Pearl.

2016 is the 75th anniversary of Japan’s attack on America in Pearl Harbor.

The oldest survivor, Joe Langdell, just passed away at age 100. I found it fascinating that 74 years later, his plan was that on December 7, 2015, the anniversary of the attack, that his family will travel to Hawaii and put his remains at the site where one of the worst things that had ever happened to him occurred.

32 other survivors of Pearl Harbor made the same decision to return posthumously.

There are eight more living survivors, and it sounds like eventually there will be a full crew manning those ships again, sooner than later.

I visited the wreckage of the Arizona when I vacationed in Hawaii in 1989.

It’s eerily quiet.

Peaceful, almost.

A ferry takes you to the memorial, where the ships were–where the Arizona still *is*, and you can peer over the edge, down into the clear water. It’s not hard to make out shadowy hunks of steel, warped from gunfire, bombs and missiles and rusted from the destructive combination of time and wind and saltwater. It’s a gigantic steel tomb, serving as a permanent “resting place” for the men inside.

1,993 people died that day, all told.

That’s one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-three people who were born, and learned to walk, learned to talk, learned to read and learned to write. People who grew up, drove cars, met girls, became adults and joined the Navy.

And for what? No real answer can account for that much bloodshed. This isn’t counting the enemy and their losses, either.

My takeaway, as the ferry floated along, taking us back to the mainland, was surviving something like that, you’d have to think you made it out by some warped Kafkaesque sense of luck. To think that so many of your age are still, young and ready to fight, last they knew. Submerged in ocean water, perpetually frozen in time, their potential squandered and spending the better part of three quarters of a century taking up space inside the long-sank USS Arizona…One would assume the guilt of living through this could or would be completely overwhelming.

It would be a curse to survive something so overwhelmingly destructive... To see something so monstrous extract its toll in blood for no apparent reasoning would make everything else paltry in comparison.

These are situations where men acquire 1,000 yard stares that bring others who know that look to back down.

Mostly, it makes me wonder what I would do in a situation remotely resembling the scope of horror which rained down on those 1,993 men in December of 1941.

Would I live or would I die?

What I would do if I survived?

I’ll never have to find out.