December 7, 2006

On waking this morning, I realized that it was December 7th, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I wondered if any TV news programs would mention it considering the non-stop coverage of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq study that was announced to the public yesterday. The study is a bi-partisan effort to help the administration find a new course in foreign policy that allows our troops to exit Iraq.

This evening NBC did show a minute of the ceremonies in Pearl Harbor. This will be the last observance since so few veterans are still alive to attend. It took me a few moments to comprehend the meaning of that statement. I don’t think of myself as being in that age group, but of course, I am.

We learned of the attack by the Japanese when Dad went to see who was ringing the door bell. It was a boy I had been dating. He was shouting something about the country being attacked and handed Dad a brace of pheasants. He, his father and brother had been pheasant hunting that morning and on their way home they heard the news on the radio. They stopped by the house only long enough to give us the pheasants and tell us the news. When we heard the shouting, most of the family quickly gathered to see what the commotion was about and we stood there with our mouths open, looking from the boy to the pheasants and tried to make sense of what he was saying. They were in a hurry to get home and tell his family, but we kept him from leaving just long enough to tell us again that an island called Pearl was being bombed.

The minute the boy left, we turned on the radio. None of us had ever heard of Pearl Harbor and the only island we knew about was called Hawaii which was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Why would anyone bomb that? The news was sketchy at most. After President Franklin D Roosevelt spoke to the nation, the situation was clearer but we had no idea how our lives would change from that point on.

Before Pearl Harbor, when we went to movies, we saw newsreels of the war on the Russian front, the fighting in Spain, the Japanese in China, but the attack on Hawaii caused a wave of patriotism that permeated the very soul of this country and lasted until both Hitler and Japan was defeated.

I got a job in an aircraft company and Mom went to work in an ammunition factory. Family members and school friends began to wear uniforms of various branches of service. Rationing of certain food stuffs and gasoline quickly became the norm. War bonds in various denominations were goals that even small school children aspired to own. Women began to fill jobs held by men who went into the army or navy. Suddenly the depression was over and there were jobs with higher wages than before the war. People moved to cities and states where the jobs were. Hitchhiking was common and people went out of their way to give hikers a ride when possible. WW II changed the country in profound ways. Those days of trust and innocent peace no longer exists.

Today the country is obsessed with salvaging some kind of solution to our involvement in Iraq. We can all see the writing on the wall, but we don’t want to accept the decision that seems most practical, which in my opinion is, declare victory and come home. The Iraq war has already lasted longer than WW II. Since this will be the last time WW II veterans will meet, it won’t be long before Iraq veterans can start commemorating their battles until they are too old and too few. Is it possible this country is destined to have an ensuing batch of veterans taking their place?