The need to grieve still
draws Americans back
to recall a U.S. defeat
Woody Derby was just 23, a farm boy from Iowa enjoying his Sunday paper, when his life -- and the nation's -- changed forever.
Sixty-two years after that haunting Dec. 7 in Pearl Harbor, thoughts of the Japanese attack that killed 2,390 people are not far off for Derby, nor are they for a nation that has seen more dismal days, fought in more wars, lost thousands more sons.
So, Americans keep coming back here, keep remembering.
Derby has come to lay a wreath on eight of the last nine anniversaries. Ask him why, and he'll snap back with a simple answer.
"Why do you think?" the San Diego man, now 85, asked. "It's the worst military defeat the U.S. has ever had."
Derby worked in the supply room aboard the USS Nevada when the ship was attacked. He remembers the sounds of the bombing, the gushing water that flooded his ship, the brother sailors he lost.
Like Derby, some 1.4 million people come here each year. They toss flowers into the waters above the sunken USS Arizona, just as they pass their fingers across the names of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and look solemnly at the hallowed Lower Manhattan lot known as ground zero.
And so they will come again today, long after the drop of Japanese torpedoes launched the country into World War II.
Hundreds are expected to gather both onshore and at the memorial here to mark the event. Ernest Borgnine, a World War II veteran and Oscar winner who appeared in "From Here to Eternity," will speak. Taps will echo, F-15s will fly over, wreaths will be laid.
"It kind of makes you stop and think about what people have done for us to be free the way we are," said Jan Winn, 62, a retired elementary school teacher visiting here this week from Redlands, Calif. "It makes you hope we don't have to go through it again."
Another visitor to the memorial, Larry Solomon, of Lexington, Ky., said he listened during his flight to Hawaii as two young girls discussed visiting Pearl Harbor.
One of the girls shrugged off the trip, the 55-year-old marketing and research employee said, saying it was a place where "just a bunch of people got bombed." The other, he said, noted the importance of the visit.
"You've got to go," he recalled the girl saying. "You've got to be a part of history."