The greatest sacrifice.

• Author: Strelow, Diana Allen
• Position: Journal Entry - radiation survivor compensation - Column

In the spring of 1946, my father, Frank B. Allen, a Washington correspondent at the U.S. Senate for what was then called International News Service, went joyfully to the South Pacific in order to witness and to write about the first postwar atomic bomb tests. Operation Crossroads made headlines in the spring and summer of 1946 and, to my father, covering it was the assignment of a lifetime, if not of the century.

Our household was filled with preparations, as though Bikini were the best assignment for the best reporter ever. Daddy did leave an envelope to be opened in the event that he didn't come home. He had faith, though, in the Navy. He was sure that every possible precaution would be taken to ensure his and everyone else's safety aboard the U.S.S. Mount McKinley, where he was berthed.

My father came home in September of that year. The atomic bomb had been huge, frightening, terrible, and beautiful, he said. He told us about taking a boat to Ground Zero right after the blasts. I don't remember whether he said he had clambered around on the radioactive rocks or not, but it was the kind of thing he would have done.

In 1955, while I was a junior at William and Mary, my father had a stroke. He had a number of minor heart attacks after that. We couldn't understand his constant weight loss. Once a robust, hearty man who loved to take his family fishing, he weighed only a little more than sixty pounds in September 1957 when he died. He had cancer and kidney failure. He was fifty-seven.

William Butler Yeats wrote, "An aged man is but a paltry thing; a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing; for every tatter in its mortal dress." In 1956 and 1957, my father's soul no longer sang at all.

My father dreamt of buying a smalltown newspaper and he did some searching for the right one. I hoped to learn the newspaper business from the ground up. It was never to be. He died a little more than thirty-five years ago, and my sister and I have, of course, long been accustomed to the loss. My mother always sounded to new-found friends as though she had just lost her husband recently, until succumbed to Huntington's disease a few years ago.

The United States carried out some 235 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1962, principally in Nevada and in the Pacific Ocean, according to the Veterans Administration.

American soldiers, naval personnel, and Marines were assigned to nearby trenches, islands, and ships, and were thus...