Paper Trail.

The article presents the author's experiences. An old man recently told him about the time he sued the U.S. He sued the U.S. country back when he was a young man, in 1958, after the Air Force accidentally dropped an atomic bomb on his property. The author visited the courthouse where his lawyer had filed the lawsuit, in Florence, South Carolina, but the files were no longer there. Three days later, he sat at a folding table under fluorescent lights in a cluttered room in a dingy building in a struggling Atlanta neighborhood and gawked through thick stacks of old photographs, brittle newspapers, judicial orders, damage assessments and more.