Hiroshima’s impact felt to this day

Kim Palchikoff

Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2013 | 2:03 a.m.

Sometimes anniversaries of even sad events can have a special meaning. This month, there are two of them. The annual anniversary of Hiroshima’s destruction by the atom bomb in 1945.

And the 10th anniversary of my father’s death.

He was a unique Nevada resident. Not only was he born and raised in Hiroshima, but later, after immigrating to the U.S., he was the first American soldier to visit the city after its destruction by the Enola Gay.

For years, on Aug. 6, my father, who became an avid peace activist late in life, protested in various ways the dropping of the atom bomb.

One year he traveled with my mother to Hiroshima to give a speech about his life and his subsequent belief that dropping the bomb was the wrong thing to do. Another year, much later, I joined him in protesting nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site. It was a long drive in the hot desert. We were joined by hundreds of peace activists, who, like us, had come ready to be arrested for their actions by trespassing on government property. My father took with him a blue lantern that contained a flame from the Hiroshima Peace Flame.

It may have just been a symbolic action, unbeknownst to the Las Vegas media, but still, to my father it was important.

He wasn’t always an activist. Before moving to Nevada, he spent more than a decade of his postwar life serving in the military reserves in Los Angeles. He was an intelligence officer, teaching interrogation techniques to the next generation.

Still, he could never get the nightmare of ground zero out of his mind. He never thought about the radiation he received walking through the ashes; no one did. He just wondered which of his childhood friends, if any, survived and was thankful that his family did.

Sitting around our dinner table in Reno, I recall him telling stories about his life as a soldier and the sadness with which he described the horror of Hiroshima. Fifty years after the Enola Gay leveled his hometown, he came to believe that any war was a crime against humanity.

Despite his change in views, he never stopped being a proud veteran. Even though he came to disagree with America’s decision to drop the bomb, like many WWII veterans, he loved his country. His definition of love just changed, he liked to explain. Before, he believed violence was the best means of solving problems. Now, he didn’t want any more nuclear bombs dropped anywhere.

He always went to the local VA for free medical care, a benefit promised to him as a young recruit. He was supposed to get this care for life.

My mother was a Nevada state employee and begged him to go on her health insurance policy. She didn’t like the quality of the VA’s care. But he never budged. He was a veteran, he stated emphatically. It was his right.

When he was in his late 60s, his health started to deteriorate. One day, a doctor at the VA told him he had stage 4 prostate cancer, and there was little hope of survival. They gave him three to five years to live.

My father was devastated. It wasn’t just the cancer but the fact that suddenly his care was no longer free. At the end of his life, the VA had changed its policy. Now only veterans who could prove their injuries were a direct result of military action got their VA bills paid for.

And that, they said, did not include him. He protested vehemently.

It wasn’t the money that bothered him; rather it was the fact that they had broken their word about the one thing he really cared about.

For years he filed claims with the government, trying to explain his situation. He wrote that he was in Hiroshima after the bomb and obviously exposed to serious radiation. The U.S. government wrote back that he was missing proof that he had been there at all.

He was a former intelligence officer, he replied. There was little documentation during the war about his whereabouts. He worked in secret.

Years passed. Corresponding with Washington was painfully slow. His cancer worsened. Finally, they decided that he had, in fact, visited Hiroshima in September 1945. But, they stated, he couldn’t prove that he’d absorbed enough radiation to cause cancer.

Case denied.

He cried when he got the news. He was hurt and disillusioned by the government he had once agreed to die for.

Still, barely living, he chose to spend his final days in the VA’s hospice. He died Aug. 10, 2003, four days after Hiroshima’s annual commemoration ceremony.

He refused the free military burial offered to him. By the time it was necessary, he had let go of Hiroshima.

Follow Kim Palchikoff on Twitter at @kimpalchikoff