Bombs Away Read Free

wring their hands in dismay.” He scratched the side of his jaw, considering. “If we’d been able to get our forces out through Hungnam, I wouldn’t think of this for a minute. The atom is a dangerous genie to let out of the lamp—deadly dangerous. But now the Chinese are bragging that they really can do what Kim Il-sung had in mind—they want to drive us into the sea and turn all of Korea into a satellite.”
    “Yes, sir. That’s exactly what they want to do,” MacArthur agreed. “We’d betray our loyal allies in the south if we let them get away with it, too. The enemy has the advantage in numbers—China always will. He has the advantage in logistics, too. He’s right across the river from the fighting, and we’re six thousand miles away. If we insist on fighting a war with our hands tied behind our backs, what can we possibly do but lose?”
    “You’ve got something there.” Now it was Truman’s turn to sound surprised. He hadn’t expected arrogant MacArthur to make such good sense. In other words, he hadn’t looked for the general’s thoughts to march with his own so well. He’d already ordered the bomb used once, and ended a war with it. How could ordering it into action again be anything but easier?
    —
    “Come on, Linda!” Marian Staley called. “Whatever you do, don’t dawdle! We’ve got to go to the cobbler’s and then to the supermarket.”
    “I’m coming, Mommy,” the four-year-old answered from her bedroom. “I’m just putting my coat on now.”
    “Okay,” Marian said, knowing it might not be. Four-year-olds could dress themselves, sure, but not always reliably. And Linda didn’t have all the buttons on her coat through the buttonholes they were supposed to occupy. Marian didn’t fuss about it; she just fixed things. Then she asked, “Have you gone potty?”
    Linda’s blond curls bobbed up and down as she nodded. Her eyes were hazel like Bill’s, not gray. Otherwise, she looked like her mother. “Just a little while ago,” she said.
    Young children’s sense of time being what it was, that might mean anything or nothing. For that matter, it might be a fib. “Well, go one more time,” Marian said. “We’ll be away from home for a while.”
    A put-upon secretary might have aimed the look Linda sent her at an obnoxious boss. But Marian’s flesh and blood went off to the bathroom, flushed, and came back. Marian didn’t think Linda had enough deceit yet to flush when she hadn’t done anything. If she was wrong, she’d find out about it.
    “It’s raining!” Linda started to open her own little Mickey Mouse umbrella.
    “Don’t do that indoors! It’s bad luck!” Marian said. “Wait till we get out on the front porch.”
    Once they left the house, she opened her own plain navy-blue bumbershoot—much plainer than her daughter’s, but able to cover both of them if it had to, and it probably would. It wasn’t raining too hard. Everett, Washington, north of Seattle, had the same kind of weather as the bigger city. You could and did get rain any time of year at all, in other words, but it seldom snowed even during winter.
    By what Bill’s letters said, Korea wasn’t like that. It was hot and dusty in the summertime, and impersonated Siberia now. He was copilot on a B-29. From things she read between the lines in his letters and from little snippets on the news, the Reds gave the big bombers a hard time. She just wanted him to finish his hitch and come home safe.
    The sun-yellow Studebaker sat in the driveway. “C’mon, sweetie,” Marian told Linda. They went to the car together. Marian opened the driver’s-side door and held her umbrella while Linda shut hers and slithered across the seat to the passenger side. She sat up straight there. Even though her feet barely got past the front edge of the seat, she looked very grown-up.
    Marian got in, too. She laid her purse on the seat between them, set the choke, and started the car. It was a postwar model, with the