Readers React: A life dedicated to peace after witnessing the devastation at Nagasaki

Editor’s note: Plenty of readers have written letters to the editor regarding the announcement that President Obama will visit Hiroshima later in May, marking the first time a sitting commander in chief will have traveled to one of the two Japanese cities attacked with nuclear bombs (Nagasaki being the other) at the end of World War II in 1945.

One of those letters, published below, is intensely personal. It is from Ross T. Quinn of Victorville, who writes of understanding his late father’s life in the context of him having seen firsthand, as a young U.S. Navy officer, the ruins of Nagasaki months after that city’s destruction. Quinn also sent us photos taken by his father, one of which appears with this article. Here is Quinn’s letter.

-- Paul Thornton, letters editor

Your editorial on President Obama’s upcoming visit to Hiroshima brought back to me my father, John Quinn, who died a few years ago in Ventura at the age of 91. He too visited Japan and saw the site of nuclear war. But in his case it was Nagasaki, not Hiroshima, and the year was 1945, in November, not 2016, in May, when President Obama will visit.

It was barely three months after the bomb “Fat Man” was dropped.

My father, who was an officer in the U.S. Navy, went to Nagasaki at age 24 as part of the American occupation forces. He was also a photographer. He, like most of his generation, really never spoke much about his war experiences, but his camera did. I first saw his Nagasaki pictures while growing up in Ventura, at about age 10 or 12. I didn’t speak much about them, either, but I now offer them so that we may see a bit of what he experienced.

I came to appreciate how, late in life, his witness to the aftermath of nuclear holocaust had changed him.

He stayed in the Navy, active and in the reserves, for 22 years, serving in both World War II and the Korean War. He retired as the Vietnam War was ramping up. He was one of those who stood on Saturday mornings, starting in about 1965, in front of the Ventura Bank of America building in silent protest of the war. He was involved in the “new politics” of the 1960s, and he helped found the Ventura Unitarian-Universalist Church, the Ventura Group Theater, the Ventura County Mental Health Assn. and Casa Pacifica in Camarillo, all profoundly life-supporting, positive organizations. He had seen enough of death and destruction.

Go, President Obama, go to Hiroshima. I believe that deeply experiencing powerful events and our remembrance of those awful times, hopefully forever past, somehow change us. I am sure that the experience of nuclear war changed my father and drove him to pursue a life dedicated to peace, fairness, justice and love. I pray that the president and all who visit there may come away similarly chastened and changed. And I pray no human will ever again be a witness, as were my father and the people of Japan, to nuclear holocaust.

Ross T. Quinn is a physician living in Victorville.

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