"The 'ever-rolling stream' called time is both comforting and reproving. Fifty-three years ago, August 6, 1945, I stood with my buddies on a cliff on the island of Saipan. After more that two years overseas, about the only recreation we had was watching the hefty bombers land on nearby Tinian Island. 'I'll bet that's the one!' someone screamed. It was the Enola Gay, a plane we had seen many times. We had been told by way of an underling grapevine that something big had happened, something so extraordinary that the war would soon end and we would be going home. We knew nothing of the details and didn't care. We were cheering, pretending the cheap PX beer we sprayed on each other was champagne, slapping each other on the back, and throwing steel helmets and MI rifles into the deep pearly waters of the Pacific Ocean. More than a hundred thousand of God's children lay in carnage — burned, mangled, eviscerated. Dead. And we cheered.
"Thirty years later I was part of another vigil. This one outside a Florida prison near where I had trained as a soldier. A single one of God's children was about to die inside the prison. A group of young men and women nearby cheered as lustily as we had done on Saipan that day. 'That's it! That's Ole Sparky!' I heard as the lights inside the prison walls blinked from a power surge. 'Fry the bastard! Fry the bastard! Bring on the barbecue sauce.' Their callous chant was sickening. Then I felt a greater affliction: the sudden realization that I had once celebrated death as crudely as they were doing. How different, then, was I from the odious adolescents of central Florida? But for time. And grace. That bequest that trumps the chants of us all."
