My years in the U.S. Navy included an assignment at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Every morning for months, I parked my car at Halawa landing and took the ferry to my job on Ford Island. The ferry slipped past the Arizona Memorial, no more than a few dozen yards distant, on water which always showed the tell-tale oil still leaking from the rusting hull underwater. In the afternoon, it was the same ferry ride in reverse.
USS Arizona (BB-39) Memorial
I believe that most service members who rode the Ford Island ferry felt a same underlying sense of solemnity, knowing that beneath the Memorial, to this day, are more than eleven hundred entombed sailors. Here is a place of historical importance. A place for respectfulness. A place of honor.
No less than the "shot heard 'round the world" at Lexington or the first cannon volley at Fort Sumter, the attack on battleship row at Ford Island in Pearl Harbor 65 years ago today was a threshold in American history. The day before, America was isolationist, coming out of the Great Depression, and ignoring the belligerence in Asia and Europe. The day after, America was in World War II. It happened before I was born and, although it sounds nonsensical, I'll never forget the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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