Duty
A Father, His Son, and the Man who Won the War
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It's not fair to call Duty a biography - as it's not. It's a thought-provoking examination of the events that shaped the thoughts, attitudes, and very lives of those who fought in America's greatest war.
Prior to his death, Bob Greene's father often spoke of a quiet, almost reclusive man who lived in his own home
town. Greene's father was a soldier in the infantry during World War II, and would speak of this man with almost
religious reverence. The man's name was Paul Tibbets. At the 
age of twenty-nine, at the request of his country, Tibbets assembled a secret team of 1,800
American soldiers to carry out the single most violent act in the history of mankind. In 1945 Tibbets piloted a
plane - which he called Enola Gay, after his mother - to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he dropped the atomic
bomb.
So adversed was Tibbets to publicity, it took Greene almost 10 years to finally meet the man his father spoke so highly of. However, the rewards of the friendship he developed with this 83 year-old hero gave Greene the opportunity to finally grasp his father's ingrained sense of honor and duty -- traits which have built our nation, but have been slowly evaporating from this country as more and more of America's valiant heroes pass silently away.
To one who wasn't there, it's hard to understand just how much World War II shaped the lives of those who lived through it. Over 16 million Americans fought in World War II, millions more than in any other American conflict. Over 115,000 Americans lost their lives, and almost 700,000 were wounded. The war cost the United States over $188 Billion (over $2 Trillion in 1990 currency). Virtually every able-bodied adult male left their wives and families behind to fight enemies one-half a world away. Those left behind worked diligently and tirelessly to provide support, supplies, and arms for those on the front. There were no protests. There were no debates. There was no doubt among Americans about the need to fight -- and the need to win.
It's popular among those who weren't even alive at the time to question the use of the Atomic Bomb. They don't know. They can't know. Those who were there have absolutely no doubts about the necessity of using the atomic bomb.
"People thought that I should be weeping," Tibbets said. "Weeping for the rest of my life. They don't understand.
"I'll meet people, and when they find out who I am - when they find out that I'm the one who flew the Enola Gay to Hiroshima so that we could drop the bomb - sometimes they ask me: 'Why didn't you just tell them that you didn't want to do it?'
"That's when I really know that they don't understand. It's usually younger people who say that to me. Because in those days - during World War II - you didn't tell your superiors that you didn't want to do something. That's reason number one.
"Reason number two is more important. The reason I didn't tell them that I didn't want to do it is that I wanted to do it."
He told me that he had never lost a night's sleep in all the years since his crew dropped the bomb - "I sleep just fine" - and if anything upsets him, it is that some people still consider the use of the atomic bomb as an unnecessarily barbaric act.
"The biggest misconception is that the war was going to end soon anyway," he said. "That what we did was not necessary."
"Do you have any idea how many American lives would have been lost had we launched a ground invasion of
Japan, instead of dropping the bomb? And how many Japanese lives? I sleep so well because I know how many people got to live full lives because of what we did."
At the time though - on the flight to Japan - was he full of anger? Did his fury at what the war had done fill him with the fuel of vengeance and vindictiveness en route to his assigned target?
No, he said; he had felt no anger at all as he flew the B-29 toward Japan.
"My mother was a very calm, pacific individual, and I learned from her to be the same way. You get a lot damn further by being calm when you're doing a job. Our crew did not do the bombing in anger. We did it because we were determined to stop the killing. I would have done anything to get to Japan and stop the killing.
Greene skillfully interweaves the accounts of Tibbets and his father's memories into a mesmerizing trip through America's most important period. Somewhere along the line, Greene appears to discover the simple, no-nonsense thought-patterns that shaped his father's life. Through Tibbets, Greene came to an understanding of his father and his father's generation that he had never been able to achieve while his dad was still alive.
Somewhere in the book, I found the same greater understanding of my father and his generation. Perhaps you can do the same.
About the Author: Bob Greene is a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune and columnist for
Life magazine. His reports and commentary appear in more than two hundred newspapers in the United States,
Canada, and Japan, and can be read daily at www.chicagotribune.com/go/greene.
As a broadcast journalist he has served as contributing correspondent for ABC News Nightline.
His bestselling books include Be True to Your School; Hang Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan;
Good Morning, Merry Sunshine; and, with his sister, D.G. Fulford, To Our Children's Children: Preserving
Family Histories for Generations to Come.
His first novel , All Summer Long, was published in a new paperback edition this spring; his latest collection
of journalism, Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights, will be published in paperback by HarperCollins early
next year.
Book cover courtesy of William Morrow and Company. Enola Gay photo courtesy of U.S. Air Force
