![]() One woman touched him as deeply as anyone. I was marked off to go into Japan, if it hadn't been for the bomb.' " ![]() "And you know, people who were in the war would tell him, years later, 'You saved my life. "He always said, if he had to do it over again under the same circumstances, he would have," Sylvia Beser said. He worried that the world no longer remembered the alternative to the dropping of those bombs: invasions of the Japanese mainland, tens of thousands on both sides who would be killed in traditional combat, the war stretching on and on. In the long and delicate peace that followed, he worried that people had forgotten Pearl Harbor and the death marches and the camps where men starved. He'd graduated from Baltimore City College, gone to Johns Hopkins University, but dropped out of his engineering studies the day after America entered the war. He was 24 when he flew the atomic bomb missions. "What do you think we were?" Beser replied. "Didn't you have any feeling for all those Japanese youth?" one demonstrator demanded. Sylvia Beser remembers a reunion of the Enola Gay crew, some years back, where a Ban the Bomb demonstration was held outside. Sometimes the confrontations were face-to-face. Sometimes there were anonymous telephone calls, calling him a killer. Through the years that followed, those two flights became Jacob Beser's footnotes to history.
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