Last month, my wife Heidi and I visited Japan. Among our stops, we made sure to spend time in Hiroshima, where the first atomic bomb was dropped during the final days of World War II. Heidi had booked us into a modest Japanese-style hotel directly across from Peace Memorial Park. We dropped our bags and then spent our afternoon quietly and thoughtfully walking through the memorial park and museum at “ground zero.”

As we crossed over to the park, we were immediately confronted with the lone remaining structure from the bomb’s primary blast zone. Nicknamed the A-Bomb Dome, this building had been a four-story county commerce office, and its location was almost directly below the blast hypocenter. Yes, the bomb was intentionally detonated 660 yards above the ground, in order to maximize its destructive force. While almost every other structure within the 2.2-mile wide blast zone was knocked over, all the force against the A-Bomb Dome was entirely downward, causing the metal to twist, blowing out all windows and killing every person inside, but leaving its hollow concrete hulk in place. Eventually, officials decided to leave this one sentinel standing as a tangible reminder of the devastation.

The park contains several thoughtful memorials to suffering and resilience, along with an extensive museum chronicling the day, the war, the atom bomb, and its aftermath. The museum tells numerous individual stories alongside the relics of their lives or deaths: a chunk of sidewalk darkened from the vaporized remains of a man, the abandoned lunchbox of a schoolchild buried under the rubble, stories of hopelessness, illness, and suicide intermingled with other sagas of hope and resilience. It was all very sobering, quieting and disquieting.

Back at our hotel that evening, I was eager to experience my first onsen, the single-gender public baths that Japan is known for, and our hotel had one on the top floor. I dutifully showered and then entered the mineral bath, about 8 x 15 feet wide and 18” deep. It was completely quiet; I was the only person there. I was surprised that the onsen was lined with low windows along its back wall (since onsen bathers are nude). As I settled into the soothing water, I made my way to the window and looked down. There, just below me and perhaps fifty yards away, stood the A-Bomb Dome, its ghostly skeleton bathed in floodlights.

The dissonance between my luxuriant comfort and this symbol of utter devastation and agony across the street was so jarring that I didn’t know what to do with it. What should I think? How should I connect the dots between my present reality and that reality?

What dots? Those fifty yards felt like a solar system of distance. Should I kneel? Weep? All I knew was that I needed to hold the experience in my heart.

On Veterans Day’s this week, after reflecting on military family and friends, I spent an hour listening to an audiobook: The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1937-1945. I was at the chapters about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so I wanted to listen thoughtfully and sat on our deck with my feet up. Mingled with details about the bombers, time of day, etc., were more stories of those impacted on the ground.

Our recent visit to that very site came rushing back to life in my mind. We’d seen clothing fragments that had blown off victims, the broken tricycles, random shoes, kitchen utensils, toys.  I hadn’t thought about the detritus again until now; our Japan trip packed so many experiences together that some of Hiroshima’s impact had faded. The book brought it all right back, and with much greater immediacy and poignancy than even the best words on a page could possibly provide.

A confluence of many streams had led to dropping the bombs*. Yet it all culminated in the greatest single devastation in human history–before or since.

In both the book and the memorial site, the individual stories of average Japanese citizens caught in the maelstrom evoke the most horror and empathy. That evening, I was out of sorts and didn’t realize why. I had moved on to some other task… but my soul was stuck there, standing still and demanding that I not simply move to the next action or attraction. Some 100,000 of my fellow human beings had died in Hiroshima, with perhaps an additional 100,000 lives cut short over the coming years from radiation exposure.

When we think of Veterans Day, we think of American troops battling “enemy combatants.” Hiroshima is our most powerful single reminder that war doesn’t only put a nation’s troops in harm’s way. I’m not about to debate whether or not the sacrifice of these civilian lives in exchange for so very many soldiers’ lives was good or moral. The fact that a world exists where such an impossible choice could even be contemplated seems immoral on its face.

Perhaps we need a new day of remembrance: a Victim’s Day for all those whom the calloused among us might simply refer to as “collateral damage”–the mothers who die wrapped around a child, the school kids who will never complete their studies, the volunteer nurses and retired doctors helping put broken lives back together.

If we remembered war every year in this way, perhaps we would try harder to find alternatives to death and destruction. And if we created a proposition to put this idea on the ballot, I’ll bet God would vote in favor of it.

Cory

Veterans Day 2026

* (Japan’s militarist-dominated government and its death-before-surrender ethos, Stalin’s imminent entry into the Pacific War, America’s impending plans to invade Japan’s homeland ensuring huge casualties, technology breakthroughs, centuries of norms on how critical decisions were made in Japan, and many smaller factors all colluded to bring about the devastation. The situation was complex. The results were catastrophic.)