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"In a 1975 interview Paul Tibbets said: “I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did. I sleep clearly every night”. “I knew when I got the assignment,” he told a reporter in 2005, “it was going to be an emotional thing. We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible.”

"In 2000, he remained steadfast in his conviction that what he had done was right. He told an interviewer, “Everybody keeps trying to get me down on my knees and cry about it and say I am sorry and everything. None of us ever have.” But, when the San Francisco Chronicle asked in 1995 if he was sorry, he replied a bit less stridently: “I really don’t think ‘sorry’ is the right word. I think it’s more about regret. I regret this weapon had to be used. But I also believe we did have to use it. We used it to stop the war, to stop all that killing. It was definitely the lesser of two evils.”

How true.

I don’t LOVE it that we had to destroy that city and kill those people. I don’t glorify it.

But I see the grim necessity in it, as Paul Tibbets certainly did. And he could live with that, as I think I could if I had been the one to drop the bomb with my own hand.

I regret that we had to do it too.

But I would have regretted it far more, and felt more guilt, if we had invaded Japan with 775,000 men resulting in the death and maiming of tens of thousands of them (if not hundreds of thousands) and I had a bomb that I could have used instead.

THAT would be real regret there.