tet mh Poet PRIVAGY ACT MATERIAL remoRST H YDROGEN VICTIM... fromradiation sickness, but none of them, so far as is known, died from leukemia. The fallout also filtered down on others of the Marshall Islands, including the island of Rongelap more than onc hundred miles from Bikini. Iuhabitants of these islands also took a dose of radiation. Rongelap was native island. as a cheer1 aistill haunted by a mental image of trees of palin the under sand the in ful brown baby playing ongelap, as the sky lit up above him from the great explosion on Bikini, and playing still, fecling no harm, as the dust of the fallout settled around him. The cheerful brown baby was now my roommate, ninetcen-year-old and he had, John Glick told me, a particularly vicious variety of acute myclogenous leukemia. There was no doubt at all that the bomb andthe leu- kemia were cause and effect. The Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs had induced leukemia in a good imany 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 homb test. The Atomic Energy Commission had flown his fatherout from Rongclap to be with him. His father was a toughlooking little man, much smaller than For hours at | atime he would sit by = ——_—s bedside, saying nothiny at all. Once in a long while he would reach out and touch hand, and sometimes would mutter something, in Marshallese, and grin. spokes hardly any English, so there was nat much communication bebvecn us. Every morning 1 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 howsick he’ was, He was a heavily built young man, and his muscles rippledunderhis skin. But there was a curiously gentle quality xbout him, a sofmess, a kind of endearing childishness—it was very easy to imagine him as that baby in the sand under the sudden glare of light. Despite the lack of a common tongue, we had our com- S0luoau Oels at eS au ee PRIVACYACT MATERIAL REMOVED 43