Off Topic but important!

[Anonymous]

I am so young and innocent; that was all before my time. But not my dad's time. He was in a National Guard unit at the start, and quickly transferred to the Navy. The creepiest time for him was riding on the Rochambeau, a former French luxury liner, while a Japanese sub followed them for two weeks. The sub never attacked, probably no torpedoes. Two weeks after my father arrived in Australia, the Rochambeau was sunk.

My dad served in Intelligence. I still don't know what all he was involved in, but I often saw him sitting in his favorite chair with a cigarette, looking across the room but seeing something much farther away, all the time thinking.

A good pal of mine growing up lost his father in the war. His step father was first mate on a tanker loaded with fuel on December 7, 1941. They were on the opposite side of Oahu. They could see smoke and hear the fight, but they never saw one zero; and luckily for them, no zero saw them.

Most of the old timers on the railroad when I started were WWII vets. One was at Pearl Harbor. He's one of the last five or six P.H. vets in the region, and is always involved in the local ceremonies. We also have the USS Taney, the last commissioned Navy ship at Pearl Harbor that day.