Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets passed away yesterday. He was 92. Having served his country in the military for three decades, he is famous for one day in particular: August 6, 1945, when, piloting the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber, he dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The single blast killed tens of thousands of people.
     Japan refused to surrender. On August 9, President Truman order a second nuclear strike on  Nagasaki, a mission piloted by Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sweeney, who passed away in 2004. That explosion killed tens of thousands more.
    Japan surrendered six days later on August 15, 1945. This not only brought World War II to an end, it also averted as many as one million American casualties--the estimated cost of an American invasion of the Japanese mainland. How many of us would not be alive today if our fathers and grandfathers had so perished? And how many millions of  Japanese would not be alive today had their forefathers not been spared from trying to fend off the American invasion?
    In the answers to these question lie our enormous debt to such men as Paul Tibbets and Charles Sweeney. Not that we, as a society, acknowledge this debt. I was shocked and appalled to read that Gen. Tibbets requested that he be buried with no headstone and no service in order to avoid drawing protestors to his grave--a site that should be hallowed ground, not a stage for political theater.
    Men like Gen. Tibbets were able to fight and win World War II because they knew our civilization was worth fighting for. They won that war, of course. But in the intervening decades it is clear that we have lost that knowledge.
    Gen. Tibbets, RIP.