America Ground Zero. - book reviews

Afterimage, Nov, 1994 by David L. Jacobs

It was very confusing because on the one hand there were statements by Linus Pauling about the possible harmful effects of fallout . . . I think the most difficult thing for people was the fact that they knew on a personal level, a visual level by going to the church and the cemetery for leukemia cases and others, they knew something wasn't right. In order to accept that, they also had to accept that the government not only did it to them, but was carrying on an extensive con job to show them there was no danger. How do you admit your government is lying to you and is putting you on the receiving end of discretionary genocide?

They single out "satanic bureaucrats fleecing the taxpayers," and the "general public that sits back, the silent majority," and speak of their lost trust in government, in the church, in life itself. Augusta Peters, her body ravaged by cancer, sounds a phrase that becomes a leitmotif:

I tell you, I know less than I ever knew. I've got more questions about everything. It's been so depressing, I would die if I could, I'd commit suicide but I'm afraid I'd make a mess out of it and be worse off. But really, I don't think one should have to live every day just getting ready to cry. I can hardly believe there is a great God. But it's a life. It's a mystery.

Adams and Lange approached the Mormons without much thought about the nuclear poison in the bones of the citizens of Gunlock, St. George, and Toquerville--poison that they, too, were subjected to as they photographed, breathed, ate, and drank during those weeks in 1953. Three decades later, Gallagher returned, armed with different expectations, and with considerably fewer illusions about the deadliness of the radiation, to say nothing of the role that the U.S. government has played in using these people, as the victims often put it, "like guinea pigs." Gallagher, too, photographed the beauty that Adams and Lange discovered in the landscape, but with the palpable irony born of knowing the lethal contents within these scapes. Both bodies of work signify the dignity of these people: in 1953, it was born of a long history of the so-called pioneer spirit, carving out their niche from a tough environment; in the 1980s, it came from having witnessed and felt at first hand the horrors and legacy of radiation poisoning, as well as the betrayals of the government, the medical community, and the Church itself.

Jay Truman, born in 1951, and witness to the bombs and their aftermath throughout his childhood, sums up the experience of Gallaghers subjects:

I think it's very important to realize about the downwind residents that these are not isolated personal tragedies. They are a cultural tragedy, a part of everyday life. We've all lost loved ones, friends, and we've all been lied to and . . . [considered] expendable. Everyone says a nuclear war is impossible. The downwind residents, the atomic veterans, the Test Site workers, we are the casualties of the Cold War, the casualties of the opening round of World War Ill. I think we always stand by looking into the endless graves of the not-yet-dead. It's like some graffiti I saw sprayed on a rock, 'When the big one comes, our long nightmare will be over and yours has only begun' . . . I remember in school they showed a film once called A is for Atom, B is for Bomb. I think most of us who grew up in that period, we've all in our own minds added C is for Cancer, D is for Death. I think that's what I see for the future.