I see this picture of the capsized USS Oklahoma during the raid on Pearl Harbor, and a personal memory comes to mind. About 2 years ago, I traveled with my father to a tiny little town in Florida called Sevilla. There lives my great-aunt Marjorie. She's an old woman who lives alone in a tiny house with a view of a creek in the back. I was 25 when I met her for the first time....my father didn't come from the most loving parents and Marjorie was my fathers main caretaker his first years of life. I was nervous meeting her because first of all, I didn't know who she really was. Secondly, she scared me with her number one house rule when she heard me and my dad speaking Spanish to each other:
"NO FAH-REN-AHS IN HEYAH--YOUS KNOW BETTA"
Uhm, actually. I had no clue we weren't allowed to speak anything but English in her home. So, I sat there, sinking in to her couches when I started looking at all the cool stuff on her wall. She's got a lot of memorabilia from WWII--especially Pearl Harbor. Turns out that her husband was on the USS Oklahoma when our fine nation was attacked by Japan. The only reason that he was one of 30-someodd people who survived the attack is because he was able to escape the ship through a PORTHOLE. Once he made it through that, he had to swim in the gassy, oily waters trying to save as many people as he possibly could and get them to land. I have no idea how successful he was at that , but I do know that he had nightmares about Pearl Harbor til the day he died in 1982. The way his skin was burned, and how charred his lungs became during that day 64 years ago today...it's a marvel he lived so many years afterwards. Lung cancer took his life.
So, I came across this picture above of a capsized Oklahoma, and wonder where my great uncle was in that moment, in that picture? I can only try to imagine the sheer horror of that day, and the ensuing day to day horror he'd have to live out honorably in the name of our nation for the rest of his life.
There are so many people who disagree with my views about the war on terrorism, and the reason why we are in Iraq. Knowing my US history has really helped me to develop the correlation bewtween 12/07/41 and 9/11/01. Both times we had no clue an attack was going to happen until it was too late to stop it. Both entries into their respective wars didn't start until we were attacked on our own soil. In the end, both of those wars are going to be considered 'great wars' in American history, even though being in Iraq and Afghanistan isn't a popular idea, but it is necessary....but that's a whole 'nother post for another time.
