The Cloud Atlas

When you've finally gotten the ugly squat cockroach of a thing all exposed, you climb-carefully-back out, and call for an officer. He dusts off his hands (he's been eating, watching, trying to radio someone who can tell him more about where this bomb came from). Then he grabs his tools and goes down, taking his knowledge with him.

But you couldn't dig too many holes without learning a thing or two about bomb disposal yourself, and smart officers-older officers-always welcomed input from their crews.

AUGUST 1944. A B-17 is returning from a practice bombing run in the California desert. The story goes that they had had a lousy day on the test range, missing targets left and right. Then again, they may have been just holding their skills in reserve, because they hit their last target dead-on.

Officially, it was an accident. Unofficially, it was a miracle, because there's really no other explanation for a bomb falling into the middle of the Japanese-American Relocation Camp at Manzanar without killing anyone. It fell through the roof of a small building that was housing some recently arrived ceramics equipment. The equipment was destroyed-a true silver lining for internees who hadn't been looking forward to the prospect of the make-work pottery program, devoted to crafting lumpy ashtrays and bowls-but the bomb failed to explode. All five hundred pounds of it managed to drill through two packing cases, the pallet beneath, and continue on fourteen feet deeper into the arid soil beneath the floor.

My Aberdeen classmates and I had the misfortune of being relatively nearby, stationed just south of San Francisco at Fort Ord, waiting to be dispersed across the Pacific. Someone somewhere looked at a readiness roster, realized he had a BD crew in his backyard, and sent us off to put our newly completed training to use. It must have seemed ideal. Give some new guys a real challenge, with relatively low risks: it was our own bomb, right? Something we knew inside out? And ultimately, what's the worst that could happen? Some trainees die, maybe take a few Japanese with them.

Our detail numbered eight. A lieutenant, sergeant, plus six of us who didn't know any better, and so were excited, almost giddy at the prospect of our first real job. The lieutenant was young, but again, that was to be expected in our line of work.

You did not expect the officer to be skittish, or for his eyes to be red-rimmed, even watery, but who knows where the lieutenant had been the night before. And you definitely didn't expect him to have a tremor in his hand, but no one else seemed to notice that, so I kept quiet. When it came time, after all, he'd be the one down in the hole, alone.

The sergeant, Redes, was the oldest of the group by far. He had plenty of experience but wasn't much interested in sharing it. He had just rotated stateside from France, and would only snort and roll his eyes if you asked him about his time there.

Before we arrived, camp security evacuated the affected area, save for a few internees left in our care, “in case there's any dirty work.” Sergeant Redes took one look at them and then ordered them to guard the area's perimeter. “For starters, don't let that security officer back in here,” he told them.

The hardest part came first. It was obvious where the bomb had fallen-the partially destroyed building was a solid clue, even to guys as new at the job as we were-but it wasn't so obvious where the bomb was now. Inside, amidst the wrecked equipment, or burrowed in the ground well beneath? Ordnance locators detected nothing around the perimeter; the bomb had to be directly under the building. The lieutenant and Redes talked for a while, and then Redes came over to us. Clear out the pottery equipment, he said, but slowly. “Don't go banging around in there,” he said. “Pretend the whole building is a bomb.” Then he lit a cigarette, while we all stood and watched him. “We're going to do this today, girls,” he said, and stared at us until we moved.

The work went slowly, even more slowly than the sergeant or the lieutenant would have liked, but since they'd told us to be cautious, they must have felt they couldn't rush us. Once we'd moved out all the equipment and packing material without finding anything, we tore up what remained of the floor. Still nothing. Glad to discover the building wasn't sitting on a cement slab, we started digging.

We were at it for one hour, and then two, and when the third began, we'd lost almost all sense of the bomb-we were just here to dig, and keep digging until we were told to stop.

Clink.