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First Sunday Burl Burlingame |
Note: Star-Bulletin staff writer Burl Burlingame substitutes this month for First Sunday columnist Mark Coleman, who is on vacation.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRYANT FUKUTOMI / BFUKUTOMI@STARBULLETIN.COM
Dan Martinez contracted the historic battlefield "infection" at an early age, and found his dream job working for the National Park Service.
Pearl Harbor historian
Dan Martinez makes history
-- one step at a timeYou can't watch a documentary about the attack on Pearl Harbor without encountering National Park Service historian Daniel Martinez of the USS Arizona Memorial Visitors Center. A lifelong educator and interpretive specialist, Martinez brings passion to every interview. He gets so emotional when talking about the great tragic events of history that tears often come to his eyes. The camera loves him.
Martinez began his history career working in hobby shops. He eventually went back to California State University on a history scholarship. Minoring in communications, dabbling in television and sportswriting, he was never afraid of the camera. But his plan was to teach history in high school and spend his summers as a park ranger at Little Big Horn. "I had my own horse, riding the range and talking to visitors," he said. "What could be better?"
One day a prairie fire swept across the Little Big Horn battlefield, exposing artifacts. For the next two years Martinez concentrated on battlefield archaeology. Then, in 1985, another opportunity arose. The National Park Service has three "hardship" parks where the number of visitors is so overwhelming, it's like herding cattle. Martinez passed up the Statue of Liberty and Independence Hall, and came to the USS Arizona Memorial. "Hawaii felt so natural being here, and so it was the beginning of my full-time Park Service career." He earned a law-enforcement credential and got a job as an interpretive specialist. But the Arizona Memorial didn't create a position for a full-time historian until shortly before the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. Since then, Martinez has been the voice of scholarship at the memorial. Recently he began a second career as the host of the Discovery Channel's "Unsolved History."
CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Ranger Dan Martinez at the rear portico of the Arizona Memorial Visitors Center, which is sinking into the landfill soil of Halawa Landing. The center's days likely are numbered.
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Making the past real
Burl Burlingame: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred 62 years ago (today). What special resonance does the date of Sunday, Dec. 7, have?Dan Martinez: As soon as I was old enough to realize that my grandparents and my mom were at Pearl Harbor, I had an obvious interest. And the way my two grandparents reacted when we talked about it -- wow, Grandfather really didn't like talking about it. And my grandmother would cry every time the subject came up.
They had come to Hawaii with the idea that they were going to get a new start. The Great Depression had had a terrible effect; my grandfather was a miner and miners were the first ones affected. They heard of the possibility of a number of miners being hired in Hawaii, and because he had such experience, he was hired as a foreman.
They had conceived of this idea of creating underground storage tanks, boring them out of the volcanic rock in the hills above Pearl Harbor. He came here in early 1940, so my connection to Hawaii starts before the war.
They found happiness in Hawaii and were making good money for very dangerous work. They were living in Kaimuki, and my mother was taught hula by Hilo Hattie -- wonderful memories. It was all shattered by the attack on Pearl Harbor. My mom, her sisters and my grandmother were on one of the first ships out, transferred to the mainland. But Grandfather didn't leave here until late 1944.
As a historian, Dec. 7 is one of those great turning points in world history, and the effect is still being felt today. I think about those huge ramifications that Pearl Harbor initiated. Looking at it from a sociological, political and military perspective, it's almost too vast to talk about!
Working in a park that honors the memory (of the dead) and meeting all these veterans makes it real. Also, having the opportunity to dive on the ship, walking the airfields, seeing the bomb craters, makes it real.
Imagine, standing with John Finn at Kaneohe or Phil Rasmussen at Wheeler Field, or Don Stratton, who was aboard the Arizona -- these things have had a profound effect. I've been so fortunate to be around this, with others, for the last -- gosh, it's going on 18 years.
BB: The veterans are passing, and eventually all that's left will be the ship itself, crumbling beneath the memorial. How important is it to preserve these sacred relics?
DM: In later years, as the World War II generation dies, we're going to have yet another fresh perspective that we don't have right now. That's not being negative -- it's just how history changes. Once the participants in an event are gone, the opportunity arises to reinterpret that event with fresh eyes. You don't have the unconscious bias that was needed to fight the war. We're going to learn more, rather than less, about events. There will likely be dramatic reappraisals about World War II, maybe even about Pearl Harbor, maybe in ways we don't understand now.
BB: How did you become interested in battlefield sites?
DM: The first battlefield I visited was in 1964. My dad worked for NASA in the space industry and moved from Goddard Space Center to Washington when I was 14. Just the year before, President Kennedy had been killed and my family had just been shattered by this experience. It hurt a lot; I admired the president a great deal and we believed in the New Frontier. Those ideals -- I believed in them and still do.
On the way to Goddard we stopped by Dealey Plaza, just a year after the assassination, and it was haunting. It still is. You knew what happened there, but to see it and walk on that street and look up at the Texas School Book Depository and just know our lives had changed right at this spot. We continued on our trip and I thought about that a lot.
Then we stopped at (the Civil War battlefield) Manassas, and when you walk on these fields you just have a sense of such power. When you walk along the the battle lines and see the row of cannon and read the stories and absorb the carnage that unfolded there, and then to go to Gettysburg, which is so well monumented and marked -- but that's where it all changed for me. A park ranger came out, and he was dressed in a Civil War uniform, and he took us out into the field and explained to us what life was like in the Union Army, and then he fired a musket. I'd never heard a musket fired before. It was loud and it was smoky, and when you're a kid, you think that's pretty cool.
I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great, some day, to have that job? Every time we traveled, I'd look for that National Park Service shield because I knew that would be a special place. It's an illness. You go to these fields and you get infected, infected with the sense of timelessness.
When I got an opportunity to work for the National Park Service, there was no doubt in my mind where I wanted to go, and that was Little Big Horn. Once you catch Custer Disease, it's incurable. Little Big Horn has what the other sites have, but there's also the Big What-If. Everyone on the white side was wiped out, but the Native American stories were hidden from us, they weren't recorded. You get up there on Last Stand Hill and look down on the great valley of the Little Big Horn, and look at those golden hills sloping down, and there are white markers scattered like stars where soldiers were buried -- there is something special and spiritual about that.
Johnny Wooden Leg, great-great-grandson of Wooden Leg the warrior, a Northern Cheyenne, used to come up to the battlefield and we'd walk and he'd tell me stories. As we're standing next to a monument commemorating the Indian scouts who were killed, in the fading light of the day, and the ground has turned golden and the sunlight is streaking like it does only in Montana, and the sun is gleaming off of his face, I turned to him and said, "John, aren't you upset that there is no monument to the warriors who died here?" He looked and me oddly, and then with a sweep of his hand, he said, "This whole battlefield is our monument."
Suddenly it all made sense. From my cultural point of view, we always have to erect something, from theirs, it's the land itself, kept always as it was. That's something to remember: different cultures have differing standards of interpretation.
BB: There's nothing like being placed in the actual location.
DM: When many visitors come to Pearl harbor, they get off the bus with really no idea of what they're visiting, and they're profoundly affected. You hear them talking about it, about this really special place that gets to them emotionally. And often they're a little frightened. They deal with their own mortality. They see that wall of names, and maybe they see a name that's similar to theirs ...
BB: Human beings, just like them, vaporized in a split second.
DM: Yeah, 1,177 of the Arizona's crew gone, just like that. The other thing that's mystical about these places is that they have so much reverence. For some people, it's kind of a pilgrimage. I know it was for me. I have to go to that historical Mecca and touch it.
Being there
BB: You're drawn to sites of great tragedy.DM: It's bothersome, yeah? Places where you see the marks of terrible violence and horror. And yet, some are not. Some are symbols of great hope or victory. I remember standing on the edge of the atomic bomb load site on Tinian atoll, in absolute awe. Human history as we know it changed in that little pit in the runway revetment. Enola Gay and Bock's Car had their bombs slung up inside them, right there, that exact spot.
BB: Talk about points of no return! Do kids today even understand what happened at Pearl Harbor?
DM: When I go to a site that is sacred ground, I go with perfect intent. I'm prepared. But kids see our film and the memorial and they are transported, absolutely transported. They discover feelings within themselves that they're unaware of.
BB: How about preserving battlefield sites and relics like the USS Arizona?
DM: If you go to the fields of Gettysburg or the waters of Pearl Harbor or the airfields of Hickam, Kaneohe, Wheeler -- any of these places touched by a terrible day -- the ghosts of the past are there. You think about that.
It had a tremendous impact on the people of Hawaii. You know, the largest group of survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack are the civilians, and that's never really been explored. It's untold. There's never been a medal or any sort of recognition that's tangible. The military Pearl Harbor survivors received a national medal. What about recognition for those in Hawaii who were here on the front lines in the war?
BB: Battlefield sites are part of our national heritage.
DM: Historic sites define who we are. Who we were. Battlefields symbolize defining moments. Even Washington was a battlefield in the War of 1812, when we almost lost control of this fledgling country.
The Civil War reassessed our whole attitude toward slavery and, by extension, the rights of man. Interpretation is the name of the game. For years, battlefields were interpreted wholly as battlefields, and there was no context given for what occurred there. The political ramification of discussing slavery in the 1960s was just not going to happen. There was more self-examination on that issue in the 1860s!
BB: The War of Northern Aggression ...
DM: Oh, yeah! The "War Between the States." I was always offended by that. As if the Confederacy, the Great Lost Cause, was somehow something noble. I never saw it that way. Not to take away from Southern valor, but what they were fighting for was appalling in the sense of human dignity. It was as if the country needed to be drenched in its own blood in order to liberate itself from the shackles of slavery. I find no glory in that; I find no valor in that.
I'm glad the national parks are finally recognizing that we also need to interpret the issues surrounding the Civil War. Yes, they were economic, but what was the basis of that economy? Holding black men and women and children in chains. You just have to be upfront about that. I'm glad we're finally doing that, because unless we do we're just like the Japanese, unable today to recognize their participation in World War II, and without that, they truly cannot be free.
BB: The Civil War, no matter the reason it began, eventually became the first conflict fought to free other human beings. It was an extraordinary spasm of righteousness. Is the same sort of liberation theory being exercised today in Iraq?
DM: We get so many mixed messages out of Iraq. If we're embarked on that noble cause of making making Iraq free, and to allow her the opportunity to have democratic ideals and principles -- it could be that, as much as we love democracy, they may not. It's too soon to tell. The Iraq issue is larger than the borders of Iraq. Will it truly be a fight for freedom? Let's hope so, because there are a lot of our young men and women dying there.
BB: Who "owns" history? How will they look back on this period?
DM: We think that the guardians of the gate are historians like myself and academics; we're under the impression that they own history. But no one owns it. It's a parentless child. As time goes by we will gain fresh perspectives, learn more and get the distance to see the bigger picture. World War II supposedly realigned the map of the world, and look at the things we're living with now because of that.
BB: World War II is still with us today?
DM: As a legacy, not as baggage. They called it a "Cold War," but it could have been every bit as hot as any other war. Some are calling the situation in Iraq as the beginning of World War III. Whatever you call it, it certainly has the makings of a true world war.
The threat of weapons in a world conflict is greater than ever before. We don't even have accountability for nuclear weapons in countries that once were part of the Soviet bloc. The status we're in right now is ... war. Right now Americans are in a state of denial about the modern world war. The stakes are extremely high. This administration is prosecuting this war to its fullest.
BB: We think of it as a brushfire war?
DM: Brushfires have to be contained before they become firestorms.
History by Hollywood
BB: Speaking of winning hearts and minds, what about the movies "Tora Tora Tora" and "Pearl Harbor"? They were two different creatures.DM: This year our anniversary theme is "Hollywood Remembers Pearl Harbor." We're exploring how Hollywood has interpreted Pearl Harbor because it shapes people's vision of what happened there. It also creates a lot of myths. The first feature film on Pearl Harbor is "Air Force." It is one of those films that is so heroic and so filled with ... historical nonsense. I recall the "Mary Ann," one of the B-17s flying in from California, lands at Hickam and they tell some officers, "Hey, it looks like they did a pretty good job here." And he says, "Yeah, Japanese showed up in laundry trucks and knocked off the tails of airplanes." Well, I remember visitors coming and saying, "I heard that Japanese knocked off the tails of airplanes." And you wonder where all that comes from, well, it comes from that movie. Is it any wonder that there was no sympathy for Japanese Americans who were incarcerated? They'd already been indicted and tried in film.
BB: Does accuracy in movies matter?
DM: The chasm between "Tora Tora Tora" and "Pearl Harbor" is so vast. I've rated "Tora Tora Tora" as about 90 percent accurate and you have "Pearl Harbor," which is about 5 percent accurate.
"Tora Tora Tora" purports to be an accurate telling of those events and shows us for the first time the "Magic" (encoding) machines and the diplomatic intrigue and radar as it really was, and we have two countries make their own films and they combine them together -- I mean it's just unprecedented in cinematic history.
And then you see "Pearl Harbor," which is a reflection of where Hollywood is right now. There was a certain reality check while working on that film as the press started to sniff out this story, in particular the Star-Bulletin started doing features on what was really happening with the film's accuracy. The studio reacted strongly.
BB: Reality check! What is called "enabling legislation" creates the rationale for creating national parks, and yet the Arizona Memorial is the only site run by the National Park Service in the entire nation that has no such codification for its existence.
DM: Enabling legislation defines the authority of the park, the boundaries of the park and also decides what is National Park Service land. And when you are cohabitating an area (with the military), you double what needs to be done because whatever we do at the park has to be reviewed by the Navy. Since we're the only national park that has to do that, the costs magnify themselves.
I find it very troubling that enabling legislation for the site has not been moved on, because knowing the agreement for this national park, which is wonderfully accepted by the Navy, was originally done on loose language and a handshake. But here are hard realities of administering such a park. The fabric that holds that agreement together needs to be revisited and solidified so the Park Service can actually have the authority to administer the park. There are some who believe that if it isn't broke, why fix it? But that's shortsighted.
BB: How is the physical infrastructure of the visitors center holding up? I see cracks everywhere.
DM: Our visitors center was built to accommodate a maximum of 2,000 visitors and 10 employees. The reality is that it takes about 70 employees, and we have more than 5,000 visitors a day. It's overloved! It's a well-intentioned design, but the Park Service had very little to say about it, and that's our speciality, that's what we do. And the fact that it's woefully inadequate has come back to haunt us. There are plans to expand, but when we took soil samples, we discovered that the building we have now is not long for this world. Very, very short.
We're designing a new visitors center, but it's going to have to be moved to more stable land. The future for that whole area is in flux. It's a very critical time -- in the next five years, maybe 50 percent of the vision will be accomplished. But you have two bureaucracies to deal with and the money has to be raised, as well. It's a tremendous challenge.
BB: Plus the security issues at an active-duty naval base.
DM: They've come home to roost. Sept. 11 changed all of that. Things are just different. You know, for years the Park Service site at Pearl Harbor never had a fence around it. One good thing, we've cut down on the number of thefts (from parked cars), which were epidemic. No one on Oahu had any idea of how many break-ins and thefts we had. It was a joke. Not only did we not have enough people to police the area, our people didn't have any expertise in policing.
We're going to have a much better facility. The fact that our building has given up and has decided to sink into the mud is a blessing in disguise. Those who are planning are cognizant enough to look over the past 20 years there and take heed. The key issue will always be money. Luckily, our national campaign has the likes of Tom Hanks and Sen. John McCain on board. The No. 1 visitor attraction in Hawaii needs a first-class home.
It's still overwhelming. There's so much to be done. We have a tremendous job to do, and we have terrific people there to do it. We've seen some amazing things.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Mark Coleman's conversations with people who have had an impact on our community appear on the first Sunday of every month. If you have a comment or suggestion, please send it to mcoleman@starbulletin.com.
