Pearl Harbor, 60 years after

Finally got to watch Pearl Harbor on VCD. By sheer coincidence it was the day Americans marked the 60th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, which was Dec. 8 here.

Watching the movie spooked me enough, considering the global events since Sept. 11 plus my recent stay in Honolulu. After the movie, however, I read articles from The Honolulu Star-Bulletin plus letters e-mailed to me by friends from Hawaii, which gave added poignancy to the movie. I’m not referring to the sappy, commercial love story, but the war and scenes of death and destruction. How long before the world forgets?

"There are less and less of us each time," Vincent Vlach said, according to The Star-Bulletin. Vlach, 84, is one of the 21 remaining survivors of the battleship USS Arizona, which was sunk by Japanese bombers, burying 1,177 soldiers in a watery grave.

Vlach attended the anniversary ceremonies at the memorial built over the sunken battleship. Adm. Vernon Clark, commander of the entire US fleet, reportedly declared, "We are at war again, our homeland attacked."

If only because of what Americans refer to as 9-11, which claimed more lives than the raid on Hawaii, Vlach and his fellow Pearl Harbor survivors still alive – a total of just around 45 – can be sure the Japanese attack will still be remembered for the next few years to come.

* * *

Yet it takes just one generation to wipe out the horrors of war. My mother still remembers the Japanese occupation, but those of us who were born and grew up in peacetime have no ugly memories of the Japanese.

This is probably good for world peace. At Pearl Harbor I toured the war memorials and had lunch with Adm. Dennis Blair at his headquarters at the Pacific Command together with, among others, two Japanese – one a resident of Tokyo, the other a Japanese-American living in Hawaii. The guy from Tokyo found the presentation of the war at the Arizona Memorial fair, and didn’t mind posing for pictures at the spot on the USS Missouri where Japan signed the document of surrender during World War II. Posing with us was the Japanese-American, whose older relatives were rounded up in Hawaii and interned on the US mainland following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Public sympathy normally goes against the one who fired the first shot, but it can be offset if the aggressors later suffer great devastation. What can be more stupefying than the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

My late grandfather survived the Bataan Death March, and I don’t know how he would have felt if he knew I spent an evening last year in Hiroshima with a Japanese family. The father proudly showed me his picture as a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army. He fought in Leyte during the war but was back in Hiroshima when the bomb hit the city. His two daughters still wonder if they’ll one day suffer from any lingering effects of the atomic bomb. Anyone who has been to Hiroshima and seen THEIR war memorial can quickly forget Japanese war aggression, and forgive.

* * *

After two world wars, the Holocaust and the atom bomb, you’d think people must have surely seen enough of death and destruction. And you’d like to think the only ones moronic enough to wage war in the 21st century are smelly men with lice who can’t handle their testosterone, financed by smelly, spoiled rich brats with lice like Osama bin Laden.

Yet here we are, right smack in the middle of a conflict we can barely understand. Our home-grown terrorists are making headlines all over the globe, so these days I often get e-mail from abroad expressing concern for my safety, even if I keep telling the senders that our trouble spots are hundreds of miles away from Manila.

And people are still shooting at each other in various parts of the globe. Even if America has shown that a new type of warfare using high-tech surgical air strikes is now possible (the Taliban literally didn’t see what hit them), fewer casualties don’t make war less horrific.

"War is hell, but you do what you have to do for your country," The Star-Bulletin quoted Richard Fiske as saying. Fiske, now 79, was a 19-year-old Marine private on the USS West Virginia, which was bombed and torpedoed during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

By all means we should keep remembering Pearl Harbor – the 2,390 Americans killed, the 21 warships sunk or damaged, the 320 aircraft hit in just three hours by 184 Japanese war planes – all those events that tell us about the horrors of war. But we’ve said "war is hell" so often it’s almost a cliché. And still the world keeps going to war.