A Nez Perce elder’s remembrance of Nagasaki resonates to this day

The horror and devastation of these events seemed so distant when I interviewed my great uncle, Horace Axtell, at his home in Lewiston, Idaho, in the summer of 2000. The air was warm with a steady breeze, and occasionally a distant mule could be heard braying at a neighboring farm every so often.

For a good portion of the hour, I’d talked to Horace about how Native Americans had the highest enlistment rate per capita than any other demographic, fighting on behalf of the same U.S. government that had broken countless treaties and driven many onto reservations. Horace talked of the warrior tradition which many Native people observed in order to protect their nation, even if that nation hadn’t always done right by them.

Horace was the embodiment of a gracious and wise tribal elder. Calm, soft-spoken and reflective, his body tensed when we broached the subject of his time occupying Japan after the war.

“We landed right there in Nagasaki Bay,” he began. “As we’re going in, we saw some bodies floating around out in the bay, and we also see a ship sticking out of the water. And when we got to the shore, we could see where the Mitsubishi plant was. It was just a mass of destruction. A mass of rubble.”

I saw an intensity in his eyes as he relived those moments. While I knew my great uncle as a silver-haired, burly man who walked and spoke with dignity, I realized the Horace I was listening to now was a 20-year-old soldier who was witnessing carnage on a scale never seen before that time in history.

Horace and the rest of his unit built their headquarters and motor pool on a hillside, next to a schoolhouse and playground that seemed unaffected by the atomic bomb’s impact. “It was strange. Some of the homes were standing, and some of them right next to it was all crumbled. Just the way of the reaction, to the wave of the atomic bomb. So powerful, that trees like this” — he gestured to a tall oak in his backyard — “you could see standing but all the branches were stripped off. And it was bad.”

Horace said it was horrific being in Nagasaki due to the stench of dead people and animals. It was so terrible that he had no appetite.

“It was hard. I mean, I still remember some of those things, and it was more of a nightmare than anything.”

Horace described the surviving residents of Nagasaki as friendly, perhaps because the fighting and destruction were finally at a standstill.

“We had to take pity on them because a lot of them were lost, and looking for relatives and young children were running loose without proper food, and without shoes and clothing. It was a terrible sight. I have nightmares about that sometimes yet about the way people were after the war was over.”

Horace became a driver and operated a four-ton dump truck that transported two dozen Japanese men around the city to clean up areas that were destroyed. After the truck was filled with bricks, rubble and other debris, he’d drive it out to a centralized dump site next to where warehouses were being built for Marines. This process would continue day after day, under the supervision of U.S. military officers overseeing the clean-up detail.

“This one officer, he got a little violent I thought,” said Horace. “He must have had a grudge of some kind. The poor guys, they couldn’t understand English and this one lieutenant kicked this guy around and I couldn’t say anything because he’s an officer. I felt bad. The poor old man, he was quite a bit older than the rest of us, and he wanted to work.”

For all the devastation, loss and cruelty seen in post-war Nagasaki, my great uncle found a friend while going about his work.

“This little boy, he was maybe 12 or 13 years old. I guess it was because of the color of my skin — see I’m a Nez Perce Indian — he just kind of took to me. I don’t know, maybe I resembled one of his parents or something,” Horace said with a kindly tone. “I was dumping my gravel one day, and he jumped into my cab and he wanted a ride.”

The boy became a regular passenger in Horace’s huge army truck, and began to do tasks such as cleaning the windshield and doing his best to lift up the heavy five-gallon gas containers kept around to fuel the vehicle.

“And it got to the point where he would sleep in my truck. And just stayed there,” continued Horace. “And I’d bring him food and water and everything, and he became such a nice little boy. I can’t even remember his name because it was such a long time ago.”

The boy would prep his truck while the occupying force had breakfast, without asking more than just being able to ride along with my great uncle.

But soon, Horace’s time in Nagasaki was over. He was being called back to the States, meaning the two needed to part ways.

“It was harder to come home than it was to go away,” said Horace, his voice growing quieter. “Because it’s hard to leave a little boy crying. And he became so friendly. He was a good little person.”

Fifteen years after I interviewed him about the war, Horace died at the age of 90. I attended his Seven Drum Memorial service and burial on his old homestead in Ferdinand, Idaho. On the drive over in the early morning hours, my family and I passed an old, hoary gray owl standing in the middle of the dark county highway and I remain convinced it was Horace, making sure we were safe and going the right direction.

But I digress. I have taken Horace’s reflections deeply to heart. As a boy, I watched many old war movies from the 1940s and 50s that romanticized combat, and often reduced the Japanese to violent, subhuman caricatures (similar perhaps to how Native people were portrayed in Westerns). I often think of that young Japanese boy and wonder what became of him when he was left alone in the ruins of Nagasaki. Did he ever find his family? Would he survive on his own? What would he be doing today if he was still alive?

I also play back my interview with Horace, who ended our conversation by comparing the devastation he saw in Japan to accounts he’d heard about the Nez Perce War of 1877.

“Our people had this war, my grandfather, my great-grandfather fought in that war. And the way women and children and old people were massacred or killed, almost a comparison to what I seen with my own eyes.

“And it kind of hurt. You get the feeling that war is not the way to settle any kind of disagreements. There should be better ways.”