If I lived by a major airport I wouldn’t get anything done. It is like my daughter’s yellow Labrador Retriever when he sees a squirrel. His mind just goes blank and he goes after the squirrel with abandon. Whenever I hear an airplane, I have to look up. I don’t chase the airplanes—I am just transfixed by flight. When I was a medical student in Washington, D.C. the road to our apartment in Alexandria went right under the flight path for what is now Regan National Airport. I was hopeless. I just couldn’t help myself. MK was exasperated initially, but, to this day, she still reflexly steers while I watch airplanes. I am a lucky man.
So it was this morning. I was out in the garden hunting weeds. The distinct sonorous drone of multiple mixed Merlin and radial engines gave away an early Memorial Day flight of WWII Warbirds taking off from the Idaho Falls Airport. Six or so airplanes grouped up and flew east. I stopped hunting weeds and stood transfixed with the beauty and emotion of the formation flying above the horizon in front of me. As the planes climbed higher over the foothills, I imagined flybys over cemeteries up and down the valley, honoring fallen soldiers and those who served, possibly circling Island Park or the Tetons before returning home to hangers in Driggs, Rexburg, and Idaho Falls. Most of the pilots who actually flew these planes in battle during WWII are honored today with American flags placed near their headstones. Those of us who were fortunate enough to have seen these magnificent machines flying by, saw a portion of our tremendous heritage.
A very significant part of our great fortune is tagged to harnessing the atom with nuclear weapons technology borrowed from captured German scientists. On July 16, 1945, as he witnessed the first detonation of the nuclear weapon he designed, a piece of Hindu scripture ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It is, perhaps, the most well-known line from the Bhagavad-Gita. Oppenheimer felt the consequences of the atomic bomb for the rest of his days. His apparent inability to accept the idea of an immortal soul would always weigh heavy on his mind, long after it became clear that Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented what would certainly have been a much more horrific, bloody, up-close, and personal battle with “conventional” weaponry. Even now, the political donkeys of this world continue to criticize the use of nuclear energy and using this first nuclear weapon.
This morning, as the sight and sound of the antique warplanes faded, I imagined what might have happened was it not for a few sentinel military moments. Not bombing the U.S. fuel supply at Pearl Harbor was one of those moments. Had the Japanese military chosen to immediately return to our shores with an invasion of the western United States, they would have found us to be dismally unprepared. Fighting a Japanese invasion would have almost certainly diluted sending our troops to Europe, delaying the surrender of Germany long enough for their scientists to develop a nuclear weapon for Germany instead of the United States. With Germany/Japan at the helm, the nuclear weapons release on America would have been less controlled—much less. It would have been an entirely different world than the one we live in today.
Tweak just one or two critical military decisions of the past and the antique warplanes flying by this morning would have been Mitsubishi A6M Zeroes or Messerschmitt Bf 109’s.
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