JACKSONVILLE, Fla — "I wanted to be a sailor," says Bill Crawford, now age 93. He's sharp. He's patriotic. He clearly remembers his time walking around Hiroshima.
He was an electrician's mate on a minesweeper off the coast of Japan.
But then he received a new assignment. He was to go on land in Hiroshima, just 30 days after the Americans had dropped the bomb.
"Everyone was in white bandages," he recalls. They were still in a daze, walking around. "They were wounded. They didn't know what happened."
Crawford says at first, the Japanese would cover their faces with their arms when they saw the Americans.
"They were scared," he explains. They heard the Americans was coming and they were a threat."
Crawford says their superiors had told them not to make any statements that could be considered aggressive. Eventually, the Japanese, some of whom spoke English, began to converse with the Americans.
"I talked to this one man," Crawford says. He'd lost his friends and family. "They're gone. They disappeared," the man told Crawford.
And he didn't mean their bodies were burned and buried. "Nothing is there. You don't see nothing. You don't see nothing but black ash," Crawford says, as he refers to how the bomb vaporized people.
The man looked right at Crawford in the face and said, "The world -- no more."
"You go from this young boy -- I was 18 years old still -- to not old enough to be exposed to what we were around," he remembers vividly.
According to The National World War II Museum in New Orleans, 80,000 people died instantly in Hiroshima. Three days later in Nagasaki, America dropped a second bomb.
In all, several hundred thousand were dead and wounded, many to suffer the horrible fate of radiation poisoning as time went on.
Crawford does believe he had some effect from the radiation. As a young man about 20 years old, he kept losing his teeth. His doctor said that was highly unusual.
But was it the right decision or the wrong decision to drop the bomb?
"Yes, that question always comes up," Crawford says.
Dr. Rob Citino, Senior Historian at The National World War II Museum and author of 10 scholarly books on WWII says take a look at the other options.
If America set up a blockade around the island nation of Japan, Citino says, "Our casualties would be light. Theirs would have been monstrous, including millions dead from starvation."
Another option? Continue to firebomb Japan. Citino says, "We now had gigantic, sophisticated B-29 bombers. We'd been dropping bombs, bombs, bombs... burning cities, cities, cities."
One night the bombing in Tokyo, he says, killed more people than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki did combined in one night.
But then what about a land invasion?
"Truman once said he was worried that invading Japan would be one Okinawa after another, " Citino says.
The reference? President Harry Truman was talking about the numbers from military action on Okinawa. According to Citino and the museum, 12,000 American soldiers were killed. But 100,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, plus an additional 80,000 Japanese civilians.
The Japanese seemed to have no desire to cease fighting or save lives.
To Crawford the answer was clear. He knew he could have been sent on land if America had invaded Japan.
He figures he might have been killed. "I may not be here talking to you today," he says.
And, although he is respectful of the lives destroyed in the bombings, he says he can understand the decision by Truman to drop the bombs.
Crawford's dream of opening his own electrical business came to be when he came arrived back home. He built a successful company.
But now he'll smile and tell you he's patriotic, yes, but he's also very grateful for his biggest gift in life: his sweetheart. Mr. and Mrs. Crawford have been a married couple for 67 years.
And, yes, she's heard his war stories many, many times. But she listens to every word and continues to say that he makes us all proud.