Dissimilar teacups for lifesaver Veterans http://www.magicvalley.com/articles/2007/11/10/opinion/letters/124392_32.txt

Several weeks after piloting the atomic bomb, which unleashed its devastation upon Hiroshima, Japan, U.S. Commander Paul ‘Warfield’ Tibbets walked through and examined the swelled streets of Nagasaki where his comrades-in-arms had dropped the second bomb.

There ‘to sate his academic curiosity’, Commander Tibbets nonchalantly purchased some souvenir rice bowls and wooden cup saucers, later remarking, “Damndest thing you ever saw.”

Throughout his life, which ended only a few weeks ago, Commander Tibbets always maintained that surgically dropping these vaporizing bombs was a seminally patriotic mission, which saved both sides millions of lives, from what would otherwise have been a long enduring horrendous battle.

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Around the same time as Commander Tibbet’s postwar walk, Navy skipper and Axis sub-chaser, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who went on to become San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore founder, peacenik warrior and beat poet extraordinaire, hiked among the same Nagasaki ruins. There he observed -as San Francisco Chronicle writer Paul McHugh reported last Veterans Day: "I saw a giant field of scorched mulch. It sprawled out to the horizon; 3 square miles looking like someone had worked it over with a huge blowtorch. A few sticks from buildings jutted up like black arms," Ferlinghetti says. "I found a teacup that seemed like it had human flesh fused into it, just melted into the porcelain.

"In that instant," said the former submarine chaser Ferlinghetti, "I became a total pacifist."