When Marine Archie Moczygemba entered Nagasaki in September 1945, the atomic bomb had been dropped little more than a month earlier. Eighty-one years later, he can still remember what he encountered inside a hospital.
“We walked through a hospital shortly after we arrived,” Moczygemba told the “All the metal beds were just crumpled against one wall. The sheer power of the bomb was unthinkable.”
The veteran, who turned 102 on Independence Day, is one of the last remaining former American service members alive who personally saw the aftermath of the atomic bombings. Those veterans who saw it, also known by the moniker “atomic veterans,” entered the two Japanese cities as members of the Allied occupation in August 1945.
Fewer than 10 of these veterans who saw the damage are still alive, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. As they continue to dwindle, historians and filmmakers are moving fast to preserve their knowledge, as they have limited time remaining.
High Schoolers Who Saw the Ruins
Roughly 67,000 U.S. service members were assigned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the occupation, according to the Bulletin. Many were teenagers who had little understanding of radiation or the long-term dangers surrounding them. They entered cities where tens of thousands of Japanese civilians had survived the initial explosions but continued to suffer from burns, injuries and radiation exposure. Some American personnel helped care for survivors whose conditions were not yet fully understood.
The horrific conditions they witnessed stayed with them for life. Moczygemba recalls seeing the patterns of women’s clothing burned into their skin from the intense heat of the bombing. While his short-term memory has faded due to age, one thing he can’t forget is the blisters and terrible burns left on the victims.
“It’s something a lot of people don’t talk about, what the exposure did to those who survived it,” he said.
Another Marine sent to Nagasaki, Larry Pressley, is fast approaching his 100th birthday. While he and Moczygemba served in the same city, they did not meet there. Pressley recalled the limited rations of water and food that the Marines brought for their stay.
The troops stationed there showered in contaminated water, and some drank it. This exposure is something that Pressley believes may be related to radiation-related cancers among service members decades later.
American troops also carried Geiger counters to measure radiation. According to the veterans’ accounts, the devices’ alarms seemed to squeal constantly as they moved through the city.
Ordered to Shut Their Mouths
Atomic veterans were told they could not talk about what they witnessed. Much of the information around their assignments was deemed classified, and they were told it was against their orders to tell people about their experiences. A lot of the veterans obeyed that order until 1996, when the government eased these restrictions.
The secrecy complicated veterans’ later efforts to connect cancers and other illnesses to their military service. Proving that a disease diagnosed decades later resulted from time spent in a contaminated city became a prolonged battle for some veterans seeking Department of Veterans Affairs benefits.
By the time they were permitted to speak openly, many of the men who had served in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had already died.
In the 2025 PBS documentary titled “Atomic Echoes: Untold Stories of World War II”, every veteran who was interviewed stated that they had never been publicly asked to retell their horrific experiences. In the documentary, there were three American veterans interviewed. One of the veterans, named Michas Ohnstad, died in 2026. This death shows how the clock is ticking down for these atomic veterans, and how it is a race against time to get their voices heard.
Preserving a Vital Piece of Human History
“Atomic Echoes” brought together testimony from American veterans and Japanese survivors, known as hibakusha, to document the human consequences of nuclear warfare. Other projects have used artificial intelligence and virtual reality to preserve the experiences of survivors.
In Japan, visitors can use VR headsets at several locations to see recreations of the cities as the bombs fell and fires spread.
Those involved in making these documentaries have the opinion that similar efforts are needed to keep the tales of the American occupation troops alive.
The U.S. atmospheric testing has gone on all over the globe, and telling exposed veterans’ tales is just as important for documentation as it is for remembering a vital piece of human history. These stories allow us to peer into the mindset of the time.
These testimonies provide casualty figures and weapons statistics cannot: specific memories of individual people, injuries and destroyed communities. They also carry renewed significance because some modern nuclear warheads are estimated to be 50 to 100 times more powerful than the weapons used in 1945.
Pressley is of the opinion that another nuclear attack would be far more devastating than the one from World War II and could leave a scene that is only seen in nightmares.
“You can’t drop another atomic bomb, ever,” he said.
It is important to convey and properly tell their stories, of the Japanese survivors and the veterans who saw the aftermath of the destruction.
The future is coming fast, and these veterans will not be around much longer to warn us about the dangers of the past.
“I was one of very few people to experience it,” Moczygemba said. “And I’ll never forget it.”
