Contributions by Emily Kiernan

Childhood is a mortifying thing, best forgotten.

Less than a month later, watching the bomb named Little Boy falling from the Enola Gay towards the city of Hiroshima, co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis said, “Look at that son of a bitch go!” What he wrote in the log he was keeping for the New York Times, however, was, “My God, what have we done?” At least one fellow crew member remembered him saying this aloud on the flight back to Tinian, so maybe he did try it out, having liked the sound of it on the page.