A walk through Japan that consisted of stops at a hospital, a post office, and someone's home to have tea doesn't sound all that extraordinary.

But consider that this stroll takes place around Hiroshima in 1945, about two months after the United States dropped the first atomic bomb, and all of a sudden it becomes clear why former World War II radio technician William Renshaw described it as a "surreal" experience. Renshaw died 10 years ago; his story was written down by his daughter, Pat Kezele of Sunnyside, in an interview she did with him in 1992.

According to the written account, as sailors walked toward the city they could see the surviving people of Hiroshima "peeking around the sides of the buildings" at them.

"As we approached, they disappeared. They obviously thought we were going to rape, plunder, or kill them," he said.

Although there are not many surviving members of the USS Vulcan crew, those who remain remember the story as well. One of them was machinist mate 3rd class Marvin Chell.

"It was in October, I remember that much," said Chell, an 81-year-old Minnesota resident. "One fellow brought back coins that were melted in the heat. That probably wasn't too healthy to carry those around. They were probably radioactive."

Like Renshaw, Chell remembers a post-apocalyptic scene with empty streets and a "wiped out" city where everything appeared to be burned.

"I would imagine it was like walking through the remains of a forest fire," he said. "The blackness of it. I remember thinking that whatever did this, it had to be pretty powerful, especially if it was just one bomb."

Chell said most of his interaction with the city's residents was limited to giving chocolate and gum to kids. Renshaw told his daughter that he did that as well, but also walked a bit farther, determined to explore the desolate landscape.

Reading from her father's interview, Kezele said he and a friend -- a sailor Renshaw could identify years later only as a "Jewish guy from Chicago" -- kept walking until they found a reinforced concrete hospital built by the American Red Cross. They found it filled with burn victims, separated only by sheets hanging from ropes and wires.

"The smell was terrible," he said. "From the roof of the third floor we could see for miles around and, except for the occasional brick or concrete structure, everything was flattened."

The two men walked toward the other surviving structures, one of them a post office a mile away. Renshaw spotted an abacus there and bought it from a postal worker.

It's a memento Kezele still has, along with its original box and packaging.

"I've always been tempted to get a Geiger counter and see what the radiation reading is on that thing," she said.

At that point, Renshaw told his daughter the strangest part of the story: He and his buddy came across an English-speaking Japanese woman, who invited them in for "tea, cookies and conversation." The woman explained that she had lived in the United States for 20 to 25 years and had moved back to Japan after her husband died, before the war.

It was during this teatime that the woman told the two sailors something very odd: Prior to the atomic bomb being dropped, she said, the residents of Hiroshima had been unhappy, because they had never been bombed -- even though the U.S. targeted all the other cities around them.

Amazingly, she told Renshaw that the surviving Hiroshima residents were now "proud" that the U.S. had chosen their city for the "big bomb."

Years later, Kezele said, her father could never figure out whether the woman was afraid of Americans and trying to get on their good side, was just being very polite or was completely mad.

"My friend and I found her sentiments hard to understand in view of all the devastation and death we had seen that day," he said.

Renshaw said after he got back on board, "the captain of our ship, a rear admiral, told me that he had caught hell" for letting his sailors walk around Hiroshima before the Army's scientists had arrived to conduct their research. But Chell said in the Navy's defense, back then no one knew much about what radiation was or what it could do.

"I don't think the Navy would have allowed us in there had they known," he said. "All I knew is that those bombs kept us from invading Japan, which would have been a horror story for our troops."

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that there were 195,000 "atomic veterans," or American service members who were involved in the post-World War II occupation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb was dropped three days later. Some of them have since developed leukemia, various cancers and cataracts as a result of being exposed to radiation.

Chell said he has never suffered any sort of health problems from his trip to Hiroshima, and even returned there with his wife a few years ago on vacation. Kezele said that after the war, her father suffered from polio until his death, but never anything that he could attribute to radiation exposure.

In fact, for a while after the war, Kezele said her father didn't even think about that stroll at Hiroshima. It was not until the 1950s, when monster movies based upon the premise of radioactive mutants, like "THEM!" and its giant ants, that his walk through the nuclear wasteland came to mind again.

"He did worry when those movies came out, especially about me and my brother because we were born after he got back from the war," Kezele said. "It ended up being a joke though, and he he'd say to us, 'I'm glad you guys turned out OK ... as far as I know.'

"Other than having unusually attractive and intelligent children," she said with a smile, "I think he was fine."