A Day That Will Live In Infamy
By darkness falls
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.
Author's Note:
On seeing the wreckage of Pearl Harbor, Admiral Bull Halsey said "When we get done with them, the Japanese language will only be spoken in Hell." From 1939 to 1945, most of the world turned into Hell...Comments on "A Day That Will Live In Infamy"
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On Sunday, November 27, 2011, ColorMeToxic
(238) wrote:
This was incredible...you've earned a new fan.