I can’t. Terkel was a huge lefty.
Probably better worded given the death of DADT.... Studs Terkel interviews the pilot of the Enola Gay
His answer: "We would like to think we made a difference".
Thank you for fixing the title.....I appreciate it.....
In the early '80s I was taking a Jr. College class in Oceanside, CA that had a Paki instructor. Kinda humorous guy and I got to like him - until he said that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was racist.
Now this was Marine Corps country (Camp Pendleton) and when he said that, I braced for a half dozen retired Marines in the class to jump all over him. Instead, to a man, they sheepishly hung their heads - that's how strong the Racism! epithet was then.
The continuing silence pist me off and I got up and told the Paki that I had just seen a show (History Channel then?) where Tibbets was saying what an administrative nightmare it was to plan for bombing both Japan and Germany. I also mentioned to him that my grandmother on my dad's side, along with tens of thousands of other Germans were incinerated in the Hamburg raid, so racism had no part in the atom bombing. In modern war there are no civilians and everybody gets the wrong end of the stick.
I met Studs at a party back in 1976. The girl I was with batted her eyes at him and asked “Are you really a stud?”
Like Harry Truman said - “If you can’t stand the heat.... stay out of Hiroshima”