I notice that Doran has a sneer on his face there among the pimples. Maybe he thinks the old man's crying is putting a damper on the party. He snickers and says something under his breath to his Petty-style fiancée. She doesn't answer. I don't think she even hears. She's too busy feeling sorry for Taves. Jackson doesn't much approve of crying, either, but he shoots Doran a withering look, and pimple face shuts up.

We wing southwest. As Ibaragi Prefecture falls behind, the old farmer retreats from his window. Back at his narrow seat he withdraws into himself again, leaving the remainder of the flight to more sanguinolent personalities.

The Tokyo area, with Mount Fuji looming in the background, is hidden by the horizon. Prideaux, off in his corner of the flight deck, is busy checking fuel consumption, flow, pressure, cylinder-head temperature, RPM, all of which he compares against speed and altitude. He speaks into his chin mike.

"Everything a-okay, Colonel."

I put on an extra set of headphones and listen in. Bong's voice crackles in the line. He's telling Baptista, the bombardier, to get his department ready.

Sometimes a city passes beneath us. That's Kagoya, maybe. And that? Kyoto? All like the anthills back on that hardstand in Saipan; tromped into nothingness by big feet falling from the sky.

The navigator's voice sputters in my ears. We're approaching the Kobe-Osaka area, he says, once the site of heavy war industry and dense population. Both are gone now. Kobe-Osaka is a reflection of all that's gone before. The twin cities on the bay look as if they've been erased by a child obliterating a carelessly drawn picture.

The countryside isn't much different. Towns villages, lonely farm houses are all cinder piles, more barren than the winter-stripped woods and fields that surround them. Now I understand why Congress ordered heavy cuts in the last bombing appropriations; there's nothing left to bomb. But Jackson and Doran don't seem much dismayed. They have faith in Bong, who knows these islands as well as the backs of his burn-drawn hands. He'll find a target. Somewhere.

For a while, we're over the Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku. To the north lies the Chugoky Mountains where it is believed many of the surviving Japs have taken refuge. In any case, if anyone is alive in the low country, they've hidden as we passed over. Several of us have been steadily scanning the ground with binoculars, but no one has sighted a thing, not even a dog or cow. Jackson comments on this latter fact, and evokes a reply from Estenssoro, now that everyone has donned head phones.

"They eat their dogs and cats, Señor, and other things less pleasant, as more than one downed flyer has discovered too late. All that's left down there are Japs and rats, and they're all hungry."

The girl looks a little green, but the color doesn't go well with her blonde hair. Jackson mutters something about the Japs reaping what they've sown. And Doran just snickers again. Probably, he's imagining little Japs and big rats, all chasing each other around with knives and forks -- or maybe chopsticks -- in their yellow hands and furry paws.

Glints of silver draw our attention from ground to blue sky. I see them in the north and count a dozen. The flecks of silver become giants that dwarf even our B-29. Each plane is driven by six powerful pusher props. Wings sweep back in massive grace. The formation is ours, of course, returning from a practice bombing run in the Ura river valley. This last bit of information comes from Bong, who has given the Air Force bombers our identity code and clearance. Good luck and good hunting, Bong's opposite radios back.

For a moment, I think Jackson is going to salute the B-36s as they leave us, but he is only fussing with a loose thread on the cap of his VFW uniform.

In fifteen minutes, we're over the Ota River and Hiroshima, a city burned out by fire bombings early in the war. I sit back, no longer interested. Ruins are ruins, and after a while, they all begin to look pretty much the same. Pictures are Ernie's department, anyway. My job's the story. While I have a little time, I mentally sort through background material, composing in my head.

We've been at war for fourteen years, though things have been pretty much one-sided since early in '46. The bombing of the Japanese home island started back in '44, but it wasn't until late in November that Saipan based bombers got into the act. One hundred B-29s took part. Now, exactly ten years later, there's only this one, Bong's Donald Duck, flying to commemorate that first raid -- San Antonio One. And that's my story: The Ten Years After Theme.

How much have things changed since that first historic assault from distant Saipan? Plenty. Roosevelt is dead, for one thing. His death back in May of '45 was the big story of the year, eclipsing everything else, including the munitions plant disaster at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Since then we've had two presidents, first Truman, then back to the Republicans with Dewey.

The war has changed a lot, too. In '45, there had been talk of and even preparation for an invasion of Japan. The Japs managed to scrub that idea. We'd already seen the terrible casualty counts of Truk, the Philippines, Iwo, and the like. And the Japs promised us worse if we tried to invade their own front yard. They still had seventeen able divisions, and backing them, a defense force of one and a half million. Reconnaissance showed the Nips were doing just what they said they were doing -- digging in everywhere, preparing to give us the worst possible welcome.

For a while, hope persisted that Japan would have second thoughts and surrender. After all, our B-29s were pounding them awfully hard, and more bombers were arriving every day. But the Japanese War Ministry wasn't in a mood for surrender. When Emperor Hirohito got other ideas, they killed him. At least, that's what we think, based on the limited intelligence we managed to gather on the subject. But the Jap in the street -- or bunker -- was told otherwise. Hirohito, the Voice of the Sacred Crane, had died honorably, killed by a B-29 while exhorting his people to resist to the bitter end.

So we kept pounding the islands while resistance literally burned away on the ground. Antiaircraft fire became rare, then ceased altogether. Our air force took full title to the Jap skies. But still no one wanted to see a million American boys go down the tube in an invasion of Japan. So we waited, hoping for a surrender that must surely be near.

But fanatics in the Jap military wanted to make surrender impossible. Thus it was that Japan burned all her bridges by executing the prisoners she still held, both military and civilian. And that did it. The decision was made to isolate Japan, to bomb her back to the stone age. There'd be no invasion. Why waste a million lives when the Navy and Air Force could neutralize, even obliterate, the islands for a fraction of the cost?