Pearl Harbor

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Today was Pearl Harbor day. When one goes to Oahu for the first time, one must go see the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial. I believe it's a sort of a civic duty. People my age do not understand at all what it was like on December 7th, 1941 and the days following. The terrorist attacks in New York and DC do not really shed any light on what it was like to be attacked by a foreign military for military goals; those attacks weren't military, they were criminal acts committed by criminal people, and it's just not the same thing.

Because of those attacks, though, the Arizona is now one of those secure places where you can't take purses, backpacks or anything else (including "large cameras"). As such, I left my big lenses and my backpack and stuff in the bag check before the security checkpoint and went in with my 5d + 50mm f/1.4 in the hopes that it would constitute a "small camera". Apparently, it did, because I got in with no trouble, and, to my chagrin, I saw tons of people walking around with SLRs and big zoom lenses. Oh, well.

The way it works, is you go in and get a ticket with a number on it. Then, you wander around the exhibits and the gift shop until your number is called and then you line up and go into a theater to watch the movie. When the movie is finished, you all pile onto a boat and head out to the actual memorial.

The exhibits were pretty interesting, there was all kinds of personal items from the sailors on exhibit, some of them salvaged from the ships that were damaged and/or sunk. The movie was spliced together from actual footage both from the US military and from the Japanese navy with a narrative. It was pretty powerful stuff. I don't have much else to say about it here.

They ferried us across to the memorial itself, and as we got there the group ahead of us was lining up to leave. It was pretty crowded, but most everybody got to see everything they wanted to see, I think. The memorial is situated right over the sunken U.S.S. Arizona, and the water was clear enough you could see bits of the ship. It was kind of spooky, really. They never retrieved any of the sailors from the ship, so they rest there today. Some of their shipmates survived the attack, and requested that they be laid to rest with their shipmates in the Arizona upon their death.

The shrine was sobering. All those names on the wall, all those people who went down with the ship. I spent part of the time being angry because these men and women died merely because Japan wanted to be able to freely expand their empire. It's hard to stay angry about that, though, because that sort of thing is still happening today. I think humans will never learn the lessons of the past; we continue to repeat the same mistakes, to engage in the same hubris.

The next group was arriving, and it was time for us to go, so we lined up and got on the boat for the return trip. When we got off the boat, we accosted a sailor to pose with Laura Grace for a picture. He was very nice; we made him pose for a while to try to get Laura to get a little closer to him, but she was all shy. The pictures came out okay, though. We shopped for a bit at the gift shop, and then headed back to the bag check, had a snack, bought some clip-on sunglasses and hemmed and hawed about whether we would tour the U.S.S. Missouri, the badass battleship on which the articles of surrender were signed. Judy and John decided not to go, and us kids decided we would. So we headed over an bought tickets. We skipped the U.S.S. Bowfin, a submarine, because it cost $6 and you couldn't go belowdecks.

We toured the Mighty Mo for a while, a couple of hours, I think, and it was pretty neat. It's very shiplike, and it's not as big as I'd imagined it would be. Don't get me wrong, it's plenty big. But, to live on for months at a time? Pretty small. We didn't take the guided tour, but we did glom onto a tour once or twice to listen to the guide.

Laura wanted to climb all the way to the top, so we went as high as we could, which was up to the bridge. It was here that I noticed that a lot of this ship was made of concrete! That's not a material I normally think of in shipbuilding, but it makes sense. Concrete is pretty blast resistant, and that hull could float the moon, so why not?

After a while, our feet started to get tired, so we left and took the trolley back to where we started, got our stuff out of the bag check, piled in the van and headed north for the rest of our day.

As usual, for more photos, see my Hawai'i 2006 Flickr set.

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Photos

U.S.S. Arizona Memorial
Taken from the U.S.S. Missouri's pier.

Laura with Sailor
Hey, Sailor, you come around here often?

Mighty Mo
U.S.S. Missouri, the last battleship.

Big guns
The view toward the bow from under the fore main guns.