After the Fallout

The first time I learned about Enewetak Atoll, I was 10 years old. I’d found a U.S. Army booklet describing the island chain and asked my father about it. He gave me two pieces of information: that there were coconut crabs on Enewetak bigger than armadillos and that he was not allowed to talk about what he did there, ever.

My father, G. B. Youmans, was a stiff-necked Georgia man whose credo was, “A promise made is a debt unpaid.” He’d worked as a cable technician on Enewetak in 1954, as part of President Truman’s directive, carried out jointly by the Army and the Navy, to test nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands so as “to determine the effect of atomic bombs on American warships.” This assignment required an oath of secrecy, an oath my father would honor with his life.

The mystery of Enewetak set me to wondering what kind of exciting secret life he must have led before he became a milkman in Jacksonville, Florida. I scanned the Pacific Ocean on a globe, finding Enewetak among the Marshall Islands. Such tiny dots in all that blue! It seemed to me the islands and their inhabitants could disappear in an instant and hardly anyone would know.

Some 10 years later, Enewetak came up again while my father lay in a hospital for three months, undergoing two operations for his fungus-filled, hemorrhaging lungs. The doctors were baffled, saying it wasn’t cancer, and it wasn’t quite like black lung, either.

His lungs weren’t like anything they’d ever seen before.

Though my father had kept his word, never going into detail about his experiences, he did reveal to his pulmonary doctors that he’d spent 13 months on Enewetak. He came home from the hospital with four ribs removed, half a lung, and a drainage tube protruding from his body.

He was 48 years old. He would spend the rest of his life tethered to an oxygen machine.