it, and would occasionally talk about it, but this wasn't tens of thousands people.