A Day That Will Live In Infamy

     It's early Sunday morning, and promises to be another beautiful day. Another day in this island paradise. He still can't believe his good luck at being stationed in the Hawaiian islands, Chief Bosun's Mate on the battleship USS Arizona, berthed at Ford Island in Pearl Harbor.
     He stands on the aft deck, hands on his hip and watches the young sailors swabbing the deck. Off in the distance he can hear the drone of airplanes, several by the sound. Seems strange for the Army to be training on Sunday, but you never know about those guys.
     Suddenly he hears the staccato burst of machine gun fire and a plane whips over the fantail with its belly exposed and it takes him a second to realize that the red circles on the wings mean the planes are Japanese. He turns and yells to the sailors on deck "Take cover! It's the Japanese!" and then an explosion knocks him over as a torpedo strikes the stern and detonates, throwing a geyser of water and shrapnel into the air.
A plane swoops down, lining itself up with the deck, and bullets tear chunks of planking out as it makes a strafing run. Sailors are falling and blood is running into the scuppers.
     As he picks himself up, he looks up at the sound of a falling bomb, and watches as it impacts the foredeck, punching through like paper, and then an explosion as the ship erupts beneath him and his vision fades to nothing....

     The man removes his fingertips from the name on the wall of the memorial as if the letters were red-hot. He's always been able to see things, but he had never expected what had just happened. But he knows in his heart that what he saw in his mind was what had really happened to Kenneth R. Jones, Chief Bosun's Mate, USS Arizona, on December 7th, 1941.