Perhaps the most iconic photograph from the attack on Pearl Harbor: the battleship U.S.S. Arizona suffers a hit to her magazine by a Japanese torpedo.
1,177 sailors and officers perished aboard the Arizona. To this day, most of them are still there.
Today, seventy years later, there are approximately six thousand who survived the Pearl Harbor attack who are still among us.
Remembering them on this 70th anniversary, as well as those who died that day and those who have passed on since....
“The good die young.”
Those were the words of my grandmother, twenty-five years ago this evening. And when those words were the most semblance of comfort that an eleven-year old kid had to grasp – even if he didn’t really understand what it meant at the time – on what was at the time the absolute worst day of his life…
…well, they kinda stick with ya, even a quarter century later.
Heck, I can even still remember what I was wearing that day, what Granny was wearing, the most miserable dinner of pizza that I would ever have, all of the vehicles like neighbors’ cars and the ambulance and the deputy sheriff cruisers that descended on our farm that afternoon. I can even tell you what show that I watched on television that night, trying and failing to lose myself, to stop thinking about it all…
…but most of ...