Washington – It has now been seventy-eight years since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1967, twenty-six years after the attack, I took the picture below.
My ship, USS Rainier, is tied up on battleship row in front of the memorial to USS Arizona. It is approximately where USS Maryland, USS West Virginia, USS Tennessee, and USS Oklahoma were moored on December 7, 1941.
When I first reported aboard USS Rainier in 1966, one of our crew was a USS Arizona survivor. He had remained in the Navy and become a chief petty officer.
My ship was enroute from Yokosuka, Japan, to Concord, California, when it stopped at Pearl. It was hard to fathom that we had re-traced the 1941 route of the Japanese fleet and were now at the site of so much wreckage and death.
