Written by another:
The man was a teenage apprentice seaman, when he spotted planes coming in over the harbor.
He thought they were military aircraft conducting drills until explosions and flames erupted from stricken ships in the harbor.
Then came screams of sailors; the stench of burning oil and flesh.
Then, he and two other sailors were waiting to ferry passengers on a small boat to and from the a hospital ship that was moored in the harbor.
His motor launcher boat rushed to a large ship, which was hit by several bombs, one of which struck her forward and set off a massive explosion. Already fueled and manned when the attack began, their 30-foot boat was the first rescue vessel to arrive at the scene.
They found the water littered with people — some wounded, some dead, some unharmed. Many were covered in the leaking oil from the ships.
They loaded as many as they could and delivered them to the hospital ship before returning to the another ship for more.
"As we're pulling them out of the water, a lot of times the skin would come right off the arm," The man said. "They would just be black with oil, except maybe you could see the white of their eyes."
The planes kept coming. Dive-bombers plunged out of the sky, dropping bombs and strafing the water and ships with machine gun fire before roaring back up for another round. Torpedo bombers flew in level to drop their submersible weapons for underwater assaults.
The burning, sinking vessels at first lowered men into the makeshift rescue boat. But some sailors started to panic and jump into their small ship, forcing it to pull away so it wouldn't sink too.
"Some of the sailors would be like in shock and some of 'em would be like going out of control, screaming and hollering," He said.
The next morning — after nervously worrying the attacking planes would return — his boat unloaded men from their craft who failed to make it through the night and delivered them to land.
"We had them stacked like cordwood in our boat. The open end where the feet was sticking out was these big brown tags that said 'unknown, unknown,'" He said. Many couldn't be identified.
More than 2,200 were killed.
"We didn't survive by any skill," He said of his boat. "It was just luck, pure luck. Because all we were concentrating on was trying to save people, and not save ourselves."
Horrible. Senseless. Unneeded, and un-warned. The military predators struck again and again.
December 7, 1942. A day that will live in infamy.
Don't tell me we 'Merkans don't know about having our country attacked. Don't tell me we've always just sat back in our Laz-E-Boy recliners and watched in safety from a distance.
Stop your internecine squabbling and foolish tribal posturing and nonsense. Come together as a group, a people, a nation - and set your house in order. Accept that there are people who view "God" differently than you do - and that only GOD can say which way is correct - and He ain't talkin' just now. Quit blaming America for your own failure to organize, build, plant and educate your own countries.
Two generations of Americans have watched planes being used to murder 1000's of our citizens in a mere breath of time - UNPROVOKED. This may seem trivial to those who have lived through terror in places like Ireland and Israel and what WOULD be Palestine if the people who would like to be Palestinians would stop behaving like spoiled children and join the rest of the world in living (moderately) peacefully.
Things like 12/7/42 and 9/11/01 are only going to make things worse in the long run. Had the Japanese not perpetrated the atrocity above, there would have been no Hiroshima, no Nagasaki. Had Al Queda - or whoever it was - not committed the atrocities on 9/11/01, there would have been no Afghan war - and no EXCUSE for Shrub-boy to start the Iraq debacle.
War. What is it good for?
Absolutely. NOTHING.
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America was just an experiment.
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