FIRST HYDROGENVICTIM...
from radiation sickness, but none of them, so far as is known,
died from leukemia.
The fallout also filtered down on others of the Marshal
Islands, including the island of Rongelap more than one
hundred miles from Bikini. Inhabitants of these islands
also took a dose of radiation. Rongclap was Lekoj Anjain’s
native island.
1 am still haunted by a mental image of Lekoj as a cheerful brown baby playingin the sand underthe palm trees of
Rongelap, as the sky lit up above him from the great explosion on Bikini, and playingstill, fecling no harm, as the
dust of the fallout settled around him. The cheerful brown
baby was now my roommate, ninetcen-year-old Lekoj,
and he had, John Glick told me, a particularly vicious vari-
ety of acute myelogenous leukemia.
There was no doubt at all that the bomb and the leukemia were cause and effect. The Nagasaki and Hiroshima
bombs had induced leukemia in a good many Japanese.
Several inhabitants of the Marshall Islands had developed
suspiciots lymph nodes as a result of the Bikini test But
Lekoj was the first case of leukemia from the fallout of a
hydrogen hombtest.
The Atomic Energy Commission had flown his father out
from Rongelap to be with him. His father was a toughlooking little man, much smaller than Lekoj. For hours at
a time he would sit by Lekoj’s bedside, saying nothing at
all. Once in a long while he would reach out and touch
Lekoj’s hand, and sometimes Lekoj would mutter something, in Marshallese, andgrin.
Lekoj spoke: hardly any English, so there was not much
communication between us. Every morning I would smile,
and he would grin back—his teeth were perfect—and I
would ask, “How you feel?”
Usually he would reply, “Fine. Fine.” But toward the end
of the twelve days we spent together, he would be more
likely to say, still with a grin, “No good. Feel deezy.” He
was being given very powerful chemicals, in an attempt to
induce a remission, and he was nauseated. But he remained
remarkably cheerful. I wondered if he knew how sick he
was.
He was a heavily built young man, and his musclesrip-
pled underhis skin. But there was a curiously gentle quality
about him, a softness, a kind of endearing childishness—it
was very easy to imagine him as that baby in the sand under the sudden glare oflight.
Despite the lack of a common tongue, we had our com-