Imagine you're walking to work one day, and suddenly, Kaboom! Someone drops an atomic bomb on you. Now imagine if that happened to you twice.
So, this guy's name is Satu. He's 29, he lives in Japan, and he's a naval engineer. He designs oil tanker ships; he's a really smart guy.
Satu's been working out of town for about three months because he's been designing this new oil tanker, and it's his last day working away from home. He is ready to leave that city; he just wants to get home so he can be with his wife and son. So anyway, he's walking to work on this final day and he's already daydreaming about the day being over.
Just as he's reaching the shipyard, suddenly, he hears the sound of an airplane buzzing overhead, which isn't that uncommon, but this plane sounds different. So he looks up and sees that this is not a commercial plane; it's a military plane flying over the city. As he's staring at it, something drops out of the bottom of it.
As this object falls to the ground, Satu is watching it, trying to figure out what it is. That is when, suddenly, pow! A crazy bright flash fills the sky and blinds him for a moment.
In this split second, Satu, he's disoriented, but he knows this bright flash is an explosion from a bomb. Light travels faster than sound, so he knows what's coming next. He immediately dives to the ground for cover and rolls over into a ditch, covering his face with his hands and plugging his ears just in time to hear a massive C-boom.
The force of this blast is so strong it lifts him off the ground and flips him into the air, spinning him like a tornado. Then, bam! He slams to the ground and is out.
When he regains consciousness, everything is dark and his ears are ringing. He immediately thinks, "Oh sh**, I'm dead. " It takes him a moment to realize he's not; he’s alive.
He's lying in a potato patch. He stands up and can barely see through all the thick falling ash around him, but off in the distance, he sees a huge mushroom cloud of fire rising into the sky because Satu is in Hiroshima when it was hit by the world's first atomic bomb attack. So he looks at himself, and his face and arms are all badly burned, his eardrums are ruptured, and everything just hurts.
He stumbles through the falling ash with very little visibility and makes his way to what is left of the shipyard where he works. There he finds two of his co-workers, and they're both covered in ash and badly burned as well. The three of them look at each other and they're like, "What do we do now?
" Now here's the thing: Japan is in the middle of World War II right now, and local governments and citizens had been constructing air raid shelters all around the country to protect people in the event of bombs being dropped. So the whole country had been prepared for war. The three men look all around and they find one of these air raid shelters.
They go there, and they're inside the shelter, huddled up with some other survivors. It's there that they hear their first bit of promising news: somehow, one of the local train stations is still operating and the trains are still running. So the three guys crash in that shelter for the night.
The next morning, Satu is like, "Hey, I need to get back home to my wife and kid. " Unfortunately, his wife and kid are in another city, many hours away by train. So, Satu and his co-workers set out on foot, determined to make it to this train station.
They walk all through the city, or what's left of it, which is an apocalyptic hellscape. Everything is either covered in ash or just straight up on fire, and most of the buildings are completely decimated. But the absolute worst part is that the streets are littered with charred and melted corpses.
Eventually, the three men get to a bridge, and they need to cross this bridge to get to the train station. But, of course, this bridge is no longer standing; at this point, it's just a pile of wreckage. But Satu and the other two can't stop now; they've already come this far.
So they decide they have to wade into the river and swim across, but this river is filled with a layer of floating dead people. They swim through it, and then finally, they reach the train station. Satu gets on a train to go back home.
This train is packed with other people, badly burned, who had also survived the bomb. This is an overnight trip, so the next morning, the train arrives at his stop. Satu gets off and goes straight to the hospital.
The blackened burns on his face and his hands are so severe that his doctor doesn't even recognize him. But he gets treatment, they bandage him all up, and he heads home to see his wife and son. When he gets home, he's all burnt up and bandaged, and his family doesn't recognize him either.
Regardless, he is with his family, and he's alive and safe. Until the next morning, Satu wakes up as a man who is dedicated to his job because, even though he's severely injured and mentally traumatized, he gets ready and heads off to work. Home office in his city, and as soon as he gets to work and his boss sees him all bandaged up, his boss is like, "What the hell happened to you?
" I mean, the boss had kind of heard there was an attack on Hiroshima, but he doesn't believe Satu would have survived that. So the boss pulls him aside into a conference room and he's like, "All right, buddy, tell me what the hell really happened. " And Satu, he starts telling the story like, "Yeah, they dropped a bomb on me back in Hiroshima.
It was crazy! " And of course, the boss is like, "What? There is no way one bomb could destroy an entire city.
" And, uh, famous last words, because at that very moment—pow! A crazy bright flash fills the sky, the exact same flash Satu saw before, and it blinds him for a moment. But he's been through this, and he knows what's coming this time, and he immediately dives directly to the floor.
Then, a massive kaboom! All the windows in the office shatter, and there's debris and glass everywhere, and everything in the office is destroyed and blown over. When Satu comes to, all of his bandages have been blown off, and everything around him is complete chaos.
A second atomic bomb had just been dropped, and people are panicking and screaming, and the whole city has just been destroyed. Even the building he's in is now mostly a skeleton. So, Satu checks himself, and strangely he's not any more injured than he already was, and he's relieved because he just survived two atomic bomb blasts—one in Hiroshima and another one three days later in Nagasaki.
What are the odds? But then he remembers his wife and son back home—like, oh, did the bomb get them? Are they hurt?
So, Satu runs out of the building, or what's left of it, and he runs as fast as he can through the falling ash, dodging fires left and right, trying to get home. Soon enough, he arrives at his house, but unfortunately, his home is no longer home because the whole thing has been reduced to just a pile of rubble. He is devastated.
How could this be? What the hell happened to his wife and kid? All right, so here's what happened.
Shortly before the bomb dropped, his wife decides, "You know, Satu is burned up really bad. I'm going to go to the store and get some ointment for when he gets home from work. " So she takes the son and goes to the store, and that is when kaboom!
The bomb drops. But luckily, the store is much further away from the blast than the house was, so the wife and son end up only having minor injuries. But if you think about it, if Satu hadn't been injured in that first bomb, then his family may have never gone to the store, and they probably would have died in that second bomb.
That's crazy! But anyway, so Satu does, of course, have radiation poisoning, but he does survive, and he eventually goes on to become a public speaker, speaking out against the use of atomic weapons. He actually lived a long life after that; he lived to be 93.
Then, sadly, he died of cancer likely related to being in two atomic bomb blasts.
