Battle Creek Enquirer from Battle Creek, Michigan • Page 34

SHEn Lifestyle Editor: Rebecca Buckingham, 966-0693 Battle Creek Enquirer Sunday, May 28, 2000 7D Greene uncovers his father through conversations of war ing those tapes, Greene heard something he missed before that his father's division was slated to join the invasion of Japan. Had that happened, Greene says, "I might not have been born." about the bomb "would be meaningless in the context of this book," but, he says, the more he heard other veterans thank Tibbets for saving their lives, "the more it made sense." Greene's book also describes bis parents' wartime courtship, and his father slogging with the infantry through Italy, based on recordings the elder Greene made and gave to his children a decade ago. Replay lives? I sleep so well because I know how many people got to live full lives because of what we did." Greene says he wanted to let Tibbets tell his story. Greene's opinion and uncomfortable with publicity. Greene, the curious reporter, was filled with questions about the war and about life, the kind of questions he never asked his father.

But while spending time with Tibbets, he thought of his father and of a "safety net being removed a safety net that had been there since the day I was born, a safety net I was often blithely unaware of. No generation has ever given its children a sturdier and more reliable safety net than the one our parents' generation gave to us. The common experience that wove the net was their war." Greene says it was his duty to understand more about his father and what the war had meant to him. He did that by talking at length over the next year with Tibbets, "the man who won the war." He acknowledges that's shorthand no one person won the war. But at 29, Tibbets was put in charge of preparing a top-secret military unit to deliver the bomb that would force Japan's surrender.

Most of Greene's book is not about the atomic bomb and what it did to Hiroshima. Tibbets does recall that when the shock waves from the explosion hit the cockpit of the Enola Gay (named for his mother), he could taste it: "It tasted like lead. It was like an electrical charge was mnning through the fillings in my teeth." He told Greene he never lost sleep over the job he was given to do. He asked, "Do you have any idea how many American lives would have been lost had we launched a ground invasion of Japan, instead of dropping the bomb? And how many Japanese Bob Minzesheimer Gannett News Service Had it not been for Paul Tibbets, the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Bob Greene would never have written a book about his father. And were it not for the death of his father, just another infantry soldier, Greene would not have written a book about Tibbets.

The book is Duty: A Father, His Son and the Man Who Won the War (Morrow, $25), out in time for Memorial Day. If the latest in a surge of popular books about the self-effacing generation that survived the Depression and won World War II. Belatedly perhaps, but attention is being paid. Greene, 53, a syndicated columnist for the "Chicago Tribune," calls it "the whisper of a generation and its children bidding each other farewell. They're leaving us every day." His book happened by accident.

Tibbets and Bob Greene Sr. never met, although both lived in Columbus, Ohio, born within weeks of each other in 1915. In the summer of 1998, Greene was visiting his ailing father and happened to visit the Ohio History of Flight Museum. An attendant said Tibbets visited occasionally, which led to a column by Greene on the modest museum and how the World War II generation didn't brag about themselves. Tibbets liked the column and sent word to Greene that he'd be happy to talk.

For 20 years, Greene had wanted to interview him but never got a response. They finally met the morning after the last meal Greene ate with his father. So began an unlikely friendship. Tibbets could be taciturn, gruff Spmd TrJ.jfisM img mma mm "-V5fr Introducing EZ Pay. -i "1r 4 tt Today's payment alternative Vi '3 for home delivery V1i n3 subscribers.

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