A Day to Honor
In his speech, in which he asked the Congress of the United States of America to declare war upon the Empire of Japan, President Roosevelt said, "...a day that will live in infamy" and so tagged it forever. Walter Lord wrote the book, "Day of Infamy," which I read sometime around 1962. I was born in 1944, a product of the war, for my parents might never have met had it not been for that war; this was so of many of my generation. We grew up with the words "Pearl Harbor" even if we did not fully grasp all that they meant.
I enlisted in the navy in 1961 at age seventeen; I had to have my mother's written permission to enlist. I did my basic training in San Diego at the behemoth Naval Training Center and then I went to Radar "A" School in San Francisco for six months, and then, I was in the navy, the real navy, and by that I mean on a ship. I went aboard the USS Point Defiance (LSD-31) on December 28, 1961 when I was still seventeen. Shortly after the first of the year, 1962, we steamed to Hawaii.
As a radarman I spent my working day buried in darkness, in a small room, not much bigger than the closet of most girls I had known growing up in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. It was called the repeater room because it held our two radar repeaters and it was lighted only by the eerie glow emitted by them. The radar itself was a large box of vacuum tubes, wires, cables and capacitors which sent out a signal, let it bounce back and retrieved it. A repeater "repeated" the signal as a series of blips which we could see on the monitor. My world was lights, knobs, sound powered telephones, darkness, blips on the screen and orders from my senior petty officer. I did not see the outdoors, sunlight, ocean, islands, from my job position. But, fortunately, when we encountered sufficient land mass, the big radar received too many echoes too rapidly to separate A and became a bright greenish mass on the monitor screen, too difficult to interpret, a condition known as land locked.
Fortunately, as we entered Pearl Harbor, the radar became landlocked, and our watch officer reported it and asked the Bridge for permission to secure, which was granted. So, I was given permission to leave my job in CIC and go out on deck and see the world most deck sailors saw routinely. It was amazing entering Pearl Harbor. It was late January or early February, winter in my home, and here it was a beautiful, green spring day. I stood on one side, starboard, I think, and watched as we passed cranes, hangers, dry docks, more ships than you can imagine. It is a long harbor and takes time to negotiate. I was a kid, seventeen, and I was in awe of all I saw then. And then, we were there, Ford Island, tied to the side. Just in front of us, literally, was a ship I knew of only from books and films, and now, I was standing on the brow of my ship and looking down at the ship in front of us, below the waterline, visible but only in a ghost like view. The water gave it a greenish pall, perhaps because of the constant oil seepage still going on then. The year was 1962, barely twenty years after the events of December 7, 1941, and there were so many survivors then who had been somewhere on Hawaii. Both military and civilian people were affected that day and all of them had memories which could be easily tapped. Many feelings were still raw and a slight conversation could trigger something and people would talk to you in somber tones, recall someone they knew who died that day. Everyone suffered.
I was standing alone then, looking down upon the hulk of the USS Arizona (BB-39). I can recall my feelings then, such a mixture of feelings. I was in awe of the battle, saddened by the loss of so many good men, ashamed of our failure then, why we had been so badly defeated. I could not pull my eyes away from the ship beneath the water. The gun turrets had been removed, which I did not then understand. The mounts where the gun turrets had been were visible, the mounts upon which giant gears had turned the turrets pointing long barrels towards the targets somewhere out there, for the guns could fire nearly fifteen miles away. It was a death ship, it was a cemetery, it was a memorial. The Arizona Memorial had not yet been built and was only planning in the future then. Until then, everything for me had been history, something I had read in a book, seen in a film, such as "From Here to Eternity" or been told. Looking down on the Arizona, it was real. Men had died there. My sense of the world was changed then. A friend soon came up and we talked, probably the nonsense of two seventeen year old boys. We probably smoked a cigarette then as we talked, leaning on the lines that prevented us from falling overboard. We may have laughed, we may have joked, but we could not shake off the feeling of somberness that overcame us.
December 7 is a day I remember every year. I wake up thinking about it, about seeing the USS Arizona, the feelings I had that day looking down on her remains. I take time to honor the day in some way. I may do something special that I have not done all year such as a special dinner. I pay for the dinner for the only Pearl Harbor survivor I know. He eats a small dinner, wears his cap all the time and is greeted by the people who know him. Each year may be his last one for he has passed 90 years now. I wish we could do more to honor him for his life here today represents not only his, but all the lives lost that day, the men he knew and with whom he served. When he comes into the restaurant, we should stand as a group, call attention on deck and render him a full hand salute. That won't happen, but we owe him. Perhaps my small annual gesture is something to him; it's not enough, no, but maybe it honors him. I hope so.
Stephen Joe "Red Boots" Payne
