Rose Colored Retrospectacle

It's 94 degrees at noon in Salt Lake City, not the hottest day of the summer, but sparkling. I note the temperature as I'm driving, in search of origami paper. Sage Market, my favorite Japanese market with the sweet, funny, talkative proprietor, only carries a few designs in large sizes. A clerk suggests the Oriental Market, where I find, surprisingly, a young woman shopping in a full kimono, and a larger selection of paper, but still not what I'm looking for. I finally find smaller sheets in the craft section of a grocery store.

Back home, I make sure I can still do the folds right. I can, and with a shoebox, a stack of squares, and the directions to our destination, we head out.

120 miles west of Salt Lake City lies a desolate stretch of land layered thick with crystalline sodium, the Salt Flats. They are the remnant of an ancient sea that once covered most of Utah and the nearby areas. But today, our destination is more humble. Just east of the Utah / Nevada border lies the town of Wendover where, in 1945, hatched a secret that changed the course of a war and claimed thousands of lives.

Today, 60 years after an atomic bomb called "Little Boy" was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, killing some 140,000 people, we're visiting the Wendover Army Air Base, armed with a camera and as many paper cranes as I can fold on the hour and a half trip out.

In 1944, as part of the Manhattan Project, a nuclear team was activated and began work on a top secret mission. 1767 officers, enlisted men, and the First Technical Detachment -- the scientists -- began "Project W-47," lead by Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. Their job was to design bombs that could be dropped accurately.

In order to design these bombs, they had to choose a place where they could test them. That place was Wendover, an isolated border town of about 100 people, far from the beaten path, but with rail service to major west coast cities and Salt Lake City. It was isolated, hidden, and had plenty of wide open spaces where they could test non-explosive versions of the bombs until they got them right.

On August 6, 1945, Tibbets himself dropped "Little Boy" from the Enola Gay. It detonated on Hiroshima at 8:15am. Three days later, another bomb, "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki from the "Bock's Car" airplane. When surrender didn't come directly after Nagasaki, a second Fat Man was ordered by Col. Tibbets. The surrender came on August 14th, shortly after the plane carrying this third bomb took off; the plane was intercepted somewhere off the coast of California and returned to the airbase, where the bomb was disassembled. The war was over, and both Allies and Axis countries began the long hard job of putting themselves back together.

Today in Japan, 55,000 people gathered to remember and to uphold peace; 1000 doves were released, and speeches were given. Here in America, our president is on vacation -- running the latest war is hard work, so he's gone to Texas. Hardly a word about today's anniversary is heard outside the narrow band of National Public Radio broadcasts; for a bunch of supposed liberals, they seem to be the only ones remembering today - the victory or the loss.

When we arrive at the remains of the base, there are a few cars in the parking lot, but there seems to be some kind of gathering near the airfield. Our momentary thoughts that there is some kind of commemoration of this day are dashed, as the afternoon quiet is suddenly shattered by a revving engine: they are racing cars, doing time trials of some sort. Red race car after little red race car zooms across the horizon. Disappointed, we head into the museum.

We're not the only visitors; a bearded gray-haired man asks some questions, but we noticed that his teenage grandson stayed in the RV outside, seemingly disinterested, playing a hand-held video game.

The museum has a few cases of WWII items -- uniforms, model planes, patches, photographs. A few small bombs have been turned into ashtrays outside, and donation collectors inside. It seems distasteful to put money or butts in such a thing, but the gallows humor runs high here.



One room, the Hall of Heroes, includes models of the air base in 1945, and photos of plane art -- comic-book-style pinups with pithy captions. In one, a worm pops out of an orange gourd, addressing a busty woman with the off-color comment, "Some punkins!" Pumpkins, I've learned, are not just over-large breasts but were the name given to test bombs. Another plane's nose bears a stork carrying a full-grown woman, a real "bombshell," with the words, "Strange Cargo." Another shows a blond on a Rising Sun over burned out pagodas: "Necessary Evil."



Photographs of Paul Tibbets, pilot and secret keeper, standing in front of the famous plane, line the wall next to images of a Fat Man bomb being loaded into a plane. A display of tail gunner equipment sits on an old-fashioned wooden desk, but next to it is a '60s era metal desk piled with paperwork and a phone -- this is obviously someone's office.

Feeling out of place, we walk into the last room, and are greeted by an awesome, frightening sight: a full-size green replica of a Little Boy bomb, signed by crew members. I locate Paul Tibbet's signature. We place cranes on the bomb and leave before someone sees us. The birds will be thrown away as soon as they are noticed, but the gentleman who takes our money for the map and driving tour booklet seems so loath to vacate his chair, I doubt he'll see them until closing time, if then.






Back outside, we visit the signs posted around the base -- the hospital, the barracks, the control tower, the mess hall, the fire station, the pool house, the chapel. Most of the buildings are falling apart, boarded up or gutted, but the woman's washroom, oddly, has a modern Dish Network satellite attached to its roof. The hospital, we learn, was used until 1980, and while some barracks are graffitied with rock slogans and littered with teenage detritus, others seem to be still in use in some capacity.



An "Operation Freedom Iraq" vet (according to his bumper sticker) drives slowly ahead of us. We see few other visitors.

Finally, having seen everything else, we arrive at the hangar. The only metal-clad building on the base, it is huge and rusted. A ancient-looking fat-bodied plane squats just to the west, and the racing cars to the east are taking a break as tires are changed and men laugh loudly. I wonder if they have any idea about today; the "Proud to be an American" vibe hangs heavy in the air with the smoke from a barbecue, but I somehow doubt they'd be interested in a history lesson from the likes of us.



We walk along the north face of the hangar, and place my paper cranes in every crevice and window ledge we can reach. Soon cranes of every color dot the landscape: red cranes trapped in fencing, green cranes in holes in the wall, purple cranes on ledges, a rainbow of cranes everywhere. I throw three cranes into the building through a broken window. My friend scales a side building and places the last crane high on a ledge, and we head out. We've spread our message of peace as well as we can. We just hope someone will choose to hear it.





Text and photographs copyright Madelyn Boudreaux, 2005. Links to this are welcome!