Lest We Forget

Wednesday is the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It was and still is a tragic occurrence, even for those of us who were not born yet.

Every year we remember the men who died at Pearl Harbor, and we should. But did you know that women and children experienced the terror, too?

This summer I purchased a copy of The Children of Battleship Row,* which is a memoir by Joan Zuber Earle. Her father was a major in the Marines, and in 1940 he was assigned to Oahu in the then territory of Hawaii. His family went with him, and they moved onto Ford Island and into a house just yards from Pearl Harbor.

A year later, nine-year-old Joan and her sister, Peggy, were living an idyllic existence. Then came December 7, 1941.

Joan and Peggy had been helping their mother prepare the pork roast that was to go into the oven before they left for church. The sisters were still in their pajamas when they were interrupted by smoke rising from the nearby ships and bullets raining from strange airplanes. Bullets they had to dodge as they ran for their assigned shelter.

But as they passed the Bachelor Officers' Quarters (the BOQ), the men beckoned them inside to get away from the falling bullets. I'll pick up Joan's narrative after they entered the kitchen.

"Get under something!" said a male voice. Peggy scuttled under the kitchen sink. Mother and I crawled under the large wooden kitchen table in the center of the room. Huddle, hide, we are safe for a minute, my brain recorded.

Whomp!!!!!  An explosion louder than any crack of thunder or volcanic eruption shook the building, immediately followed by a rain of fire. Even from under the table where I was kneeling, I could see clearly out the kitchen windows. The familiar greenery outside the building was obliterated. On three sides, flaming material now filled the sky. Peggy could see as well from where she was crouched. The BOQ's on fire, I thought. The BOQ's on fire! We're going to be trapped in here and burned up.

I'd never been a screamer, but now I became hysterical. I felt sure that the roof over our heads was already in flames. Stark terror swallowed me. I began yelling words I thought I would never say, "I hate Ford Island. I hate Ford Island. I want to go back to the mainland!"

Mother, kneeling next to me, held my shaking body in her arms. For some reason, she was not screaming, nor was my sister. But I have never fully recovered from what my mother said next: "Don't cry, Joan. Don't cry. Marines don't cry. Don't ruin the morale of the men."

I stopped. After that, I turned my screams inward, becoming mute in my terror.

Joan and her family survived Pearl Harbor. But it took an emotional toll that I can't even imagine.

December 7, 1941 affected the men who died. It affected their families and friends. It affected those who lived through it. And it affects each of us because, as my distant ancestor said, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."**

So let us never forget Pearl Harbor.

__________
*Although I highly recommend The Children of Battleship Row, it appears to be out of print. And nobody can pry my copy out of my fingers to borrow it.

** From "Meditation XVII" by John Donne.

Invincible?

Most of us know where we were and what we were doing on September 11, 2001. At least most Americans do.

I was at work in Chicago. More specifically, I was in a managers' meeting with a video-conference hook-up to our New York office, located two blocks from the World Trade Center. As we were getting ready to start the meeting, the manager of the New York office asked if we heard the news reports that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. Then a few minutes later he told us that his building was being evacuated, and he left abruptly.

All of our New York employees escaped physical injury, although it was months before the space was usable again. One of our board members was among the casualties, as was Windows on the World--at the top of one of the towers--where we held our New York board meetings. (I got stuck in an elevator on the way up there once.) But in spite of all the human casualties, it could have been a lot worse. It is truly amazing how many people got out safely.

Why was 9/11 such an emotional event? Yes, we lost approximately 3,000 lives (including the deaths at the Pentagon and on the four airplanes), and that is indeed a tragedy.* But everyone dies, and many deaths are unexpected. According to the Department of Transportation, 37,261 people died in traffic accidents in 2008. That's over 100 deaths EVERY DAY. And be grateful you don't live in Iraq or Afghanistan, where death is a way of life.

So why was 9/11 such an emotional event? Because we lost our sense of security. We thought we were invincible within our own borders. We hadn't seen such aggression on U.S. land since Pearl Harbor, which had the same emotional impact because we had been sitting in our own territory and minding our own business.

It wasn't always that way.

On our vacation, Roland and I visited three forts on the Mississippi River. We started at Fort D, located in downtown Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Fort D is one of four Union forts built to protect the city during the Civil War. The biggest enemy its opponents fought was boredom because the only battle in the area occurred west of the city. But the country knew that it was vulnerable within its borders, and it was prepared.

Fort Kaskaskia is one of two forts near Chester, Illinois on the other side of the river. The fort was made of earthworks and wood, so all that is left are mounds where earthen walls used to be. Fort Kaskaskia was occupied from 1703-1763 by the French, then by the British until the Revolutionaries captured it in 1778, and it was last used in the War of 1812 (by the Americans).

Our final stop was Fort de Chartres, pictured above. This fort had a long history of French occupation during the days when France claimed the territory, but the French surrendered the fort (and the Illinois territory) to Great Britain in the mid 1760s. Great Britain abandoned the fort in 1771, and the Americans never used it.

As the very existence of these forts shows, Americans (and their predecessors in this land) have not always felt invincible. Once upon a time, we realized that we were in danger from all sides, and we learned to prepare for it and deal with it when it came. Yes, there were surprises, but they did not affect us as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 did.

My point?

America's greatest vulnerability is its conviction that it is not vulnerable.



* According to the 9/11 Commission Report, more than 2,600 people died at the World Trade Center, 125 died at the Pentagon, and 256 died on the four airplanes.