Pops says, I guess with replay we’d miss the fights. He means the institutionalized spectacles of rage, when a skipper charges from the dugout and puts his red face up to the stone face of an umpire, hat thrown to the ground, dirt kicked on pants, spit flying in faces, gum even, ripping the bases from the earth and tossing them into the nowhere of center field as protest against a call he knows will never be changed. I guess the soul of baseball is somewhere in those rages. There’d be no reason to rage with replay. If the call is always absolutely right, then you could only ever weep with regret. The Reaper’s wings are prone to get icy when it flies high or at night and so the edges are made to bleed ethylene glycol from areas covered in things called microscopic weeping holes. Pops says, Keep the tradition of using your eyeballs. Crack. An Invader hits a sacrifice fly to center field, bringing his teammate home from third. This is what makes our pastime indelibly human: the possibility of sacrifice. First they were called drones and then they were unmanned aerial vehicles and now they are remotely piloted aircraft because we are increasingly anxious to clarify our relationship to our technology—we are there and not there at all. With Reapers, it’s whether our moral barometer for taking lives slips or loosens wildly or totally implodes; and with replay, it’s whether we cling to our infallibility. These problems have drastically different stakes but are blurred by the same struggle to keep a hold on how we define ourselves as Americans.
By this time next year many Reapers will be fitted with the Gorgon Stare sensor package, which will add up to sixty-five full-motion video feeds to the bird’s eye, creating “data at rates of 10 to over 1,000 times projected communications data transmission capacities, and will far exceed human analytic capability.” To keep this glut of data from being wasted, to make it useful in “pattern of life” recognition, the USAF Scientific Advisory Board recommends “automated processing.” By this time next year the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers will announce they’re designing baseball equipment—bats, balls, and gloves—that can be networked with sensors and transmitters installed around the stadium to provide verdicts for every call in the game. “The new technology should be accurate to an extent that human observers simply cannot match, even with tools such as automatic replay.”
Pop says, We’re all human. I’m not sure what he means.
When a reporter gets into the Reaper Ground Control Station at Holloman Air Force Base, he sees the video feed and asks, Is that a civilian car on the road? Major Trey says, It is a civilian car, here in New Mexico … simply to train drone pilots to be able to follow a moving target … the cars do not know we are following them. The targeting system on the screen moves along Highway 54, the road Pops and I will take north in a few hours, along the bend back toward the Jornada del Muerto into La Luz desert, the climb from the Tularosa Basin, the straight shot of asphalt between the green stretch of Lincoln Forest and the big pure splotch of White Sands, me and Pops at the start of a road trip to see as much baseball as we can, trying to remember why we care to be alive and American. Major Trey says, We do not simulate or actually engage those vehicles.
Tomorrow morning, after a stop in Roswell at the Super Meat Mart to buy hot beef jerky, Pops will get chili flakes in his eyes as he gnaws and they will swell and tear, and I’ll wake in the passenger seat as he steers the truck with his knee, one hand prying open a fiery eye and one hand dumping a bottle of water into that fiery eye while the truck’s cruise control hurtles us at seventy-five and all four wheels veer onto the shoulder. Tomorrow morning, when we don’t die but his eyes are swollen shut, Pops justifies his decision to keep speeding even though his eyes were melting out of his face by saying, I didn’t want to stop getting to where we were going.
Crack.
A Pupfish homers in the bottom of the ninth, a long bomb to right field, but it means little. The final score is 10–4. The Pupfish fall to the Invaders. Our pupfish are endangered because they survive in only two sad excuses for springs, Salt Creek on the White Sands Missile Range and Lost River on Holloman Air Force Base, both areas off-limits to the public. The military promises to keep an eye on the population count and let us know when they are gone for good. So now you know our ball team’s name is an elegy. We were born to lose.
The ballplayers pack up, and some kids run onto the field. They jump around the mound as a lady snaps a photo of them on her phone and hollers for them to stay out of the dirt. Few photos of victims of drone strikes in Waziristan have been published because the area is dangerous for reporters, because the Hellfire missile destroys everything, because of a “double-tap” tactic that keeps the drones hovering just long enough to launch additional Hellfires at any first responders. One of the few photos I’ve seen is of three children whose parents are dead, have not yet been dead one day or one night. The children’s little hands clutch the rubble, hold the rubble out for the camera, chunks of Dande Darpa Khel, where they will never live again, where their parents have died, have not yet been dead one day or night, staring, her into the eye of the camera and him at the rubble like treasure in his hands, and the small one in the middle looks to her right, in profile, her eyeballs invisible, their lips all dipping at the corners, but these are not frowns—I can trace the sink of a frown but see smiles on their faces, have in my belly, despite the flames behind them, despite the rubble, despite the sinking, a sensation of smiles, a discrepancy called shock and awe that will not last into the night. The government reported no civilian casualties for this strike. Two Hellfire missiles hit exactly what they targeted, just as they always do, because our Reaper uses what marines call the Light of God, a laser fired from a Multi-Spectral Targeting System on the nose of the drone, fired really from a steel cargo container in an American desert or an office in Langley, but beaming down on Dande Darpa Khel in the desert of North Waziristan, a beam that, seen from the ground, might extend up to infinity, light that looks like it’s coming from heaven, says one drone pilot. Right on the spot. Coming out of nowhere from the sky. It’s quite beautiful. But, of course, it is green like an alien thing, and you will only ever see it with the right goggles. Even then it comes only in pulses. You see, for a moment, the pitcher’s mound lit up, and for a briefer moment, you don’t. Then you see the target lit up again with the pulsing green Light of God. Then comes the explosion when you can’t see anything at all but light.
CHILDREN OF THE GADGET
In the Year of Our Lord 2015
July 18, 2015
Hundreds of twinkling lights, five hundred brown paper sacks with candles in them, luminarias around the mound and spilling out into the base paths and a family of three with singing bowls on the infield grass, the biggest singing bowls I’ve ever seen, like singing buckets between their legs and them dragging mallets along the glass rims to make the air drone, for hours the air drones as one by one the luminarias are extinguished by roving figures in the dark, and when another wisp of smoke from a smothered wick dissipates, then we are done remembering, for this year, one more victim of the Gadget, the Manhattan Project’s crowning achievement at Trinity, the world’s first atomic blast, seventy years ago, right here in Southern New Mexico. The guy sitting in front of me on the bleachers has a John Wayne koozie around his drink. He sips and sips from John Wayne. Up in the press box a trio of announcers takes turns reading pages of names of all the people in the Tularosa Basin who have died of cancer caused, they say, by radioactive fallout from the first breath of the atomic age. For hours, name after name like the slow grind of a macabre graduation ceremony. So then this is how the twenty kilotons of the Gadget’s blast fades, not up into the mushroom cloud and gone in under a minute, but filtered through seventy years and still a few more names, and still a few more flames to be extinguished.
Out beyond center field is a rusty merry-go-round, the kid-powered playground kind with the kids running in circles to get it spinning at unsafe speeds and jumping on and getting immediately flung off, and all through the reading of names and extinguishing of
luminarias, that merry-go-round never stops creaking and spinning, the children of Tularosa never stop running and hollering and getting flung into the night. It’s almost like they don’t even know they’re the children of the bomb. Or, the Gadget. Children of the Gadget. Out of New Mexico came two different versions of the bomb and then there was a superbomb and eventually many tens of thousands of each including warheads on missiles and torpedoes, but they were all born of the same moment of warfare singularity when mass destruction became less of a campaign and more of a decision. The Trinity Site: just forty-five miles northwest of those children discovering the nauseous joy of physics on the merry-go-round. Every bomb is the Bomb. But that first one at Trinity was called the Gadget—a code name for secrecy’s sake, a name diluted by the technicality that it was only a test device, a name meant to hide the significance of what we were about to do. Just a gizmo or a widget. A little doohickey. Nothing but a goddamn gadget. Just toying with the nauseous joy of physics.
Henry Herrera sits up in his lawn chair next to the bleachers and says, The thing went off and the fire went up and the cloud rose and the bottom half went up that way. He gestures over my head toward first base. But then the top part, the mushroom top started coming back this way and fell all over everything. He waves both his arms back toward us and all around us, big swoops of old, thin, and crooked arms over his head like he might be able to accurately pantomime an atomic blast or like he’s invoking its spirit or just inviting the fireball to rain down again so the rest of us can really understand.
Henry’s sort of a celebrity in this crowd, one of the only remaining residents of Tularosa who actually witnessed the Gadget’s blast, a guy who’s beat cancer three times already and says he’ll lick it again if he gets the chance. I’ve heard him repeat the story, word for word, to anyone who will listen, for years now. He sits next to me, fiddling with the pearl snaps on his Western shirt, petting his white hair down in back behind his big ears, telling the tale in spurts, little stanzas between long gaps of pondering, those rests of silent reflection that never stop growing as we age, like ears, like I guess all our really old storytellers have big ears and the will to ride a lull for as long as it takes until an aphorism or anecdote has marinated on the tongue and is ready to serve. He serves one up: I’ll bet ten dollars to a donut your momma never blamed you for the atomic bomb. True enough. And the rest of his story sidles out as the luminarias burn.
Henry was eleven and up early, just before dawn, to fill the radiator in his daddy’s Ford, always his first morning chore. The radiator on an old Model A had to be drained every night and filled every morning if you couldn’t afford fancy additives like water lube or that newfangled antifreeze. And the Herreras couldn’t afford anything fancy. This was 1945 and they were just like all their neighbors in Tularosa, most everyone Hispanic and working ranches, growing and raising as much of their own food as they could and collecting most of their summer drinking water from the monsoon rains. So there’s little Henry with his skinny arms holding a bucket over the fill hole in the grille of the Ford, and what he remembers most is that his momma had laundry hanging on the line to dry. He remembers the laundry blowing in the wind. Kinda strange to have wind like that right before dawn. All her white stuff, he says. Linens and shirts and underwear flapping around. And then the flash: on the polished steel of the Ford’s grille and the dull steel of the bucket and the flapping white linens and the retinas of little Henry’s eyes. Light. Night turned to day, he says. Like heaven came down.* And then the blast and the shaking and then dark again. Silence. Nobody ever thought much of a bomb going off because bombs were always going off over at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range since our Second World War began, but this explosion was different. It was huge and after a few minutes comes this little filmy dust, Henry says. Fine dark ash just came down and landed all over everything. Momma’s clothes hanging out there turned nearly black, so she had to wash them over again. You talk about a mad Mexican. He laughs at the thought of his momma’s face, seeing all her whites turned to grays, screaming, What the hell did you explode out here, Henry?
So that’s the story of how Henry’s momma tried to blame him for the atomic bomb. It’s funny until you know we was drinking it and eating and everything else. But we didn’t know that for years. Not really until we started dying.
For so long the story of the Gadget’s explosion at Trinity has included some version of this: history made in an uninhabited stretch of the high lonesome desert in New Mexico. A 2015 PBS documentary about Trinity begins, “Here, miles and miles from anywhere…” Even the most acclaimed history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes, an otherwise stellar eight-hundred-page tome that covers everything from the most minute details of late-nineteenth-century theoretical physics to the rate of venereal disease at the Trinity outpost (proudly the lowest in the nation), glosses over that many thousands of New Mexicans lived within fifty miles of the blast. “A bomb exploded in a desert damages not much besides sand and cactus and the purity of the air,” writes Rhodes. More recent articles about Trinity occasionally use the phrase “sparsely populated region.” And it is true that a few thousand mostly Hispanic or Native ranchers and villagers living within fifty miles of the Gadget pale in comparison to the nearly half million Japanese who felt the Bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But that kind of math is little solace for folks such as Henry who feel they’ve been poisoned in the shadows, forgotten or swept under the rug by their own victorious nation.
Henry intertwines his tale of the Gadget with one about being in the military ten years later, touring Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war because he’d become obsessed with what he’d seen as a kid—night turned to day, like heaven came down—and he needed to see also what the Bomb had done to our enemies, and he surely saw it all: the complete devastation, the rubble and ash and shadows stuck to walls and just imagine all those families, he says. His eyes get watery, crying the way all these old tough guys from the desert do, a quivering lip and the eyes barely dripping but gritting his teeth to offset it all, gritting so hard it appears he’s trying to stop not just his own tears but trying to will away all the sorrow in the world all by himself, the presence of any tears really secondary to the wrought of his face in relating not just sadness about Japanese civilians killed in the bombings or sadness about American civilians killed by the test but also rage about the inevitability of it all. We did it, he says. We Americans did that. We had to, I know. But nobody remembers we did it here first.
So here they are having a vigil, three generations of families from the Tularosa Basin, a stretch of desert southeast of Trinity, between the San Andres Mountains and the Sacramento Mountains, from Carrizozo down past Alamogordo with the village of Tularosa smack-dab in the middle. And the luminarias on the village ballpark are their way of saying after all this time, We were there. The desert you blew up was not so lonesome. We are here still but we are dying. If you cannot save us, then let us tell our story.
July 18, 1945
(Two Days After the Gadget’s Blast)
There’s the head of a jackrabbit, blown from its body. Little chunks of them are everywhere, and maybe this one’s body is in pieces nearby or maybe it evaporated. There are so many heads and legs and piles of charred guts or just shadows on the sand, burns where all the sand is scorched except where a jackrabbit stood, perked up at the sight of a warning rocket, then blocked the heat of the big blast for a shake until it was blown away, leaving only the specter of its long, jagged ears on the sand. The official report will use the word eviscerated. How else to explain a whole spattering of lucky feet not far from the crater where just the other day sand was melted to green glass by heat ten thousand times hotter than the surface of the sun. So it was jackrabbits. And snakes and cicadas and maybe a coyote or two. First blood of the Gadget. Someone reports a stench in the air from eviscerated animals, but that is the only time any death will ever be officially linked to the first breath of the atomic age.
* * *
The Gadget’s explosion was only announced retroactively after its cousin Little Boy wiped out Hiroshima. The Alamogordo Daily News, the paper of record for the Tularosa Basin, wrote it up like this on August 9, 1945, printed this as the Gadget’s twin, Fat Man, was falling toward Nagasaki:
Some of the biggest news ever to break on man’s understanding has exploded this week—a terrifying type of bomb, the Russian declaration of war upon Japan, etc., etc. Since our readers get the details in the dailies and magazines and by radio, we will not attempt to even review it. In fact we are forced to leave out much news of local import for lack of space.
And in the BIG NEWS: Alamogordo probably is now a heard-of place to people all over the world, as the site of the final atomic-bomb test.
This is the entirety of the announcement of the Gadget’s birth in our hometown newspaper. Because the Trinity test happened on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range (now White Sands Missile Range), Alamogordo is often credited as the site of the bomb’s birth. But the village of Tularosa is closer to Trinity—forty-five miles southeast. Carrizozo is closer still—thirty-five miles east. Alamogordo is sixty-two miles south of Trinity and I guess that’s about as close as the government wanted the press to suggest any Americans lived. The announcement in the Daily News is small, and half of it is an apology for lack of space. There are two et ceteras (abbreviated, of course, for space). Maybe this was the beginning of us not telling the full extent of the story. But Alamogordo was only three thousand folks large and the paper was only a weekly, so maybe it can be excused for extreme brevity regarding “the biggest news ever to break on man’s understanding,” if not for what comes directly below the small announcement of the Bomb, just an eighth of an inch away, separated only by a slight line with a small circle in the middle, a second announcement that dwarfs the first, dominates the page:
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