On the way out, I checked his chart for the DNR. I didn't see it. But something else was written there, two words that sent me back to my seat beside him and kept me there for the rest of the morning.
I WANTED TO CONFESS, too. I go to confession regularly, of course, once a year, at least, whether I need to or not. I usually avail myself of another missionary who's passing through (I prefer the foreign ones, whose faith is always stronger than their English), or I go during one of my visits to Anchorage or Fairbanks. But there, partly out of respect for my brother priests, I confess only what is expected: the petty excesses, errors, failures of daily life. I'm not about to saddle them with all that happened to me, especially during the war. It is enough that I should bear that: I don't want them to suffer with it as well. Wartime transgressions, I figure, will wait for my deathbed, for last rites, when I can cough them out in an unintelligible rattle, be forgiven, and then go on to my reward.
And this is exactly what Ronnie, my brother shaman, was doing. And that's how I realized what I was missing: release, reward. Oh, I'm old enough, have seen enough, that there have been times of late when I've wanted to die-long, dark nights of the soul are nothing new in a land where winter nights can last twenty hours or more. But who could wait, like Ronnie, until the precipice before death to talk? I wanted to tell my secrets, now, ones I have held fast for a lifetime. And who would listen? Ronnie.
No, I've not wanted to burden a brother priest with my secrets, but I'd happily burden Ronnie: he's dying, after all; he won't have to suffer me long. As I waited for him to reawaken, I began to draft my speech in my head. But the longer he slept, the longer my confession became. I worried I would never get it all out if I waited for Ronnie to reawaken. So I didn't wait. Instead, in low tones, mumbling to myself, to Ronnie, I started my story.
In the beginning, Ronnie had said, there was Raven, trickster and creator of the Yup'ik world.
My story also began with something that flew
IT WAS A MOST INGENIOUS device. Leave aside the compliment implicit in ingenious-yes, yes, this was 1944-45, they were still the enemy-and for now, simply admire the handiwork, as I did, each time we found one intact.
A four-tier wedding cake, mostly aluminum, two feet tall. The top tier is a plastic box, a little bigger than one you'd use to hold recipes. Inside the box, a liquid solution of 10 percent calcium chloride, which insulates the small, 1.5 volt wet-cell battery, equal in heft to a good-size bar of soap. Two wires emerge from the box: follow them down. One disappears into a larger wooden box, the cake's second tier. This is where they housed the aneroid barometers: three smaller ones, each calibrated to complete an electrical circuit at a specific altitude, and one larger, more sophisticated, barometer that served as the primary control unit for the flight.
Okay, working our way down now, top to bottom, just like you would (and I did) in the field. Nothing explosive yet.
Next: the wooden barometer box is sitting on a large, round Bakelite platter. Innocent enough. But look beneath (or don't; it was unnerving, even for me, hurriedly trained in bomb disposal). Dozens of wires, all crisscrossing this way and that, many of them connecting to contacts on the bottom of the Bakelite platter, and still others descending to the cake's two lower tiers, the two round aluminum rings spoked like wagon wheels. I suppose I should be more exact. We're not following wires; these are fuses. Twenty-four inches long. Burning time of two minutes, sixteen seconds. Wired in pairs so that if one fuse failed, the other would finish the job. Smart. While airborne, the barometers set the fuses off during the final descent. On the ground, clumsiness or ignorance did the job equally well.
Bang: it wasn't the fuses you had to worry about, though, not ultimately. But they were connected to little-well, squibs is what we called them, because to call them what they essentially were, firecrackers, made it all sound like fun.
When the firecrackers popped, one of the thirty-two sandbags would drop, and as each one dropped, you got a better view (if you were watching this contraption in flight, but few were that lucky) of what all this fuss was about. Around the circumference of the ring dangled four or more 5-kilogram thermite incendiary bombs, which would explode on impact. And in the middle? In the middle dangled a nasty black 15-kilogram antipersonnel bomb, finned like a torpedo and filled with picric acid or TNT. When these exploded, you'd encounter debris scattered as far as a quarter mile away. And for variety sometimes you'd discover some strange canister hanging there you didn't recognize at all.
Oh, and the flash bomb-250 grams of magnesium powder that you'd find if you followed the longest fuse-followed it from where it began, beneath that bottom tier, followed it to where it climbed, up, up, sixty-four feet, where it burrowed like a canker into the side of those magical balloons.
That's what they were, balloons.
Who wouldn't be curious coming upon one in a field, beside a road, among trees? Even deflated, flat on the forest floor like it was melting away, wouldn't you marvel at it? Thirty-two feet in diameter, one hundred feet in circumference, and the whole of it, most incredibly, paper, made from mulberry trees or rice, washi paper. Each balloon required forty to sixty paper panels, and each panel was painstakingly made by hand, in thousands of homes across Japan. Each household produced their share, then handed it up the line to authorities who handed it up to factories (in one case, a converted opera house), where women and children-girls, all who were left then, and who were found to be more skilled than the boys anyway-joined the panels with glue made from a potato-like vegetable. (The vegetable: konnyaku, “devil's tongue,” quite edible, quite Japanese; to reply in kind, we'd have had to caulk our bombs with apple pie. In any case, with food growing scarce in war-winnowed Japan, workers began eating what glue they didn't use, and then, whatever glue they could find.)
A balloon of paper and potato glue, a wedding cake of firecrackers and aluminum. Designed to silently ride the winds across the Pacific, barometers triggering ballast drops when necessary, and then, finally, descend into the impregnable United States mainland, setting forest fires, killing soldiers, civilians.
Ingenious. Yes, I'll use the word. Considering that any one balloon, landing in the right spot, or even a wrong spot, could do an incredible amount of damage.
But the Japanese didn't just send one balloon. Over the course of a few months, beginning in the fall of 1944 and ending in the spring of 1945, they launched close to ten thousand bomb-laden balloons, an effort which, by its end, had required the concerted effort of millions of people.
I'm not sure what the word for that is.
Years after the war, I was on a retreat with a German Jesuit who had been in Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped. One night at dinner, it came up that I had been a soldier in the war. He fixed me with a stare, and then asked me a question he'd obviously been asking Americans ever since VJ Day. “Why?” he said. I knew better than to answer, but then he asked another question. “Why two?”
Why ten thousand?
But I didn't say it.
And in the end, of course, he was right. You only needed one, be it atomic bomb or balloon.
One balloon could halt the development of the atomic bomb, in fact.
And one did, temporarily, on April Fool's Day, 1945, knocking down power lines that led to the Hanford, Washington, atomic energy plant, which was producing materials for the bombs that would later be dropped on Japan.