December 07, 2006
The First 9-11~~ Pearl Harbor Dec 7 1941
Stately palms the break water at Lilioukalani Park Hilo Hawaii
" We lived near Schofield Barracks, on Oahu...It was horrible, the planes were flying, shooting at anything that moved. We were playing outside, I was so small looking up and smiling at the shining planes with the red circles on them, Until my older brother grabbed me and dragged me under our house, which was up on post and peirs. People men and women were screaming... I could hear my mother crying, saying "What will become of us.." she knew...She knew...."
...I was sitting in my little jewelry store listening in fascination as a very elderly Japanese woman told me of that moment when her innocence ended... Of how the soilders came and interrogated every member of her poor plantation bred family, and how they were shunned by the Chinese, Portuguese and Flippino families that had been friendly neighbors just the day before. Many, native citizens of the Territory of Hawaii,found their lives in shambles. Some were turned out of their humble dwellings and lost their jobs even as they proclaimed their loyalty to the flag of the United states of America.
Some of the first Internement\Interrogation "camps" for American citizens and POW camps in the US were set up on the Big Island. Kilauea Military Camp being one of them. Located inside Hawaii Volcanoes Natl Park, the area landscape was some of the most forbidding in all of the United States. A moonscape of razor sharp lava fields, impossibly deep lava tubes, and plunging cliffs all surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. Prison in Paradise... You can still see the tiny huts, converted into vacation cottages now for visiting tourists. Groups of school kids go for a week at a time. ( they served a lovely steak dinner, family style on sunday nights... Woody and I visited often. ) We will never know all that went on there, but the facility its self is a bitter reminder of the ugliness of war.
Woody and I both have been aboard the floating Battleship Arizona memorial, as well as the Battleship Missouri, now decommissioned and serving as a floating museum... The Second World War affected both of us radically differently,My father was a veteren while his parents were living in Panama and were not directly affected by the war at all. As far as we know we had no casualties in either family from it. But it was still very moving to see a small memorial service as the ashes of yet another veteren that survived the attack on the Arizona were lowered into the hull of the shattered vessel to rest with his fallen shipmates, a tribute and a honor allowed only those few that served aboard that great ship, and lived to tell the tale...As they rang the bell I thought that there are so few left of these men and now years later there are almost none left to remind us...
I say all of this to say that there are those of us Americans that have not forgotten. That we remember that day, that moment that changed our country. I know that there will be little mention of it, which is really sad. We are really not so far removed from that morning, it was not that long ago. It could happen again, oh, it did happen... on another shore with our own aircraft. How can we forget?
Its easy.. it seems.. We can just change the channel, and go on with our lives as though the Terror really doesnt exsist after all...
Until the next time...
