What Are You Afraid Of?

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Paul Zimmer is a contributing editor of the venerable Gettysburg Review. His essay “Practicing for Doomsday,” from which this passage is excerpted, appeared in the journal’s Autumn 2008 issue.

There it was like a letter bomb in our mailbox. I had just flunked out of college after a year and was trying to think of what I would do next, how to make a little money and regain my head. Almost immediately my military draft notice arrived. I was a clueless 19-year-old boy, but at least I was able to recognize a major crisis when I saw one.

With great misgivings, I reported for service. Immediately after I had finished regular basic training, I was assigned to two additional months of pitiless advanced infantry training. When I was at last a lethal professional killer, they designated me with a few hundred other soldiers to serve in Nevada as an atomic guinea pig, experiencing nuclear explosions in open trenches near ground zero.

I was very well aware of what the bombs had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki a decade before. Even to a rosy-cheeked kid, this seemed to be a desperate drill.

That spring, groveling in slits near the explosions, we witnessed eight detonations in the desert. Several times these trenches caved in on us, and we were buried alive. Finally, when we had clawed out of our living graves and stood stupefied under the infernal mushrooms, the officers ordered us to advance toward ground zero.

It is hard to think of what we saw. I was a kid. Reality had an off-and-on switch. For 30 or more years, I thought rarely about this experience. I was a writer but never wrote about it. I never talked about it to my family or friends.

But I remember my fear.

I remember my buddies groaning and sucking air, choking on the earth that entombed us. I remember blinded, maimed desert animals and birds pitching against our boots as we walked through blasted yucca and cactus toward the fire. Smashed artillery and tanks. Flattened “doomtowns” built by the Atomic Energy Commission and populated by mannequins, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sundered and melted grotesquely by the fire. Automobiles and trucks crumpled and tossed like paper wads. Large dogs and horses mangled on their tethers. Burning bushes everywhere.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print