NAGASAKI - The plutonium bomb is stamped on Katsuji Yoshida's face.

And on his hands, his arms, his back and where his two ears once were.

It took a dozen years for Yoshida's body to mend.

His mind never will.

"I was 13 when this happened. Now I am 63 and have nightmares still."

His nightmares recall that morning 50 years ago when he looked skyward and saw a parachute falling to the ground.

Yoshida was enrolled then in the Nagasaki Prefecture School of Industrial Science, but classes had long since been canceled because of the war.

He was a year too young to work in an arms factory, but he wasn't too young to dig air raid shelters and make bamboo spears. "That was my job."

Before the bomb was dropped that morning, an air raid siren echoed over the school yard where Yoshida and his friends played.

The siren wail had become a way of life. "I thought it was just one more. I was wrong."

Yoshida had heard vaguely about a "new kind of bomb" the United States had dropped over Hiroshima three days earlier.

But as he and seven school friends stood drawing water from a well, he didn't realize Hiroshima's fate had come to Nagasaki.

The parachute he watched carried tools to measure that doom.

Suddenly, there was a violent explosion about a half-mile away above the Matsuyama-machi district in northern Nagasaki. The blast hurled him 125 feet into a rice paddy.

He was knocked out and lost track of time.

"For me, it happened in a fleeting dreamlike instant."

But the dream was reality. Skin on his arms "had peeled off and was hanging down like a torn shirt from my fingertips."

The open wounds were blood red, but there was no pain.

"I told myself that it was only a minor burn and that a little ammonia tincture would cure everything."

All around him and his friends "was a terrible scene ... men and women who had been working in fields hideously burned ... they came down from the hillsides screaming and crying."

Overhead, Yoshida heard the sounds of an airplane engine. "We must hide!" he told his friends and scrambled into a grove of burning trees. He pulled charred weeds over his wounded body, and he began to hurt.

The engine noise faded and Yoshida and his friends looked at, but barely recognized, each other. "We were changed."

"My face was swelling so quickly that I could feel it growing larger."

He wanted to go home. He tried to move but could not.

"A steady stream of people filed past us over the hills. ... I can never forget the pathetic cries of the many people on the verge of death.

"My friends and I joined in the chorus of screams for water, but nobody stopped to listen. They could think of nothing but finding refuge.

"I could see through my swollen eyelids, but remained unable to move. A small creek nearby was filled with people trying to take a drink. Many of them died with their faces in the water, and others stepped over the growing pile of corpses without the slightest hesitation."

Before long, his face was so bloated he could not force his eyes open.

Darkness set in and the friends remained squatted. "We did not know what else to do.

"Whenever someone passed, I spoke out in the direction of the footsteps: 'Is the neighborhood near Suwa Shrine damaged?' The answer was always the same: 'The whole city is destroyed.' "

The next morning, the sun sizzled down on his torn body. "It fried me more - it was a feeling of torture I can never forget."

That afternoon, he was found by a rescue team from the nearby city of Isahaya. They carried him on a wooden stretcher to his school nearby, which had been turned into a field hospital.

There, maggots were picked from his wounds, which were then covered with bandages and cream. He was left on the ground to sleep.

The next day, his mother found him.

"She came to where I was, calling my name over and over again. I answered, but she could not believe it was me when she saw my body."

Yoshida leaned on his mother as they trudged through the scorched ruins to their home on a hill near the ancient Suwa Shrine. That hillside protected his family from the nuclear blast.

When he arrived, he passed out. His mother bathed his fevered body until he regained consciousness three days later.

For a while, Yoshida received medical treatment at Sinkozen - another school turned emergency hospital.

But proper treatment didn't start until Nov. 1, when he was taken by train to a hospital in nearby Omura.

He endured three skin grafts during his year there.

But pain did not end.

"My gruesome scars attracted stares from everyone. I could feel people's eyes on me - and felt terrible shame and hatred for war.

"For a long time, I felt utterly hopeless. Even going to get a haircut was too great a hardship - and I asked the barber to come to my house on his holiday."

Hope returned slowly.

"Eventually, I realized hopeless thinking would only make me more and more miserable, and I made up my mind to strive with all my energy."

He eventually found work at a food wholesale company, married and, with his now dead wife, raised two sons. He now beams with pride over one grandson.

But scars remain. Thick keloid covers his face where his skin bubbled in the heat. And he is haunted by the memory of the deaths of his seven friends during the first eight weeks after the blast.

"It all seems like a terrible nightmare now."