Japan had not declared war. It was a surprise attack.
My father was on leave — Navy talk for vacation — from his ship, stationed at Pearl Harbor. Their quarters were on the edge of Hickam Field, where the planes were all lined up in neat rows. One of the fun things about living there was watching the practice runs. American planes would bomb a hillside in our own territory — no aggression, just drills — and it was a blast to go out and watch.
So it's Sunday morning. December 7th, 1941. My parents hear bombs.
They assume it's practice.
They throw on robes, still in their pajamas, and walk outside to watch. And a Zero — they called them Zeros because of the emblem on the side of the Japanese planes — a Zero flew right over their heads.
My father looked at my mother and said, with what I imagine was considerable understatement: "I guess I need to report to duty."
So he goes to the refrigerator and downs two beers.
Because he knows this is the last beer he's going to have for a very long time.
Then he kisses his wife and his baby daughter goodbye — my older sister, only about ten months old — and heads to the docks, where the ships are burning and the world is falling apart.
My dad was a sailor at the time, not yet an officer. They handed him a rifle. That's what they had. And what they found was that when a Zero came in low overhead, a bunch of sailors shooting at it with rifles could actually bring it down.
Between the strafing runs, he fought fires. The fires were beyond anything you can imagine — an absolute holocaust of burning fuel, burning ships, burning everything. The Japanese hit hard in those first few morning hours, and after the planes were gone, it was just fire. All day long, nothing but fire.
Rumors were everywhere. There was talk of a fifth column — subversives, spies working from within, trying to defeat us from the inside. One of the rumors going around was that the water supply had been poisoned.
My father had been fighting fires since eight o'clock that morning in the Hawaiian heat, drinking water all day because what else are you going to do. By nightfall — twelve, fourteen hours in — he doubled over with the worst abdominal pain he had ever experienced in his life.
He was absolutely certain he'd been poisoned.
He went to sickbay — that's Navy talk for the doctor — and the doctor examined him and delivered his diagnosis:
Go eat. And go to the head.
My husband Ted uses this expression all the time: "I was so busy I didn't have time to take a leak." Well, my father was actually that busy. All day long. It finally caught up with him.
Meanwhile, my mother and my sister had been evacuated. My sister was just a baby — not even a year old. My mother never talked much about that part, and neither did my father. That was common in their generation. When the bad stuff happened and was over with, you didn't talk about it.
Years later, I was reading an article in Parade Magazine — the insert that came with the Sunday paper — about a woman who had done extensive research on Hickam Field and the attack. Something compelled me to contact her. God bless her, she actually called me back. I told her the story as I knew it, and she told me the rest.
Because there was a rest. There always is, with that generation. They just didn't tell you.
My father wouldn't tell any story unless he could make it funny.
Two beers and a kiss goodbye. That was the version we got.