Hawaii, USS Arizona

The Memorial to the USS Arizona, at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

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The marble northwestern interior wall of the USS Arizona memorial has the names of 1,177 men who lost their lives when the USS Arizona was sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. Today, visitors come from around the world to see the USS Arizona Memorial, which spans the mid-portion of the sunken battleship.

In June 1998, the USS Missouri arrived in Pearl harbor, and was docked within site of the USS Arizona. The two memorials, in unique juxtaposition, seize visitors in radically different ways. The Arizona is a symbol of the start of America's war in the Pacific, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, while the Missouri, with its famous Surrender Deck, represents the other bookend of World War II -- its conclusion.

In 1967 I had a private tour of the USS Missouri when we visited with a friend and her husband, then Mayor of Port Orchard, Washington. The mayor also had a full-time job with the Navy, and the next day he took me to visit the battleship, USS Missouri.

When we visited in 1968, there was an unfortunate occurrence on the ferry boat that took us to the Arizona. Two elderly men, from an unnamed country a few thousand miles west of Hawaii, were making funny gestures and apparently making jokes in their foreign language. Someone reported this to the guards at the memorial, who firmly let those two men know that if they didn’t stop what they were doing, they most likely wouldn’t make it back to shore. You can be sure they stopped the nonsense, right then and there.