The Power of Gambling

1 November 2022

By Frank Scoblete

On August 6, 1945 the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb. It was the sign that the United States had the ultimate weapon and could now destroy Japan if that country did not surrender. The city that was destroyed was Hiroshima. It took a second atomic bomb to seal the deal. That one landed in Nagasaki.

I knew someone who was at the army air corps station on Tinian where the Enola Gay landed with its devastating cargo on its first mission. The man I knew was the late Captain, my mentor in the gambling world, who was stationed at Tinian at that time.

“We knew something was up with the crew that landed with that plane,” said the Captain. “We weren’t allowed to fraternize with them. They ate at a table far, far away from the rest of us. We found out soon enough what they accomplished.”

I asked him what his men did after they heard the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the most powerful weapon ever developed.

“We did what we did whenever we could do it,” said the Captain. “We had our usual gambling sessions. Craps and poker. Those times were twofold; we fought a war and we gambled. I flew in dogfights and went on bombing missions and then I tackled Lady Luck. She was the toughest foe I ever faced.”

The Captain and his men did what soldiers have done throughout history. They fought, they died, and if they hadn’t yet died, they gambled. You can go all the way back in time and just about every person who fought, gambled.

Gambling and fighting seem to be two activities that human beings enjoy doing. We seem to have fought our way through history from the ancient savannahs to our current major cities of the world. We now gamble in casinos almost everywhere in the world now.

Some primitive tribes even had their own versions of casinos. Often native Americans had tents for the sole purpose of testing their luck. It was not a stretch of the imagination for native Americans and United States’ soldiers to occasional contest each other over the gambling “tables” rather than in the field.

Okay, what is the bottom line here?

Human beings are a gambling species. I do not mean this in the “animal sense” as two creatures fighting one another for supremacy as that will exist in almost all levels of life. True, we do contest, we fight wars, and have done that throughout our history. But many other creatures contest with each other, sometimes leading to injury and sometimes to death and sometimes to the extinction of a rival species.

We humans gamble throughout almost everything; good, bad or indifferent. If the folks who saw the folks who dropped the greatest weapon in the world at that time merely continued their gambling after their sorties, then that tells us something.

As kids we love to play games. At some point in our personal histories, we want to risk something other than just our emotions on the games we play. I started with baseball cards. I wanted my opponent’s cards; he wanted mine. Yes, it went up from there.

In gambling we must risk something that is special. Money is special for us and you understand that money, winning it, losing it, thinking about it, is the foundation of casino gambling. In that sense, all of us live on the island of Tinian waiting for an explosion that wins it for us and loses it for the foe.

Gambling is a powerful force in us and probably has always been.

All the best in and out of the casinos.

Frank Scoblete’s web site is www.frankscoblete.com. His books are available from Amazon.com. Barnes and Noble, Kindle, e-books, libraries and bookstores.