“Remember Pearl Harbor!” was the great World War II rallying cry. The sneak Japanese attack, designed to cripple the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet, would be labelled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a “date which will live in infamy.” And yet here we are, 83 years later, and as I look around the various news and opinion sources I routinely follow, one could be mistaken for thinking that Pearl Harbor had disappeared altogether into the mists of history.

By any measure, this represents an abundance of Pearl Harbor stories, each different in detail from my dad’s.
I find this sad, albeit understandable. December 7, 1941 occupies an increasingly remote place in time. We are, after all, far from the vivid images of the exploding battleship Arizona or the fireball engulfing the destroyer Shaw. Nineteen forty-one is farther from us than Lee’s surrender at Appomattox was to Americans in that year. Time marches on, as the saying goes, the “Greatest Generation” has almost disappeared, and those of us, their children, are ourselves well along into old age. Besides, the world has experienced no end of infamous days in our lifetimes and those of our children.
Still, I think that Pearl Harbor bears remembering, and not just by way of offering analogies to inform our current lack of military preparedness. To be sure, one can view our current national security situation as much like the one which existed on the eve of Pearl Harbor, with threats around every corner and a military ill-prepared to meet them. But leave that for another time. Today I’d simply like to share a small family anecdote from the day, and then take a moment to reflect upon its larger meaning.
“What were you doing when you first heard of the Japanese attack?” I suspect most every child of my generation asked this question of his or her parents. Our little northeast Georgia town was too small to support a National Guard armory, but a lot of the young men living there had begun, however haltingly, to try and prepa...