Today marks the 81st Pearl Harbor Remembrance, in memory of those who lost their lives during an attack that shook a nation and the world on December 7, 1941.
I still haven't toured the museum yet, but hope to some day. Maybe when my grandsons are older and have an interest in seeing it.
Have you visited the site of the USS Arizona Pearl Harbor Memorial? What did you think of it?
I thought it was a very moving experience - in fact, I was a little startled at how deeply it touched me - and visitors all seemed to treat it respectfully. It was a similar sense of awe to that I experienced the first time I visited the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial.
I get that feeling every time I visit the battlefields of Gettysburg. I stand in awe of the sacrifices of those who fought and died on that ground.
It is a place I would like to visit if I can together with Normandy, Bergen Belsen, and the Somme.
The only battlefield I have visited where a grandfather fought has been Dublin (1916). Bergen Belsen is where mum maternal granddad ended up in 1945 with a twisted irony of him being an Anglo Irish Gypsy son of a full blood Romanian Romany. His wife, was an English Jew (she converted to Church of England and looked like a perfect little Aryan with her fair hair and bright blue eyes). Len was one of British soldiers (Royal Artillery) who bulldozed the bodies into mass graves.
Len had already been an atheist for at least two years by the time he arrived there. No loving, caring god would allow its children to carry out such horrors as he'd experienced.
Today, I see on the news of heavy Russian casualties assaulting an insignificant lump of Ukraine. I have seen images of those poor lads scattered dead and broken about a cold swampy stretch of ground torn apart by artillery much in the way as my paternal grandfather did so many times around Ypres, Somme, Passchendaele and other stinking fields of Belgium during the Great War.
I visited the USS Arizona Memorial on at trip to Hawaii years ago. I was a sad but memorable experience.