The Golden Pearl

...The others were returned to service, but she was too far gone for that, and so in 1947 she was towed east toward a scrapyard...

...A contingent of former marines actually marches, in time, looking smart...

...We crushed totalitarianism...

...Thurston Clarke argues that the Hawaiian islands' explosive development in recent years makes it "easy to overlook how their beauty unhinged the purpose of their defenders...

...He was making him a lunch to go hiking, and of course he got blown to bits...

...Bush cannot, without choking up, get through his second-to-last paragraph, in which he describes how the harbor's water, "in what now seems another lifetime . . . wrapped its arms around the finest sons any nation could ever have...

...I have no rancor in my heart towards Germany or Japan—none at all...

...Don Larsen, who was on the, Utah, follows him to the microphone in his aloha shirt, looking like any happy, healthy retiree on his Hawaiian vacation...

...Among the latter is one from the mess hall, which he says could seat 900 airmen at once: "A kid from my hometown was there...

...As if in protest against such a fate, she sank a second time, before arriving at her destination, and she's never been raised since...

...Then Edward I. Ichiyama, once Pacific Area manager for the Social Security administration, talks of the "very tragic constitutional failure" of the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, including his American-citizen wife, whose brother was in the United States Army...

...I can remember, years ago, hearing the man who had once been Sgt...

...No, he just got a haircut before returning to his mother's house, which he'd last seen in 1942, and going to bed...

...The simple monument to the sunken USS Utah, which lies off the far side of Ford Island, is sometimes called the Forgotten Memorial...

...It's generational...

...The Japanese planes, says Johnson, would fly down behind the hangars...

...Under a broiling sun, attendants pass cups of water to the older members of the sparse crowd...

...It is history...

...Some strapped pistols over pajamas—fought, and died...

...Aerial photographs of the whole arrangement are eerily spectacular...

...Some of those arriving on Flight 1 might beg to differ, like the oil drops still rising from the Arizona, and the Allied bomb, buried near Leibnitz, Germany, which on the evening of Wednesday, December 4, according to Friday's Honolulu Advertiser, suddenly exploded, injuring two people and leaving a twenty-foot-deep crater...

...While she was still on the bottom of Pearl Harbor, some of the sailors trapped inside made marks on the bulkhead showing that they lived on until at least Christmas Eve...

...In the Shrine Room, beneath,a tablet bearing the names of all the men still below, are small floral tributes sent from the VFW posts of little towns all across the country...

...but within moments he is sobbing...

...mention of a Hawaiian boy who died in Desert Storm...

...What's visible of the shipwreck is so badly rusted and rotted that it probably won't last much longer...

...They reacted by instinctively rushing to their posts...

...On December 7, 1941, the PHSA's Utah state chairman was aboard the USS Medusa, a repair ship anchored about a mile away from the Utah...

...Her death, if untimely, was not the robbery of youth suffered by most of those who died inside her...

...ack at Pearl, as 7:55 B a.m...

...Whenever one of the sudden showers falls, you can duck into the McDonald's (offering the McTeri-Burger Deluxe, as in teriyaki), and re-emerge to hear a small cheering section of older women break into one more round of "Let's Remember Pearl Harbor...

...That is, did he allow the catastrophe to take place because he saw it as the certain way to get America into the war...

...Looking out through his trifocals, he tells me: "One thing that stands out in my memory is, after the ship started rolling over, I was talking to one of the shipmates there, and he says, `Well, there's one thing about it...

...The PHSA is taking care to assure its perpetuation, General Matthews soothes the rawness by summing things up in military-speak: "What a stressful, difficult, challenging experience was had by all who were present...

...Louis are filled, and a traveler can look forward over dozens of septuagenarian heads—gray or bald, and capped with PHSA headgear—sticking above the seatbacks...

...What we had left wasn't worth a dime...

...The statistics, like the instructional safety film that preceded them hours ago, carry the mind to the focal point of this anniversary, the sunken USS Arizona, which, at the bottom of the harbor, beneath its memorial, still holds what remains of three times as many men as are on this Thomas Mallon:s most recent book is the novel Aurora 7 (Ticknor & Fields...

...The wind whips pleasantly as the short talks get underway, led by a master of ceremonies who is actually Air Force: General Matthews is here because his father served on the Utah in the First World War, before moving to his ship's namesake state...

...The President would say yes, but individual psychologies keep their own timetables...

...There is probably nothing wrong with their history-minded presence—after all, even the DAR (two prissy old gals in a convertible) is here—but one has to wonder if this isn't something other than historical consciousness, if it isn't a peculiar species of co-dependency...

...The PHSA'S clout is such that Emory, not Miyazawa, is sitting between George and Barbara Bush this morning on the Arizona...

...Neither the microphone nor the rhetoric is turned up high...

...The information is not so much hidden as hiding, which somehow makes the thrilling, sickening event forever about to take place...

...Survivors gathered dismembered arms and legs from roofs and trees...

...Nowadays a lot of Navy men can be seen jogging around the base, making one realize that if an aerial attack were to happen in 1991, many would be strafed to death in their Nikes instead of killed below deck while sleeping off Saturday night...

...What he's liked least about this current trip is the jam-packed overdevelopment of Waikiki and the talk he hears of how it was the Navy that really won the war...

...As on December 7, 1941, there are no aircraft carriers here, and aside from some submarines that make this their port, the harbor is filled mostly with destroyers and frigates...

...Their postwar upward mobility took them by surprise—and eventually on retirement trips like this one...

...The only unusual sound was the departing roar of Air Force One...

...In this case immediate relief comes when the song is sung a second time, to quick, peppy, musical accompaniment, by a children's choir...

...For the Pearl Harbor contingent it is always 7:54 a.m...

...General Matthews soothes the rawness by summing things up in military-speak: "What a stressful, difficult, challenging experience was had by all who were present...

...A pattern meant to depict the Treeof Life has been cut into it, but the resulting shapes seem, at least from a distance, peculiarly like Japanese ideograms...

...There is no applause until it is over, and an hour will pass before one realizes that George Bush's problem is not an absence of emotions but a surfeit...

...I could see them as they went by...

...Any sort of boasting about this, during the past two years, as its inevitability grew clear, has been almost forbidden by some national feeling of what is proper...

...But the speech he gives is a litany of victims—the radiation sufferers of 1945, the blond German youth he saw lying dead...

...Or maybe a few musicians who decided to stay and jam after tonight's "Battle of Music...

...We healed their wounds and in the process, we lifted ourselves up...

...If satellites had existed fifty years ago, no one would be here now, but any reporters wishing to ride up to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific—the Punchbowl, located in the crater of an extinct volcano—will have to be on the bus by 3:00 a.m., with instructions that, of the more than 36,490 graves there, only those of Ernie Pyle and Col...

...The Arizona memorial is judged by Thurston Clarke, not unfairly, to be lacking in "the necessary morbidity, the power to move even the most ignorant to tears...

...I got my butt scratched a little bit with barnacles . . ." Eventually he was transferred to the USS Detroit, where he "continued to do [his] twenty...

...It was the last strike that hit the barracks...

...The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, looking much as it did when it opened in 1927, is ready with mai tais for survivor and sybarite alike...

...He was a cook, but he wasn't on duty that day...

...visitors have to ride the regular naval ferry out to Ford and then cross the island to the site of the wreck...

...Few veterans in the crowd on Kilo 8 remember hearing news of Pearl Harbor while "walking across the green at school," namely Andover, as Bush recalls doing after he and the First Lady are ferried over from the Arizona memorial...

...His best moment comes when he gets suddenly personal, philosophical, the way one might with friends of a lifetime some summer night on a front porch...

...Lawrence Carlson was his name...

...Ichiyama and all five of his brothers and brothers-in-law received Purple Hearts, and no one would think of denying him the title the printed program gives him—"Distinguished American...

...38 The American Spectator March 1992 through an offshoot called the SDPHS—the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors...

...On early Thursday evening the memorial's deck is strewn with television cables for live feeds to the mainland, and at 5:30 its circular floor lights come startlingly to life, as if switched by those below...

...But we don't...

...What will their reaction be—the other old vets—especially those who survived that terrible day right here...

...He also contributes, much to the liking of the PHSA, to the continuing alchemy of Pearl Harbor from debacle into triumph, speaking of the "Heroes of the Harbor," men who "did not panic" but "raced to their stations...

...He acknowledges "lots of good memories, and a lot of bad memories...

...At 10:00 this morning, outside the Arizona Memorial Visitor Center, the 111th Army Band is playing at a ceremony that includes the laying of wreaths against masts symbolizing the nine state-named battleships damaged or sunk in the attack...

...Ford was decommissioned as a naval air station in the spring of 1962, just weeks before the dedication of the Arizona memorial...

...The occasion permitted no reference to what another President called the "long twilight Sharing a memory frequently spoken by survivors, he says he "could see those guys sitting, the two of them in each plane, just sitting there, their heads...

...I got blown up in the air and I sort of came down on my neck and shoulder, and it felt like the shoes had gone off of my feet...

...The girl will never know she's been made a surrogate Japanese for one of the many nervous little ethnic jokes the week produces...

...The President would say yes, but individual psychologies keep their own timetables...

...Nonetheless, there is something to be said for trying to remember feelings once felt...

...There is a paragraph apologizing for the internment of JapaneseAmericans...

...What did he do...

...This afternoon, before stepping off the tour boat to enter it, one older man takes the trouble to comb his hair...

...Their blood soaked the ground and blackened the grass...

...The Utah was one of the first ships hit...

...But the eager self-love with which the word is spoken into talk-show microphones cannot entirely dilute the word's power, and during early December, as it appeared stenciled and stitched on hundreds of aging chests and heads, the term surely still had meaning...

...The presidential motorcade makes its timed arrival at sunrise, blue-and-white signal lights flashing like sparklers, up along the esplanade, past the flags, past the crowds from the charter buses...

...The younger Garn, a naval aviator in the 1950s, used to land seaplanes here, and twenty years ago, as mayor of Salt Lake City, he came to the memorial's dedication...

...If the book on Pearl Harbor remains a bit rancorously open, that's not so bad as a wrongheaded rush to Bitburg...

...The Utah was an old ship...

...Approaching the Utah from the water, one sees the side of her that wasn't visible during the Ford Island ceremony...

...Up at Punchbowl he is husbanding them for what lies ahead, uncomfortable with the implied idea that it is impermissible to think of carnage suffered without also thinking of carnage dealt...

...Nonetheless, some of the men flying home in this steel tube, away from all those sunken ones, must be taking satisfaction in the news, heard on hotel televisions as they undressed after last night's dinner at the Sheraton, that the Soviet Union, born when most of them were, has for all intents and purposes ceased to exist...

...We won...

...The guide also directs attention to the three paths taken by the Japanese bombers, one of which runs right between the upper floors of two postwar skyscrapers...

...Anchored on two sides, it nowhere touches the sunken ship over which it floats, and for all its gracefulness is an odd-looking structure, a carved soapcake...

...I hope you have none in yours...

...Not really...

...One theme of discussion at the commemorations would be whether, fifty years later, the war was truly over...

...The American Spectator March 1992 37 When a new flag has been raised over the memorial, I ask Milton Matson, who'd been sitting under the canopy, about his own stressful morning fifty years ago...

...on that Sunday morning, a minute before the Japanese planes come through the clouds, just as for the JFK gumshoes the Hertz sign in Dealey Plaza says 12:29, not 12:30...

...Survivor" is a term embraced today by Americans claiming triumph over a host of humiliations ranging from incest to smoke in the workplace...

...Senator Jake Garn, whose own father was a World War I pilot, takes his turn at the lectern to recall his mother crying with fear, when news of Pearl Harbor came, that her husband would be called back into service...

...From Ford :sland the hulk seems like an accident...

...Her World War I service was well behind her, and she had not had battleship status since 1932...

...For the defenders of Pearl, heroism came as naturally as breath...

...he asked himself as the bombs started dropping, a reaction he says was "pretty typical": it could only be some sort of drill, everyone thought...

...That day was December 7, the day of what he refers to as the "blitz"—the bombing of the main barracks at Hickam...

...After his release in October '41, he continued to limp for a while, "but that day I don't remember limping...

...The askers of this question are not generally so flaky as the Kennedy conspiracy-theorists, but the motivating tendencies are the same...

...He first returned here in 1971 for the PHSA's national convention, and he's returned to the islands a number of times since...

...After some mournful music and taps, George Bush's speech seems strangely throwaway...

...The "Battle" was a re-creation of the December 6, 1941 band contest in which the Arizona's placed second, earning the right to sleep late—which would mean forever—below deck...

...The B17s, arriving later, would land amidst American antiaircraft fire...

...She took two torpedoes to starboard and fell over on port, sinking after only eleven minutes...

...There are no tourist shuttles to it, as there are to the Arizona...

...Even so, if he were still here, I suspect he would join in marveling at the world's growing resemblance to the envisioned one for which he was asked to fight...

...There is nothing exceptional about this speech other than the way in which it moves its speaker...

...There is something to this...

...The girl says, "Excuse me," but she was in a hurry, and the woman, upon noticing her Oriental features, can't stop herself from laughing and saying to the man next to her, "Still pushy...

...Alfred Preis, the Arizona memorial's designer, talks with the patriotic love of the refugee (in his case from NaziThe American Spectator March 1992 39 occupied Austria), thanking the United States for "having given me life...

...What are those army guys doing on a Sunday morning...

...A lot of men in this generation, no doubt because of the war, never had much taste for demonstrativeness in any case...

...and the President's remark that the Japanese expression of "deep remorse" is "much appreciated" by the United States is greeted with silence...

...Some junketing governors are here to see the flowers placed by a survivor from each of the ships...

...A marine bugler quietly rehearses taps, as the stars shine on in the night sky...

...He enunciates it precisely, making sure I've got it right...

...On the side of the island closest to what was once Battleship Row is a mix of older buildings (including a dispensary to which the wounded were dragged all day on December 7, 1941) and new construction...

...The spectrum of shiny colors it makes under the setting sun is pretty, though nothing to match the actual rainbow that has just dropped over the enormous ship nearby, the USS Missouri, which sailed into the harbor this morning, and upon which, forty-five months after the sinking of the Arizona, the Japanese empire surrendered to the United States of America...

...1 I am indebted to Clarke's book, Pearl Harbor Ghosts: A Journey to Hawaii Then and Now (William Morrow, 411 pages, $22), and to Stanley Weintraub's Long Day's Journey Into War: December 7, 1941 (Truman Talley Books/ Dutton, 706 pages, $26.95), for some of the historical background and detail in this essay...

...and it carried them to another, better world...

...The public rhetoric turns confidential: "I wondered: what will my reaction be when I go back to Pearl Harbor...

...It is, just as incongruously as fifty years ago, Christmas season, and on Friday night the Public Workers' Santa Parade will feature floats that are really city trucks from agencies like the Board of Water Supply...

...a cappella...

...They, too, are in the parade, in identifying red-and-white attire...

...Big flags brush the sides of the bus as it climbs and comes in sight of other buses, and more buses, and more still—all of them chartered to bring the survivors and their families up the mountain...

...General Short and Admiral Kimmel are still preparing for their Sunday-morning round of golf, and Jack and Jackie are still waving...

...The "moment of silence" would probably be happening without its being on the schedule...

...An orchestra practicing for the morning...

...We reached out, both in Europe and in Asia, and made our enemies our friends...

...Dedicated twenty years ago, the Forgotten Memorial is little more than a plaque, a flagpole, and an L-shaped dock from which to observe the half-submerged hulk...

...The pilot announces that the plane today weighed 734,000 pounds at takeoff, but now, descending toward Honolulu, is hundreds of thousands less, having burned off the fuel required to carry it here...

...but their actual purpose is more like the opposite...

...The parking lot behind the Consolidated Media Center is filled with satellite dishes for the morning's coverage...

...Aging men and women step out of them on balky knees and look around in down in the harbor...

...If they weren't survivors, if they hadn't lost buddies, if they had never seen war, never done anything more remarkable in their lives than go to the prom, they would still be touching, as evidence of what life does to all those who were once boys: it makes them old and then it makes them die...

...they've gotten it out as early as 4:00 in the morning to take groups around the harbor and to the Arizona memorial...

...I was asking the Fellow Up Above to help me get by or get through, and after that I always said, 'Well, if they never got me that day, they're never going to get me.'" Johnson would spend part of a long war—he was discharged in the summer of 1945—in the Gilbert Islands...

...The President's remarks memorably illustrate the way sincerity can redeem boilerplate...

...Like most of the ships that went down in the attack, she was eventually raised...

...have been anytime this weekend, for the Oklahoma lies 540 miles northeast of where she first sank after taking nine torpedoes on the morning of December 7, 1941...

...One notices the gun turrets sticking uselessly up through the water and the splintered, rotting teak wood on which the sailors walked through each peaceful day...

...During a lull, when some space opens up between units, one woman on the corner moves over to let a girl walking a bicycle cross the street...

...The sight of his old ship brings tired Don Larsen back to life, and he politely corrects a couple of the guide's mistakes...

...Fifty years later to the week, the skies over Oahu are once more crowded with aircraft flying west...

...Even so, one gets the feeling that what the combative Gerald Glaubitz said about Bush at Punchbowl a couple of hours ago is true: "He's one of us...

...I won't have to wash those damned dishes this morning.' " Matson slid down the side of the ship, holding on to a 10-inch hawser...

...On, Wednesday, December 4, all 433 passenger seats on Flight 1 from St...

...Their eastward flight path is taking them closer to the wreck of the USS Oklahoma than they struggle" of a "hard and bitter peace," the one that began with an expedient handshake over the Elbe...

...The first speaker actually does something like the opposite...

...Its small frame houses look much as they would have then...

...It remains for Bush to conjure the dead once more, this time to imagine words they might be speaking: "Don't you think they're saying: 'Fifty years have passed...

...What we actually do is: We Remember That We Remember Pearl Harbor...

...Even so, on Thursday morning, December 5, by which time the commemorations were underway, there were hundreds 36 The American Spectator March 1992 of sailors doing the same things sailors were getting ready to do on that long-ago morning when no one was paying any special attention to safety...

...All of their agony is impossible to deny, but one feels the chilly darkness...

...Above present-day Pearl Harbor one does see occasional dark clouds being pushed so fast by the trade winds that they might be mistaken for smoke, but the only things that drop from the skies are rainbows—great, thick, durable ones that follow sun-showers...

...approaches, a weird feeling, not just silent but nervous, an awed and superstitious mood, takes hold...

...Right now Bush would probably like to be standing with Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, shaking hands, but a few months ago PHSA national president Gerald Glaubitz said, of the Japanese, "They weren't invited fifty years ago, and we're not going to invite them now...

...Off the side, small fish swim toward the rusty gun turrets just beneath the water...

...It's said in the vulnerable way friends have of talking about all the hands that have been dealt, and the feelings it stirs are released in applause generated by his next proud and declamatory paragraph: "World War II is over...

...crowded plane, and which every day, even now, continues to leak two or three of the million gallons of fuel that were pumped into her shortly before the attack...

...At 6:15 the band is playing the peppy march from Bridge Over the River Kwai, and people in the crowd inevitably begin whistling, conscious or not of its being fifty years ago to the minute that Admiral Yamamoto's planes were completing their carrier takeoffs for the 230-mile flight to Oahu...

...Separated from death by just yards and seconds and fate, these men could scarcely think of themselves as anything else...

...None of the scheduled speakers is a survivor of the attack, since this event, as James Ridenour, director of the National Park Service, explains, is designed to show how there were more "victims of Pearl Harbor" than the people there that morning...

...From this vantage the sight is more moving than it was from land...

...Taps are sounded, followed by a rendition of "God Bless America" as one has never heard it—slowly, mournfully and lows' lawns is a sign proclaiming it "Ford Island Yard of the Month...

...It's one of several astute theatrical calculations that will be made this week, displays whose effectiveness is guaranteed by the emotions lying just below the skin of those who have come back...

...The catch in his throat moves people on Kilo 8 to tears...

...The huge number-3 gun turret breaks through the water, and the tiny oil slick made by each day's escaping, fuel is visible...

...1 On this Thursday afternoon fifty years later, when a small ceremony is planned at the Utah memorial, the only unusual item on one of the bungaThe speakers at this afternoon's ceremony sit on the dock, and the honored guests gather under a canopy...

...One offshoot of the desire to keep the memory of Pearl Harbor ever fresh is the continuing historical attention, principally from amateurs, to the question: Did FDR know...

...Fifty-five of her men went down with her...

...The report of saluting rifles reaches them through the Panasonic TV before, a split second later, it arrives on the breeze...

...President and Mrs...

...The heartier men walk behind banners identifying their old ship or their PHSA chapter, and the frailer ones come by on trucks...

...Fortynine minutes later the first wave of Japanese Zeroes began destroying the Pacific fleet...

...Today the site gleams with a newly tarred walkway and a coat of fresh paint...

...All history's destiny is toward pageant: the German Protestant Princes and the Holy Roman Empire are equally colorful, each no more right or wrong than the other, and the Civil War is eventually a chess set...

...CI 42 The American Spectator March 1992...

...In fact, in the months before the attack, she served as a target ship for American planes that practiced bombing runs by dropping bags of flour onto her timber-covered deck...

...he corner of Leuwers Street and Kalakaua Boulevard T is a good place to watch the PHSA's big parade on Friday morning...

...I wanted to know, assuming he had rushed to Times Square to kiss the same nurse in Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous photograph...

...But there is no point in hastening a process that, aside from its inevitability, is destructive of the truth...

...One theme of discussion at the commemorations would be whether, fifty years later, the war was truly over...

...Waikiki's beach lies only a block or two from Kalakaua Boulevard, and as the parade goes by there are plenty of swimmers and sunbathers content to let it pass unnoticed...

...They may literally not have known what hit them, much less its historical meaning...

...and when that was done, we helped our enemies give birth to democracies...

...Don't you think," asked President Bush about the fallen, that "each one is saying: 'I did not die in vain...

...Nearby Hickam Air Force Base has a plush feel, like that of a well-tended college campus, with dozens of creamy beige and brown facilities and residences...

...Well, let me tell you how I feel...

...When the President shouted, with true feeling, that "We crushed totalitarianism," a part of him knew he was telling only a half truth...

...Ellison Onizuka (the Challenger astronaut) may be photographed...

...He'll reopen Dec...

...The theorists claim as their intention the laying to rest of each disaster, something that cannot occur until the "real" truth is finally established...

...sentimentality could, after all, be defined as the squaring of sentiment...

...T he men leaving Honolulu, in plane after plane on Monday, December 9, have mostly retired from whatever work they took up in 1945...

...were to many of these survivors, still alive, flying homeward...

...What happened here fifty years ago is usually told The American Spectator March 1992 41 second or third in the story of December 7, 1941...

...Even with allowance made for the setting, the President's delivery is so completely unemphatic as to feel unseemly, at odds with the substance of his text...

...Some green shoots grow up through it, and the occasional bird lands obliviously on one of its crumbling edges...

...it is her deck, forever capsized toward the water's surface...

...Alfred Preis, the Austrian refugee who designed it, visited his most famous construction yesterday, recalling that his first proposal—"a sunken sarcophagus" into which viewers would be lowered for a look at the wreck through thick glass—was considered too morbid...

...Ichiyama himself became part of "the most decorated unit in American military history," the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, whose Japanese-Americans performed such unlikely historical feats as rescuing a Texas army unit from Germans who had them surrounded in the Vosges mountains...

...A strange dream of entering a cave also shaped the imagination of this man who would one day memorialize a thousand trapped men...

...a quick tribute to those who fought "the cause of Korean and Vietnamese freedom...

...According to author Thurston Clarke, on the afternoon of December 7, 1941, "Two hundred Arizona dead were lined up on the lawns of officers' bungalows...

...he Navy's tour boat has been especially busy the past T few months...

...He had arrived at Hickam in September 1940 to work as a parachute rigger, and can remember being in the hospital with a broken ankle the following summer...

...4 4 eR flections of Pearl Harbor" is the title of the Friday afternoon program outside the Visitor Center...

...The guide points out sights the men never saw during their service here, such as Aloha Stadium, as well as more eternal features of the Oahu landscape—like the Dole pineapple fields...

...The poignancy they finally make one feel is something larger and more generalized than that which came from the disaster they endured...

...Peace and satisfaction must have been a long time coming, just as they If they weren't survivors, if they hadn't lost buddies, if they had never seen war, never done anything more remarkable in their lives than go to the prom, they would still be touching, as evidence of what life does to all those who were once boys...

...Hickam held a modest ceremony at the base flagpole late on Saturday morning to honor its dead, and an hour later the base seemed back to normal...

...But once again they are going home...

...He makes it sound as if that morning at Pearl was just another part of his hitch, but then he acknowledges that this is probably his fifth trip back...

...Arthur Mallon of the United States Army tell me how it was on V-J Day that he returned to New York after his three years in England as a medic...

...The grave markers are flat in the ground, in neat rows, just like the suburban houses the World War II GIs returned to buy and live in...

...When the Japanese parliament was not able to agree on a particularly apologetic resolution, it fell to Foreign Minister Watanabe to express "deep remorse," a gesture whose incompleteness was satirized in the Advertiser's editorial carHe makes it sound as if that morning at Pearl was just another part of his hitch, but then he acknowledges that this is probably his fifth trip back...

...But further inland, on the short trip to the northwest side, one feels that the island hasn't changed at all in the last fifty years...

...That was his birthday, 23 years old that day...

...It is broken by a roar of planes, whose location and direction are acoustically uncertain until one sees the four of them—and then, in "Missing Man" formation, only three—streaking westward above the harbor and over the Arizona memorial, where the President is waiting to make a speech and cast a wreath into the water...

...He had just gotten back from brushing his teeth when it started...

...Some of the participants in the Utah ceremonies, including Milton Matson and Don Larsen, who looks exhausted, are on it later in the afternoon...

...the white memorial, floating perpendicularly atop the still-visible sunken ship, seems like the armature of a giant crucifix...

...Our country is the undisputed leader of the free world...

...Bush will be checked in at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, but the more important long-range news for the hotel appeared in Wayne Harada's "Show Biz" column in the December 5 Advertiser: "Don Ho ends his affiliation with the Hilton Hawaiian Village when he closes tomorrow evening at the Dome...

...The activity was duly reported, but higher-ups told the radarmen not to worry: it could only be the big squadron of B-17s due in from California to reinforce the base...

...Eventually, perhaps, the spirits of the Oklahoma knew or felt that, but not in those seventeen days, as they breathed the last of the pocketed air over and over...

...Its utterance leaves one suspiciously anticipating a sensitivity lesson, the kind of upside-down breast-beating that will make the attack have been America's fault...

...Then "they'd turn around and they'd strafe on the way back...

...There was a danger that December 7, 1991 would be remembered for overkill of a different sort from that unleashed in 1941: the Pacific Command issued more press credentials to journalists covering the Pearl Harbor anniversary than were given out during the Gulf War...

...The buff can keep scanning the skies or peering over at the Grassy Knoll happy in the knowledge that this awful, sublime moment doesn't yet have to be over...

...Paradise made war unimaginable, and even now a paradise that's been leased and subdivided retains charm enough to let its population, temporary and resident, ignore even such benign reminders of unpleasantness as the survivors' parade...

...Soon it is the survivors' turn...

...The battleship is a naval anachronism, and the mooring blocks of what was once Battleship Row are like pedestals without statues, bearing only the names of the ships tied to them fifty years ago...

...A lot of them had been poor enlistees trying to escape the Depression...

...The portable bleachers that had been set up by the flagpole were already being folded...

...But Robert ("Johnny") Johnson was still there, counting the names of the dead, twenty-nine of them from the 22nd Materiel Squadron, on the new marker...

...The ceremonies are for invited guests only, so the press watches them, with a big crowd of World War II veterans, over a big Panasonic TV on the Kilo 8 pier...

...The jet age had rendered its short runways obsolete, and now only small private planes practice touch-and-go landings there...

...We are at peace.' Don't you think each one is saying: 'I did not die in vain...

...from the water it looks like an atrocity...

...The organization's historian, Raymond Emory, made an analogy: "If somebody had raped and murdered our mother fifty years ago, we wouldn't be inviting them over for lunch...

...Plane after plane carrying members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association is landing in Honolulu for the attack's golden anniversary, the red tailmarkings signifying not the Japanese air force but TWA...

...Just prior to the anniversary Frank Deford wrote in Newsweek that "We make a to-do about remembering it each year...

...40 The American Spectator March 1992 toon on Thursday...

...n the hours before the actual anniversary dawned, a visitor to the harbor could see the Missouri strung with white lights, like a suspension bridge, and hear some distant strains of music...

...22—and launch a new era—at the Hula Hut on Beach Walk . . . " As the old men in the parade go by, atop their trucks and behind their banners, dozen after dozen of them, one realizes that as much as anything else they are still-living monuments to the good life...

...It's more than his experience as a naval aviator, which has made him the perfect President for this' occasion...

...If the debate over a Japanese apology has been confused, it has not been unintelligent, and it has for now saved one theater of the war from the specious moral equivalence the "healing" waters of time will inevitably bring...

...In a pained, wheezing voice he speaks of the curious foreshadowing experiences that gave him his aesthetic sense: at five years old he was taken by his mother to the Emperor's funeral and overwhelmed by the beauty, the feathers, the music, the "display of power...

...That "side" is neither port nor starboard...

...In his Arizona speech Bush moves away from the issue entirely, emphasizing instead the perils of isolationism ("The world does not stop at our water's edge"), a bland enough theme, one would have thought, except for the challenge he is facing from Pat Buchanan and the new America Firsters...

...If "survivor" is American talk-show diction, "victim" belongs to the academic lexicon...

...None of this can deny the effect that Preis's quiet creation has on many visitors...

...In 1990s America, if you haven't yourself survived something, it's de rigueur to be related to somebody who has...