Untitled Document

19 February 2001

Pearl

There is a big Hollywood blockbuster coming out this May. It will feature a host of angry computer-generated Zeros and Zekes swooping down on Oahu, on Pearl Harbor, on the home port of the Pacific Fleet. There will be digital bombs and torpedoes and great pyres of smoke made from 1's and 0's. The graphics are going to be fabulous- the future of motion pictures. We are transitioning from the time when you actually had to have something to take pictures of. In this digital age and with our enhanced information technology, reality is a product. That there is only one flying Zero-sen fighter left in the world makes no difference. Moviemakers can now summon up airwings of them on Silicon Graphics terminals. They can conjure up warships that were converted to razorblades a generation ago, place the actors upon their digital decks, and reality is whatever you want it to be.

Can't wait to see the flick. All the other depictions have been pretty lame. Remember "Tora, Tora, Tora?" I rest my case. The movie failed in large part because the paint they had available to place on the canvas - the piston-engined fighters, the ships bristling with guns- was too dull, too limited in color. It looked fake. Not enough reality was left to make the story believable.

But reality exists, still, and in the case of Pearl Harbor, it is lying exactly where it was left 60 years ago this year. I will tell you that there wasn't a single day of the 1,600 I spent on Oahu that went by without thinking of what happened shortly after seven AM on the seventh of December, 1941.

Under the legendary Hawaiian King, Kamahameha the Great, the small island in the middle of the tranquil bay was sold to a man named Ford for $10,000 dollars. There were many oysters there, and the lining of the shells was used to make shiny buttons that gleamed like pearls. Hence the name "Pearl Harbor."

The Navy owns all the land around the perimeter of the Harbor. In addition to the Pearl Harbor Naval Base proper, the shipyard, sub base and carrier piers, three peninsulas were occupied by Navy family housing.

My ex and I lived at the first of them, McGrew Point, counterclockwise from the carriers. We had a little bungalow, two bedrooms, a living room and a lanai. The Point had been built on fill dredged from the harbor, so that the big warships could come and go around Ford Island. We looked right down Battleship Row across the channel, where the capital ships of the Fleet once moored off Ford Island, rafted out two-by-two.

We left the island in 1984 for Washington, two small children in tow. Both of them born in the islands, children of the land, in Hawaiian "Kama A'ina.

Today the Congressional Staff Delegation is making a sentimental return to the Harbor. A sentimental journey, important for us to do it now and see it a last time. Winds of change more profound than a sneak-attack are going to blow through the Harbor and leave it unrecognizable.

The people responsible for the wind represent the unique dynamic of Hawaii. The Senate delegation when these things were set in motion was Spark Matsunaga and Dan Inoue. Both are masters of the pork barrel, military construction accounts in particular. The vacant real estate on Ford Island was an attractive thing, history be damned.

It could accommodate more building, a mall perhaps. Only a student of irony could fail to note that the architects of the transformation of the sleeping memorial to the Japanese attack would be Japanese Americans. And that both are wounded and highly-decorated American war heroes. And that their units were the most decorated in the Army's history- almost exclusively composed of Japanese American kids.

Ford Island was the epicenter of the Japanese attack, and it slipped into a dream years ago. Once a seaplane base, the airstrip lies under the approach to Hickam Air Force Base and the main runway of Honolulu International. With the demise of the seaplane, the airfield was deactivated.

The control tower still stands, red striped steel fading in the brilliant sun. You will remember it in the background of the photos of USS Arizona dying. Ford Island has been frozen in time. Hangar Six fell down a couple years ago, the one immortalized with the smoking wreckage of aircraft in front. Arizona is, of course, right where she was, a tomb for 1,200 sailors and her Admiral.

The graceful white arch across her is reached not from the island, but by small boats from the mainland. On the waterfront some of the thick steel cables used to haul USS Oklahoma right-side up again are still tangled on the beach. The little bungalows still doze under the palm trees. The Air Corps flight line buildings still line the west side of the field, and the headquarters and dispensary are still neatly lined up on the company street.

When I worked on the island, it was only accessible by the Ford Island Ferry. The dozen families who lived there were totally dependent on the hourly transit to get their cars ashore. Workers like me could also board the utility boats that launched more frequently from the Naval Base. There were two ferries in the inventory, and when the Island was a busier place they ran on a half-hour schedule.

But nature abhors a peaceful vacuum, and the Senators were relentless. First, they sponsored appropriations to build a long causeway to connect the island to the Kamahameha Highway.

It is a wonderful piece of work, low and swooping. Cost millions. It has a guard post on it, but if they can pry the island out of the Navy's hands, there is a potential bonanza for developers. The Brass shrugged, never a particularly history-conscious lot, and was happy to mothball the expensive ferries. The bridge cuts across navigation lane around the island, the path that USS Nevada took, firing desperately as she made her desperate run for the channel and the open sea.

December 7th, 1941, America was not at war. We were at peace. Onboard, Chaplains awoke early to get ready for holy services. Mess cooks rose to begin to cook masses of eggs, rashers of bacon, and vats of potatoes for the crews. It was Sunday, the day of rest. The sun was soft, as it is there in the most lovely of the Hawaiian islands. The breeze was gentle, and the palm fronds drifted in the warm breeze. The waters of the Harbor sparkled blue.

The Sailors that rose early walked on the decks of the mighty ships and admired the view of the Waianai Mountains to the west, and of the Ko'olau Mountains to the north and east. The Sailors who were hung over from their trips to Hotel Street enjoyed the only morning of the week when the big loudspeakers didn't crackle to life at 0600 and demand that they "Shake down and trice up! Sweep down all major Passageways! Now commence Ship's business!"

In the stillness of a Sunday morning the mountains are majestic volcanic icons, colored in brilliant greens and wreathed in clouds. There is a gap between them, and it was through this gap that a watchful Sailor could hear the whine of aircraft engines, aircraft launched in the pre-dawn from Japanese aircraft carriers to the northwest of O'ahu. Holy services were in progress under the tropical awnings rigged on the sterns of the big ships. It was just past seven o'clock, and the world ended.

The Japanese planes left the Harbor a smoking carnage. The Dispensary- the first aid clinic- took a 500-pound bomb in the courtyard. It was also used as a makeshift morgue for the dead. I know that it is haunted, because I shared a bunkroom in the old building, staying overnight when I had the duty at the THIRD Fleet.

One night I awoke, but only partly. I was looking down at my own body in my bed from the upper corner of the dark room. I was looking at myself through someone else's eyes, and I did not know who. But I was not afraid. I knew it was someone that I had something in common with. I knew whoever it was, was lost and scared.

Two ships were left behind by the Japanese. One was the USS Utah, a former battleship converted to a target ship. The Japanese were confused in the heat of the battle, and wasted torpedoes and bombs to sink her. Only forty men died in her, but she is still there, on her side, with her portholes looking sadly to the sky.

The other is the Arizona. She was a proud ship, and 1,213 men lie within her hull, including her Admiral. She was ready for sea when the armor-piercing bomb rattled down her smokestack and detonated in her magazine and blew her bottom out and killed her thousand Sailors instantly. She, too, is still there, and her full oil tanks leak drops of fuel to this day, leaving a sheen behind her that washes down to the channel and out into the Pacific. It is like she is still crying for her dead.

Last year, the Hawaii Delegation scored a second coup. The Navy de-commissioned the mighty USS Missouri, the most powerful battleship ever built, and made her available as a memorial ship to any city willing to guarantee her upkeep. San Francisco thought they h her, but her Senators were not the ranking members on the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.

Although the world of technology has passed Missouri by, she is the most magnificent specimen of her breed ever built. In her day, as the mushroom cloud loomed over a new world being born, she was so powerful a symbol that she was chosen for the special honor of having the Japanese sign their complete and unconditional surrender to the Allies on her deck in 1945.

She is the other thing that will change Ford Island forever. She was towed across the Pacific and is now moored in the berth where Oklahoma once lay. Just to the south of the buoy that marks the stern of the Arizona.

And there, in Pearl Harbor, is the first of it, and the last of it….for America, anyway. It is reality, and it is not digital.