National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl
(Honolulu, Hawaii)
Twenty-four WWII veterans, 23 of them Pearl Harbor survivors, were at Punchbowl cemetery Friday, December 9. Their visit to the cemetery was part of a trip organized by the Denver based The Greatest Generations Foundation to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.CBS issued a statement expressing shock and promised to look into the matter. The veterans are pissed and want an apology.
While at Punchbowl the vets were honored for their service and given time to visit grave markers of comrades killed in combat.
As the vets entered the cemetery they saw a team from Hawaii Five-O preparing to shoot a scene for an upcoming episode.
"They were on the graves, and that rubbed some of the Veterans the wrong way with all of the camera equipment and the audio and the people walking over the graves. But we did our ceremony, and just as the day progressed last Friday just disrespect after disrespect," said Steffan Tubbs, a member of the board at The Greatest Generations Foundation.
Tubbs said people on the TV production crew were noisy and kept moving about while the national anthem and taps were played. Worse yet according to Tubbs is that Five-O workers stopped vets from placing roses on the graves of unknown soldiers.
"There was a production guy with a back pack and an ear piece kind of walking at various points close to a vet and then he'd go away and then he come back through the group and he was hushing them and telling them to ‘hurry it up' … in other words because the production was going on. I saw it. I couldn't believe it. It was the ultimate disrespect and it got everybody's blood boiling," Tubbs told Hawaii News Now.
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