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 Marshall
Islands, including the island of Rongelap more than one
oa
.
also took a dose of radiation. Rongelap was
native island.
I am still haunted by a mental image of
, as a cheer-
ful brown baby playing in the sand undcrthe palm trees of
Rongelap, as the sky lit up above him from the great explosion en 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
and he had, John Glick told me, a particularly vicious variety 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
suspicions lymph nodes as a result of the Bikini test But
, 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 toughFor hours at
looking little man, much smailer than
bedside, saying nothing at
a time he would sit by ©
all. Once in a long while he would reach out and touch
, would mutter somehand, and sometimes
IVACY ACT MATERIAL REMOVEDH»e Marshallese, andgrin
, spoke: hardly any English, so there was not much
communication between us. Every morning | 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
ae:
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 muscles rip-
pled under his 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 of light.
Despite the lack of a common tongue, we had our com-
QSIAOWSY TWIHALVW LOY AOWAlud
"
,
hundred miles from Bikini. Inhabitants of these islands