The Mechanic’s Conscience
By Ravi Nayyar
(Save for a few stylistic edits, this story is the same as the version which the author originally composed as part of his study of Cold War literature in HSC Extension 1 English.)
0100 hrs, Tinian Island, 6 August 1945
The 509er mechanic laboured away at the Enola on her North Field hardstand. Scanning her flush-riveted skin, gleaming before the 1000-Watters, he would roll in under her bomb bay doors with a Maglite. The sound of the captain practising for his mid-air show in just under 10 hrs greeted him on the other side. Boy, he must be sweating in there, with the tension and all. After all, these birds were of the unfaithful kind: some would crash and burn during take-off and landing, which is why you wouldn’t want little boys armed and dangerous in the bay unless you wanted to be a pioneer in more than just burnt toast.
0125 hrs
Whenever he rolled in under the bomb bay of any B-29, the mechanic always felt that the doors would just stare at him in their metallic disgust, as if he were guilty of something. Sometimes he felt that they were about to collapse on him in their revulsion, burying him in the paved earth, and getting a deep satisfaction from it, as if exacting a just penalty from him. But who were they to loathe him: the mechanic was just doing his job, what his nation and commanding officer had ordered him to do? He would carry out these instructions to the utmost of his ability so that the citizens of America could sleep easy in their beds at night. Besides, he knew that USAAF operations were about dropping things on people, wherever and whomever, when he enlisted in ’41.
But this one was different: he could still remember the sight of the Indianapolis steaming into Tinian on that day in late July, as he wiped his forehead (fatigued with God knows how many hours under the Superfortresses) with his GI sleeve. When the siblings were delivered, he was doing some rewiring and stuck his head outside a cockpit to witness this occasion upon hearing the Indy’s horn and the cheers of his fellow Americans. It had been unseasonably hot that day. Three days later, upon his return to the Quonset he shared with a flight engineer, he saw the envelope: his sunrise shift for the 6th had been brought forward for a pre-flight on a ‘very special one’. But what did that mean? How ‘special’? ‘Special’ in what way? He thought the B-29 herself was ‘special’ in how revolutionary she was for her time. And of course. he and his 509er buddies had no idea about Manhattan or Alberta until that day in July, when the windsock drooped towards the northwest of the Able strip, painfully foreboding.
But orders were orders, and they had to be followed, no matter what direction one’s conscience may drive them in. And the mechanic never saw the brothers, nor did he want to, as he moved on to inspecting the finer details of the tight-fitting cowlings on the Enola’s engines with a Maglite in his teeth. After all, the lights were never enough for peering into these parts of the bird. Ah, a piece of propeller wiring was loose: the mechanic delicately performed repairs with his pliers.
0135 hrs
As he pressure-tested the wings one last time, the mechanic felt closest to old Enola than any other B-29 he maintained: it was a strange relationship in that he was constantly checking her out, but all she did was just lie on the hardstand facing the waters of the Pacific, ignoring his voyeurisms. But there was something about her as she posed in front of the 1000-Watts, her nose dimly lit while her wing and belly were gloriously visible. The mechanic admired her not as a graceful dove or swallow, but a flush-riveted eagle, the letters emblazoned on her nose mirroring a sense of pride. Unassailable, unbreakable, unbeatable. After all, there must have been a reason for the colonel to choose her even while she was on the assembly line.
0145 hrs
The mechanic had finished up on the bird and was packing his tools and the 1000-Watters in the maintenance Quonset. Bathed in floodlights, the Enola’s belly was open over the loading pit, taking up the little one. A huddle watched carefully as the infant was lifted into her. It was indeed a delicate operation, a momentous one too, for this would be a ‘very special one’. The mechanic had tried not to care why: he had had a job to do and he had done it. And now he could get a break from it all for a few hours and catch up on the adventures of Buck Rogers as he turned Mongols to puddles as they invaded the Land of the Free.
0200 hrs
The colonel and captain and the rest of the crew were ready to go. The colonel waved from the cockpit to the movie cameras and photojournalists camped nearby: the crowd was indeed something. So much so that the mechanic, suddenly curious about the media circus about what was supposed to be a classified operation that even the mechanic didn’t know properly about, placed his comic on the steel crate next to his bed, and ambled over to the Quonset’s window. The mechanic was not alone in his bemusement: he could discern a hint of surprise on even the colonel’s face — even the Manhattan guy hadn’t warned him of this.
The windsock drooped to the north-west.
0244 hrs
The colonel had started the engines, the propellers scything through the air in those cycles with a renewed vigour, eager to carry the bird to her target. Boy, had the mechanic done a fine job, the bird calling her last goodbyes to him, as she began her taxi down the Able runway and…
0245 hrs
She lifted off, soaring into the dark skies of history. The gestation period would begin in a few hours, overseen by the captain, before the glorious birth of a little boy over 2, 000 feet over the target.
‘God bless America,’ the mechanic whispered. He could follow the bird’s wing lights into the blackened heavens for a few hundred metres, and then, she was swallowed up by the clouds.
0815 hrs, 8 August 1945
The mechanic was underneath Bock’s Car, checking her tyre pressure. He then repeated his ritual of checking the bomb bay doors that seemed irate at him. He had polished these ones well, and his boyish blue eyes stared back at him as he lay there on the hardstand. They gave him that innocent, questioning look, as if aware of what he had done.
But what had he done? An ordinary mechanic, he was just following orders. Besides, Enola’s sisters had already paid a visit to cities other than the 6 August target (which was mainly a military base fuelling the Yellow Peril’s war machine, wasn’t it?), dropping tons and tons of incendiaries across the country. Why be concerned just about this infant, even if it was ‘different’ to the others? Millions of GIs would now be spared the wrath of the Japs who were buried in the rubble: severe costs would be avoided. Wouldn’t that be more important? Saving American lives? Wasn’t that why they were fighting in the first place? To protect freedom? What would the Founding Fathers think if they shirked their sacred duty to destroy any incursion against the liberty of the people wherever due to the minor concern of enemy casualties? The United States of America was at war. And the infant’s birth was necessitated by the war, wasn’t it?
But what if the Japs retaliated? What if even Buck Rogers wasn’t enough to subdue their desire for the defeat of the stars and stripes after such a humiliation? After all, they were known for literally fighting to the death. That was what drove them to kill so mercilessly in ’41. Would have this been an exercise in futility? Was all of this for nothing?
Moreover, what if other countries, such as the Japs, adopted America’s child? What if they used him to start an arms race or something, or just kick up more trouble, and hold the world to ransom, in fear of it just ending suddenly? What if they started World War III with the noiseless flash of Little Boy? But they had barely finished II.
The mechanic’s eyes stared into their counterparts on the hulking doors. They shifted to the spanner in his hand, and then the withered skeletons of Enola’s sisters lying on either side of the runways. The hearsay was that there was theoretically no limit to what America’s kid could do.
Would Little Boy grow up to become something even more deadly and terrible than mankind has ever dreamt of?
But he was just a mechanic, with a job to do so that the American people could sleep easy in their beds at night.
And wake up to liberty and security.
