erved and those who did not serve. Probably the most dramatic atrocity was the atomic bomb. The open-endedness of the question is perplexing indeed. It is true that, certainly in the opinions of many if not most military people, that the war would not have been terminated as quickly and as efficiently as it was without the use of the atomic bomb. It is also true that Harry Truman is prominently implicated in this, the most horrific of events during World War II, but was the use of the Atomic Bomb at Hiroshima a good thing? Many saw it is not because it killed so many people in one felled swoop. At the same time, it ironically and confoundedly accomplished exactly those ends which we, as warriors, were striving for with the very means that we were fighting against, and that is brutality and dominance by a foreign power. Fussell points to the clear existence of racism as a mediating factor wherein no Marine was fully persuaded of his many adequacy who didn't have a well-washed Japanese skull to caress and who didn't have a go at treating surrendering Japs as rifle targets. Why allow one American high school kid to see his intestines blown out of his body and spread before him in the dirt while he screams when he can end the whole thing just like that (Paul Fussell). There is a dichotomic parallel or view, from the perspective of the soldier and the civilian. J. Glenn Gray was an interrogator in the Counter-Intelligence Corps, and later a professor of philosophy at Colorado College. Gray addresses the shame that was felt by so many Americans and critical of the dropping of the bomb at Hiroshima. Fussell takes exception to Gray's approach in that Gray maintains that we dropped the bomb without warning the enemy. At the same time, he ignores the fact that 720,000 leaflets were dropped on the city offering them advance notice and the opportunity to get out of there before we dropped the bomb. The author makes the point that the act was tragic...
