Pearl Harbor

I come from a Navy family. My uncle was an admiral. His brother, my father, was the Commodore of a squadron of sixteen Destroyers. I was raised beside the oceans of the world. As a teenager I dozed on beaches in the warm afternoon sun.

During World War ll, when I was a little boy, I would walk along the beach in the morning by myself and pray for my dad to come home alive from the Pacific.

When we were in Hawaii my parents gave me a ukulele. We lived on a  mountaintop outside Owahu. My mom was walking with me to a neighbor’s’ house when Japanese planes flew low over the mountain heading for the Harbor. From the open cockpit the pilot looked down at us. He was right there. I could see his face. He looked like a teenage boy. Mom began singing Christopher Robin poems so I wouldn’t be sacred. I didn’t know there was anything to be scared about. But during the next hour the ships in the Harbor were sunk and so many people were killed. Dad was stationed on the battleship California, which went down that day, but we didn’t know that right away or who the survivors were. Everyone thought the Japanese were going to land and take over the islands. For days we had to keep our shades down, just burn candles and listen to the radio. We didn’t know if Dad was coming home again.

We must have had a big house because Mom invited a number of Army wives and their kids to stay with us, while they waited for their husbands to come get them. Their quarters had been bombed. The Japanese attack also wiped out the Army Air base and all its planes so the pilots couldn’t take off and fight back. As the days passed, some of their husbands came to get them. And some never came at all. One lady was pregnant. Her husband didn’t come get her. My mom was holding her and crying. My dad came home and held us both close for awhile before he went off to war.

The Navy raised up the California and sent her out to sea, where she was hit by kamikazes. Japanese pilots dive bombed their explosive laden planes into the American ships killing themselves in order to try to sink our ships. This was before guided missiles. Dad was Gunnery Officer on the California. His job was to shoot these planes and pilots down before they struck the ship killing hundreds of men and even sinking this great battleship.

The Navy sent the wives and children home to the mainland. For awhile my mom and I stayed with my grandparents in their house outside Annapolis on the Chesapeake Bay. There were two little boys from Germany also staying in the big house with us. They didn’t speak English. They were Jewish. They seemed to always stay under the grand piano in the living room. I knew something had happened to their parents. No one said anything to me, but I figured if I’d been raised in Germany, my parents probably would have disappeared, and maybe me too.

Then we moved to Long Beach, California, I think because that was where Dad’s ship would come home to -- if it ever came back. That’s when I went out walking on the beach and praying for my dad to come home safe. I don’t know where I got the idea to pray. But I did. My mom would sleep with me in the bed with her a lot when Dad was away. One time in the middle of the night we had a surprise -- Dad climbed into bed with us. We were all so happy.

Maybe that’s when I started believing.