PART 1.
On the Horizon
On December 7, 1941, early on a Sunday morning, Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. Most of the United States Pacific Fleet was moored there. Tremendous damage was inflicted, and the battleship Arizona sank within minutes, with a loss of 1,177 men.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor that day was the beginning, for the United States, of World War II.
I was born in Honolulu in 1937. Years later, as I watched a home movie taken by my father in 1940, I realized that as I played on the beach at Waikiki, USS Arizona could be seen through mist in the background, on the horizon.
That Morning
They had named the battleships for states:
Arizona
Pennsylvania
West Virginia
Nevada
Oklahoma
Tennessee
California
Maryland
They called them “she”
as if they were women
(gray metal women),
and they were all there that morning
in what they called Battleship Row.
Their places
(the places of the gray metal women)
were called berths.
Arizona was at berth F-7.
On either side, her nurturing sisters:
Nevada
and Tennessee.
The sisters, wounded, survived.
But Arizona, her massive body sheared,
slipped down. She disappeared.
Rainbows
It was an island of rainbows.
My mother said that color arced across the sky
on the spring day when I was born.
On the island of rainbows,
my bare feet slipping in sand,
I learned to walk.
And to talk:
My Hawaiian nursemaid
taught me her words, with their soft vowels:
humuhumunukunukuāpua`a
the name of a little fish!
It made me laugh, to say it.
We laughed together.
Ānuenue meant “rainbow.”
Were there rainbows that morning?
I suppose there must have been:
bright colors, as the planes came in.
Aloha
My grandmother visited.
She had come by train across the broad land
from her home in Wisconsin, and then by ship.
We met her and heaped wreaths
of plumeria around her neck.
“Aloha,” we said to her.
Welcome. Hello.
I called her Nonny.
She took me down by the ocean.
The sea moved in a blue-green rhythm, soft against the sand.
We played there, she and I, with a small shovel,
and laughed when the breeze caught my bonnet
and lifted it from my blond hair.
We played and giggled: calm, serene.
And there behind us—slow, unseen—
Arizona, great gray tomb,
moved, majestic, toward her doom.
She Was There
We never saw the ship.
But she was there.
She was moving slowly
on the horizon, shrouded in the mist
that separated skies from seas
while we laughed, unknowing, in the breeze.
She carried more than
twelve hundred men
on deck, or working down below.
We didn’t look up. We didn’t know.
Leo Amundson
Leo was just seventeen.
He’d enlisted in July.
The U.S. Marines! He must have been proud.
And his folks, too: Scandinavian stock.
Immigrants to Wisconsin, like my own grandparents.
Leo was from La Crosse. My father was born there.
My Nonny had come from La Crosse by train.
Had she known Leo’s parents?
Had she nodded to Mrs. Amundson on the street?
Had she said, “Good morning. I hear your boy’s a Marine now”?
Nonny and I played on the beach in the sunshine.
On the horizon, the boy from La Crosse
(just seventeen),
service number 309872,
was on the ship. We never knew.
George and Jimmie
George and Jimmie Bromley,
brothers from Tacoma,
handsome boys with curly hair.
(Jimmie was the older, but not by much.)
There were thirty-seven sets of brothers aboard
(one set was twins).
And a father and son,
Texans: Thomas Free and his
seventeen-year-old boy, William.
Both gone. Both lost.
They found George Bromley’s body.
Not Jimmie’s, though.
Solace
The hospital ships had names that spoke of need:
Comfort
Hope
Solace
Mercy
Refuge
They carried the wounded and ill.
That morning, Solace was moored near the Arizona.
She sent her launches and stretchers across.
The harbor had a film of burning oil.
Scorched men were pulled one by one from the flames
and taken to Solace.
Jake and John Anderson
John Anderson survived the attack.
He’d been preparing for church.
Rescued, he asked to go back.
He begged to return, to search.
He was burned and bleeding.