Quincy, Illinois’ most famous (or infamous: there’s no statue), son has died at 92: Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, Jr., pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress named for his mother. Only 30-years-old when he dropped Little Boy on the citizens of Hiroshima, Tibbets spent the rest of his life defending his action with a simple, utilitarian argument: Dropping the atomic bomb saved lives, Japanese as well as American, by ending the war. Would he have done it again? “Hell, yeah.” And he slept well at night, thank you. “There is no morality in war,” Tibbets said in 2002.
Now he knows the truth.
But do we? Americans are more than eager to confess certain among our nation’s sins, most often ones that are deep enough in the past that none of us is actually guilty of them: owning slaves and swindling Indians out of Manhattan with a box of brightly colored beads. Calling “wicked,” however, the calculated vaporizing of over a hundred thousand of innocent Japanese mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and infants in an intense flash of atomic superheat never fails to draw fire. Must all the members of Tibbets’ generation follow him to their rewards before we can join Elizabeth Anscombe, Fr. James Gillis, Richard Weaver, and General J.F.C. Fuller in condemning what El Paso, Illinois’ most famous son, Bishop Fulton Sheen, called “our national sin”?
For his deed, Tibbets was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (second only to the Medal of Honor), and today’s jingos at freerepublic.com are proposing we memorialize him with a postage stamp or a coin. The best thing any of us can do for General Tibbets is to pray for his soul, but we can also take the occasion of his death to examine how inured we have become to the brutal devices, practices, and consequences of modern warfare—devices, practices, and consequences that have inspired Pope Benedict XVI to question whether it is even possible for a just war to be waged in the modern world. Epidemiologists writing for the British medical journal, The Lancet, estimate that the Iraq War death toll exceeds 650,000. Critics call the figure high, but what if the number is only half as many? The fact remains that vast majority of casualties in a modern conflict are civilians, and “casualties” here means “dead;” the maimed and insane have yet to be counted.
Tibbets’ death is also an opportunity to seek a deeper understanding of the duties that patriotism demands of the citizen. Among these obligations is a ready response to his country’s call to take up arms when the threat leaves him with no other option, understanding, of course, that the forms that response can take are constrained by the natural and revealed laws. As citizens rather than subjects, however, Americans who long to be called patriots have an additional duty to love their country enough to know when not to turn a blind eye to, much less support, the destructive, and yes, “wicked,” polices of the men entrusted with leading her. Acknowledging the days in our country’s past when we have failed to live according to the standards and principles of the Christian West is an essential first step in avoiding similar sins in the future.

Christopher Check is the executive vice president of The Rockford Institute, publisher of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, www.chroniclesmagazine.org. He served for seven yeas as a field artillery officer in the Marine Corps.