Posted by
EWRoss on Monday, December 07, 2009 7:00:00 AM
As a US Army Captain, I was
stationed on Oahu, Hawaii, in the mid-1970s. Our house in Pearl
City overlooked Pearl Harbor. In the military
and later as a civilian working for the Department of Defense, I visited Hawaii dozens of times
until I retired from government service in 2007.
Living there and visiting so often,
I had a different perspective, of course, than the tourist who only visits Hawaii once or twice.
Still, I couldn't drive by the USS Arizona Memorial or, after 1998, the
battleship USS Missouri without remembering the events of December 7, 1941. And
I couldn't stand on either and look down at the sunken hulk of the USS Arizona
with oil still seeping from it and where bodies of 1102 of the 1177 sailors
remain entombed without thinking about what it must have been like that day.
I was only a few hundred yards
from from the Pentagon on September, 11, 2001. I heard the plane crash
into the building, saw the column of smoke, and smelled the burning jet fuel. A
few months later when I visited Hawaii,
I went again to the Arizona Memorial. This time I had an even deeper
understanding of the shock and surprise the men of the Arizona must have experienced.
With each passing year, the memory
of that "day of infamy" fades further in the American consciousness.
For many, it's becomes just another tourist attraction. A nation at war, America would
do well to keep the memories of the attacks of December 7, 1941 and September
11, 2001 alive.
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