In 1989 five of the surviving crew members from the three planes which dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan traveled to Hiroshima, to confront whatever demons their souls held regarding their role in this event. They were accompanied by that barnacle of modern life, a film crew, who hoped to capture the human drama and emotion the trip promised. After all, it would make great television.

We love nothing more, nation of emotional voyeurs that we are, than to stick our big electronic eyes right smack dab in the middle of real, live, via satellite, as-it-happens, human melodrama. The more melo the better. We just love to interview the weeping mother of the missing child, the battered survivor of the plane crash before they can even make it away from the fiery scene, the convicted defendant on the courthouse steps right after they hear the verdict, the mother of the mass-murderer who has just been executed, and on and on. We love to probe all that wonderful, gooey, melodrama and emotion. Vicariously of course. From the safe comfort of our living room sofa with popcorn and beer.

We love to witness people who are being forced by real life events to confront some intense emotion. It provides a vicarious charge for people whose own internal landscape is otherwise pretty lifeless. It's the same reason people like to be scared by horror movies--to feel alive a little bit. It's the same reason many of our movies revel in violence and gore. It is so intensely horrific that it thrills us with fear, and fear is about the only flash of energy which can provide a bit of a tingle in an otherwise enervated inner world.

And God help me, I love it too. I am fascinated by much of it. I love the docudrama realities spun out by the army of mini-cams roving the world. I can't help myself. It's some kind of subliminal radio waves secretly emitted by the television set I'm sure. I can think of no other explanation.

Well, so the crew of the Enola Gay went to Hiroshima to come to terms with the most important event in their lives. And our big electronic eyes went along.

I saw the documentary on the Arts & Entertainment cable network recently. It was pretty poor television, as these things go. The five guys reminded me of nothing so much as my father. Not some mythic figures from the heart of the 20th century's history, but just like hanging out with my father, chatting about the weather. Their conversation was so American and so neutral. The talked about the weather (really!), and about how nice it was to meet everyone, and how well the memorial museum displaying the photos and artifacts of the bombing was put together, and do you have any children Mrs. Survivor, oh, and 12 grandchildren, how wonderful.

But what on earth should anyone expect of them? These are guys from another generation, they haven't been trained to emote for the cameras on cue. They are probably the last generation of Americans who will lack this vital cultural trait.

Nothing poetic happened on this trip. No dramatic resolution occurred. Nothing articulate and wise was said. No tears were shared. No insights offered. These were just five nice, ordinary Americans on a sight-seeing trip. Nobody from Central Casting was along and there was not a decent script-writer in sight.

And I was glad nothing dramatic happened. After all, these men's spiritual working-through of their lives is none of our damn business, and the larger moral implications of these events for our lives are something we never really inquire after in any honest way anyway and so we shouldn't expect these guys to work through it all on our behalf. But I found myself imagining what I would say if I were one of these men. I was indulging in a long internal monologue to enlighten everyone on the deep insights I had gained from my pilgrimage, as the real pilgrims were strolling across the bridge they had used as an aiming point and engaging in the usual small talk with each other.

This fantasy is presented not by way of exculpation nor by way of a mea culpa. It is offered just to take note of some truths about ourselves and about the nature of warfare. Some truths which are so salient that no one from the crew of the Enola Gay dared mention them.

You see, we hype the horrors of nuclear warfare in a way which we never seem to get to with "conventional" warfare. Morally, they are not distinct. The drama with which we enshroud Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a deceit we present to ourselves. We imagine that these events are somehow of a different order than the daily events of the 50 or so wars raging in the world at this moment. But they are not. We should be able to see the horror of conventional war and shudder at its barbarity, but we can't. Nuclear war is just a way to shout the message a little louder, but it's the same message.

So, I present to you a voyeur's fantasies. This is what I imagine I might say if I were a member of the crew of the Enola Gay and the inquiring electronic eyes were probing me for the insights I had to offer.

Questioner: "Do you see yourself as responsible for all this horror and suffering you unleashed in the skies over Japan?"

Response: "Yes and no. I do feel some guilt sometimes, not a lot but some, and I guess guilt implies responsibility. But mostly, I see myself as just a soldier in a nation at war, and soldiers don't have all that much freedom to decide for themselves what they will or will not do. Mostly we just do what we're told.

Look, I was ordered to do many things in the war. I was told to go here and there, and I did. I was told to do this and that, and I did. I was told to fly this mission and that mission and to drop bombs on this target and that one, and I did. In the most honest sense, this mission was like dozens of others I flew. This action on my part was like so many others I engaged in, and nobody ever asks me about those.

Although I knew this mission was special in many ways, it did not seem to me at the time to pose any special moral issues. It was just more of the same. The aura of major moral quandary which has grown up around this event was simply not present in my mind on that day."

Questioner: "But what you were doing was historic and unprecedented. You were dropping the first atomic bomb in history."

Response: "It always puzzles me how people talk about the bomb we dropped on Japan, like it was somehow different than what hundreds of other guys were doing every day.

Look, when our three planes arrived on Timion Island to prepare for the raid on Hiroshima, we weren't the only planes there. There were 145 bombers already there, and they were flying daily bombing runs against Tokyo and other cities in Japan. If you just somehow took all those thousands of conventional bombs and melted them together into one big bomb and instead of dropping them from 145 planes, dropped them from one, what would be the difference? In effect, that's what we did. That's what the technology of nuclear weapons is, a kind of mechanical alchemy in which thousands of little bombs are fused to create one big one."

Questioner: "But 80,000 people were killed instantly. Isn't that unimaginable devastation."

Response: "Yes. That's precisely what it is--unimaginable devastation. But I never have understood this strange kind of math by which killing 80,000 unarmed civilians with thousands of bombs over the course of many days is somehow less devastating than killing these same people in one day with one bomb. The only difference is that it's easier for us to get our minds around the devastation when it happens all at once--we see it more vividly--than it is when the devastation happens slowly over time.

Once we decide that bombing unarmed civilians is an acceptable form of warfare, which was decided long before the Enola Gay was ever conceived, isn't that the point at which the moral choice is made? Do you really think it matters to the dead what kind of weapon killed them?"

Questioner: "After meeting some of your victims, after seeing that they are people just like you and me, don't you wonder how you could have done such a thing."

Response: "We were very young. Those who go to war are always very young, and not just because the young have the necessary vitality. The young are sent to war because they lack the wisdom which comes with age. With this wisdom you begin to understand some things, like the fact that all people are just people, that the Japanese are just like the neighbors down the street. And this makes it harder to kill the enemy when you don't see them as alien in some fundamental way.

You know, we hated and despised the Japanese. We thought and believed they were sub-human in some way. Even when we didn't say it or consciously think it, we had to look at them in this way to make it all acceptable in our minds. Everybody thought this. Not just the crew of the Enola Gay, the foot soldier shooting it out on the islands of the Pacific saw the enemy as alien is some basic way. We never thought about innocent women and vulnerable children. We only thought about "Japs."

No one ever asks the average soldier or airman from the War if they thought about their victims, and whether they feel guilty about what they did. They only ask us.

So yes, meeting these people now, and seeing them as regular people like everyone else, is hard. If I had been able to see them this way back then, it would have been impossible for me to do what I did. But it was never possible to see them like this before, only now, all these many years later."

Questioner: "They say that dropping the atomic bombs shortened the war, saving thousands of lives in the long run. This is the usual justification for the decision. Do you agree?"

Response: "I don't know about all that, and I don't need any kind of justification. I was just doing what I had been doing for several years by that point, trying to kill the enemy to win the war. That's all the justification I needed in my mind at the time.

I will tell you one thing though, it is true that dropping the bombs did end the war very quickly. In that sense they worked very well. And I am sure that if those bombs hadn't worked so well, and if the war had dragged on, we would have produced more atomic bombs and we would have begun using them as regular weapons of war just like all the others. In time, people would have become inured to the atom bomb just like they have become to every other weapon of war ever invented. It is because only two atomic bombs were dropped that this cult of specialness has grown up around these weapons. If hundreds of them had been used, they would have become nothing special in the ways of war.

I suppose it's good that we have this taboo about the use of nuclear weapons. I don't want to see them used. But if you think these weapons are somehow different in kind, morally, from grenades and machine guns and ballistic missiles and all the rest of it, you are deluding yourself."

Questioner: "What are your key insights about the role in history of the crew of the Enola Gay."

Response: "Look, the role of the crew of the Enola Gay is nothing special in history. The basic gestures of warfare have remained the same throughout human history. The crew of the Enola Gay didn't do anything which was different in any way from the millions of other warriors who have slaughtered their fellow men since time immemorial.

You have got to stop dramatizing us and start facing the truth about yourselves. Don't look to us for insights, look in the mirror."