Nambé man spent his birthday 62 years ago watching the first explosion of an atomic bomb

In the desert of Southern New Mexico, on the morning of July 16, 1945, Otha F. Carter looked at his watch; it read 5:30 a.m. The world had entered the Atomic Age.

Carter, a military police officer in the Army, stood 10 miles from the blast site of the first atomic bomb. It happened to be his birthday.

“They told us to lie down in a dry pond and close our eyes,” Carter said as he sat beneath a shade tree in the backyard of his Nambé home. Carter hit the ground and didn’t see the flash.

At that moment, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was at the Trinity Site, was reported to have quoted the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.”

Carter, a farm boy from Hot Springs, Ark., said he kept his eyes closed, as ordered. After the explosion, his commanding officer told him it was OK to open his eyes and stand.

“I stood up and saw this mushroom-shaped cloud that kept getting bigger and bigger,” Carter said. “We were about10 miles from the cloud. Standing there, I suddenly heard an explosion that scared the heck out of me, and the heat was really hot.”

At the time, Carter didn’t know what he was witnessing. A few days later he learned it was an atomic bomb. “They told us, ‘You made history seeing that bomb blast,’ ” he said.

In early August 1945, Carter went home to Hot Springs on furlough. While there, he heard that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6.

“A couple of days after they dropped the bomb, I went into town dressed in my uniform and people were hugging me and patting me on the back,” Carter said. “They thought the GIs were really it.”

After getting out of the Army in 1946, Carter moved to Santa Fe. He worked as a bus driver, driving GIs up the hill to Los Alamos. In 1948, he became a crane operator. He retired in 1987.

He married Mary Roybal in 1946. Carter and his bride moved to Nambé from Santa Fe in 1949.

He has vivid memories of the first time he traveled to Nambé with Mary to see the land he would eventually call home. The couple took a bus from Santa Fe to Pojoaque, then hitched a ride on a horse-drawn wagon to Nambé.

“The Sacred Heart Church had just burned down, and they were building it back up,” Carter said. “As we walked down County Road 113A, I looked around and said to Mary, ‘This is a pretty dang valley.’”

In his 58 years in Nambé, Carter raised three daughters and watched Nambé change from a little village where he “used to know about everybody” to a place where he hardly knows anyone.

“If I could have one wish, it would be that I was younger,” said Carter, who turned 83 on Monday. “It’s dang hard growing old. Most of my friends have passed away, and I’m getting so old, I can hardly play the radio.”

Contact John Knoll at johnknoll77@hotmail.com.