One afternoon when I was seventeen years old, I walked into the to the downtown branch of the Decatur Public Library, a low brick building with no windows that sat right next door to the Army recruiting office. It was in this library five or six years earlier that I found stuffed into a rickety spinner rack Hiroshima, John Hersey’s journalistic profiles of the first to witness and survive the arrival of the atomic age.

The worn-out cover bore the word HIROSHIMA in bold letters and a black and white photograph of a gigantic mushroom cloud. I doubt that I knew the term “mushroom cloud” then, but I recognized the towering grey cloud from somewhere—TV? A comic book? But to be sure, the word and the image together held no associations for me.

I sat cross-legged on the carpet of the library and read the opening paragraphs with violent wonder, while my father looked for books on deck building and do-it-yourself plumbing. How could I have known then that this book would forever change me? I was in the throes of puberty—painful zits and awkward crushes, but no sense that the world was unjust—but Hersey’s first-hand observations, the cold objective details of the aftermath, awoke a deep fascination in me, a curiosity to know why and how it was that human beings could unleash such cruel power on other human beings.

Never before had I read a book that described the ravages of war so explicitly. It was not the complete flattening of the city that unhinged me but the way the survivor’s bodies, the elderly, young mothers and young children, all bore the burns of the invisible radiation and tremendous heat. The skin of people’s hands sloughed off in glove-like pieces, a woman’s naked torso was emblazoned with the flowered pattern of the kimono she was wearing when the intense heat and light irradiated her.

That afternoon, I felt that I needed to read the book again and again. I needed to know if I would still feel the same outrage and, if so, what that meant.

Looking back, I suppose I was drawn to the subject of Hiroshima because it was about suffering. In fact, one of Hersey’s subjects, Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, says to the mortally injured as he runs through the burning streets, “Forgive me for having no burden like yours.” The word burden reminded me of Christ’s burden, the suffering he endured on the cross. I uttered the word “suffered” at mass during the Creed. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered, died and was buried. For some reason it was important that I believe and understand that Christ endured suffering. I didn’t quite know why then, but it was beginning to make sense—at least I thought it did: Christ’s suffering was to be the end of suffering. But now I was curious: Did this mean the abolition of war?

This was on my mind because I had begun getting weekly phone calls from the local Army recruiting office. Each time it was someone different. Each of them spoke with the same this-is-the-REAL-world-I’m-calling-from voice, as if whatever plans I was making for after graduation were tragically romantic and na?ve, pie in the sky. Their script was the same too. They would say: What’re your plans for after high school? You know college is expensive. How you gonna pay for it? “Uh, my parents are paying for it,” I said, as if this was the stupidest question. This information signaled to them that I was not the kind of kid they were looking for.

I checked out the book and walked to my car. As I rounded the corner to the parking lot, there stood two recruiters standing in their crisp, beige uniforms, waiting for young men to walk by so they could begin their pitch. One of them called out to me: “Hey, there. Whatcha reading?” “Hiroshima,” I said, holding up the book, so he could see the black and white picture of the towering mushroom cloud. “Oh,” he said. “What’s it about?”