ParrP comments

I hear you, extanker. Thanks for the feedback.

Let's make sure we have your sources...I'm guessing this one for the first? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5472695/Letter-pilot-dropped-atomic-bomb-reveals-effect-him.html

And this one for the second? https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/20/obituaries/robert-a-lewis-65-co-pilot-on-mission-over-hiroshima.html

I went with this one, cited in Sharp's paper: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84862/page/n199 . It's interesting that in this source, the 1947 book Dawn Over Zero, by William Laurence (pgs. 182-185), Laurence (who personally asked Lewis to write the log) uses Lewis's log for an entire page, then at the end even mentions Lewis's 'My God!', but he leaves out 'what have we done?' This makes me think two things...one...it makes me wonder whether Laurence intentionally left out those words and ended the sentence with 'My God!' in order to sustain the government's 'absence of guilt' perspective. Or did Lewis add in those words after time had passed?

I guess I will have to spend my life savings and attempt to purchase Lewis's letter from an auctioneer in order to find out.

Another difference between the New York Times source and the Laurence source would be the matter of the pronoun 'us'.

To Laurence, Lewis said: (DoZ, pgs. 182-183): "Even when the plane was going in the opposite direction, the flames were still terrific. The area of the town looked as though it was torn apart. I have never seen anything like it--never seen anything like it. When we turned our ship so we could observe results, there in front of our eyes was without a doubt the greatest explosion man had ever seen. The city was nine-tenths covered with a smoke column that in less than three minutes had reached 30,000 feet. We were struck dumb at the sight. It far exceeded all our expectations. Even though we had expected something terrific, what we saw made us feel that we were Buck Rogers' twenty-fifth century warriors. The cloud still kept growing larger even after an hour, when we were some 270 miles away from the target. The pillar of smoke had reached 40,000 feet, 'way above our altitude. It kept changing its weird colours until we lost sight of it."

NY Times, from his log: ''Everyone on the ship is actually dumbstruck even though we had expected something fierce. It was the actual sight that we saw that caused the crew to feel that they were part of Buck Rodgers' 25th century warriors.''

Since I'm still bothered by his then-lack of humanity (brought upon by a mindset cultivated PRE-drop) and his lack of concern for the people he'd just killed, I stand by my choice in this article.

Hi, and thanks for the response. As for extanker's response about taking Lewis out of context, I understand your perspective, truly...however I feel Lewis's decision to drop the bomb was motivated far more by an overzealous, patriotic motivation brought upon by the culture he lived in. Still, I did see remorse in him on that television show, so that nudged me toward providing the link to the video.

I think it is more important to understand the pre-motivation of doing something like this, rather than the post-motivation of seeking forgiveness after the act.

The author here...Yes, I was very conflicted about whether or not to include that video, but I figured it was best to let readers make of it what they will. It certainly elicits an emotion.

Thanks for reading, everyone.