Pearl Harbor

We woke up early on Veteran’s Day to catch our tour bus. It was a nice, cozy size - 20 people - and our driver was fun.

We left Waikiki just as the sun came up out of the ocean. I swear it came up almost exactly where it had gone down the night before. My sense of direction is pretty good on the mainland, but the island is a magnetic anomaly or something. Like the House of Mystery.

Our first stop was Pearl Harbor. I’m just going to say this right out -- I don’t like war stuff. I was going to sit happily on the bus while the other people toured the memorial, but the bus driver chased me out.

First we watched the flag being raised. Our bus driver then stood on the podium and briefed us about the rest of the day.

Greg explained the schedule to us and how we could beat it. If we sat on the left side of the auditorium, for example, we’d be first on the boat after the movie. “Sit on the right side of the boat,” he said, “for the best pictures.” If we followed his instructions, and got back to the bus promptly every time, he promised he’d treat us by stopping at a couple of extra spots. What a thing to tell a busload of people from South Dakota and some miscellaneous over-achievers! At every stop we were in our seats right on the minute. Well, except for the one time I was a little late and Jon had to come get me. (Bob was too busy rolling his eyes.)

The facilities at Pearl Harbor are being reconstructed, so there are a lot of high fences to obstruct the view. That’s was OK for me, I didn’t need to see more torpedoes and submarines. These are monuments that list the ships that were sunk.


In the theater, there was a 60-minute film that told some history behind the war. It had lots of shots of the ships being blown up in the harbor. This was in the days before everyone had a cell phone with video capability, you recall, so how did that happen? The Japanese were filming the bombing from their planes.

The whole experience is weird. There you are watching a movie that has clips from superpatriotic times, when the Japanese were clearly the enemy. The park ranger who introduces the movie is a Japanese-American. At any other time or place, I wouldn’t even have noticed this. The fellow is simply a gracious, knowledgeable speaker, and these days only people in turbans stand out as "different." But it was uncomfortable. There were a lot of Japanese tourists in the audience, too. Bob said, “It was awkward, it was like I didn’t want to look at them and maybe make them feel bad.”

From the theater we were loaded onto a boat that went across the small harbor to the memorial that sits on top of the sunken ship Arizona. The movie host had asked us to be respectful and use the occasion to do some self-reflection. I think we all did. Bob did.



As I watched the incredible mixture of people, I remembered something Bob once said: governments can’t manipulate people into war situations as easily anymore because we’re all connected on the internet. We regular people have too much in common to believe the propaganda that we should be enemies. Is that Pollyanna? Here are two Japanese tourists, two mainlanders (one a Mennonite lady from Ohio - I talked to her), and a young man in the military. All deep in thought.


We all pick out the things we want to hear. What I heard was that a lot of regular people on both sides of a war die because they don’t question their leaders. And I have to wonder, why do we put up with that? Is it always going to be this way? After a few years, no one is right or wrong, they’re just dead.

Pearl Harbor put me in a bad mood, but that was just the first stop.