"But while serving aboard the troop transport Selinur, he had his most transformative experience of the war. Originally, the Selinur was supposed to deliver attack troops. But after atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered, the men aboard were reassigned to occupation duty. They arrived in Sasebo on the Japanese island of Kyushu in September 1945, not far from Nagasaki.
With two friends, Ferlinghetti secured enough leave to take a train up to Nagasaki to see the devastated area just six weeks after the atom bomb had exploded.
"I saw a giant field of scorched mulch. It sprawled out to the horizon, 3 square miles looking like someone had worked it over with a huge blowtorch. A few sticks from buildings jutted up like black arms," Ferlinghetti says. "I found a teacup that seemed like it had human flesh fused into it, just melted into the porcelain.
"In that instant," says Ferlinghetti, "I became a total pacifist."
It's long been argued that using atomic bombs to compel Japan's unconditional surrender actually saved millions of lives that would have been lost on both sides had the Allies been forced to invade.
Ferlinghetti disagrees.
"It was a monstrous, racist act, the worst the U.S. ever committed," he says. "Had the Japanese been white-skinned, those bombs would not have dropped.""
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