Pearl Harbor Day

We were discussing how there doesn't seem to be much emotional impact any more to our remembrance of Pearl Harbor. I tend to agree. I think that, as the years pass and history lengthens between today and Dec 7th, 1941, the emotional impact of WWII as a whole diminishes, and specifically Pearl Harbor. The Middle East conflicts notwithstanding, young adults today have no inkling of a clue what it was like to live through Vietnam, losing friends and brothers and sons to the draft and then to a war somewhere-we-never-heard-of. How, then, can they share the grief of a long-ago war called WWII, and our entrance into it with Pearl Harbor? Perhaps the closest this generation can come to those feelings are those we share about 9/11.

For me, however, Pearl Harbor and WWII remains quite close to the surface of who I am. My father was a P-51 and P-38 fighter pilot in the European theater. He was shot down and captured by the Russians, who didn't want to believe he was an American. I grew up watching many WWII movies and documentaries, listening to my father's stories, and how war was hell - literally. It made me proud to be his daughter.

We were sent to Hickam Air Force Base on the island of Oahu when I was 5 years old (1960). We left Oahu when I was 10 years old. On the air base, many, many of the concrete buildings still wore the badges of the pock-marked pits of strafing bullets from attacking enemy fighter planes. I remember to this day, laying in the grass with my face to the sun, looking up and wondering what made those holes. My father said war made those holes.

That's how I remember Pearl Harbor Day. It is a long way between 1941 and 2005.