Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. (92) commander and pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in the final days of World War II, on Aug. 6, 1945. Three days later, an even more powerful atomic bomb—a plutonium device—was dropped on Nagasaki from a B-29 flown by Maj. Charles W. Sweeney.

On Aug. 15, Japan surrendered, bringing the nearly four-year war to an end. The crews who flew the atomic strikes were seen by Americans as saviors who had averted the huge casualties expected to result from an invasion of Japan. But questions were eventually raised about the morality of atomic warfare and the need for the Truman administration to drop the bomb to secure Japan's surrender. Tibbets never wavered in defense of his mission. In declining health, he had requested no funeral or headstone, fearing it would give his detractors a place to protest. He died in Columbus, Ohio on November 1, 2007.

In the early ‘80s Da pagan Baby and I were privileged to see and hear Bruce “Utah” Phillips, the grand old leftist folk singer and master storyteller, in concert for an anti-racism org at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. We were surprised to learn that Utah, as a young lad, lived for awhile during World War II in the 1940s in Greenmont Village, a cooperative housing community that is still
thriving. At Greenmont Village, near Wright-Patterson Air-Force Base, Utah played as a kid and he would wave to airplane pilots flying above from Wright-Pat, who would in turn dip the wings of their planes in recognition of some little brat on the ground, granting him the power to control a big, metal monstrosity in the air. Utah tells it that one of those pilots was then-Captain Paul Tibbetts, who would drop the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. As was the custom among the pilots, Captain Tibbetts was able to name his airplane and have the name painted on the nose its nose. “He chose to name it ’Enola Gay’ - after his mother…”

There are men and women who rise to a particular occasion that achieves for them broadly-acclaimed and unambiguous praise for heroism. There are some who perform, perhaps out of a sense of duty to something that is so much larger than they, with or without question, and find themselves, perhaps forever recognized as heroes and damned as monsters. One of those is Commander Tibbetts who, in the ensuing 62 years of revision upon revision of that fateful decision passed down to him from the military hierarchy, which included President Truman, never questioned the rightness of his mission, at least not in public.