...nor am I a stamp collector, but this 50 year commemorative piece was given to me on said anniversary by my grandfather. He was at Pearl - not for the attack itself - but he was flown in the next day to help with the clean-up. He had nightmares about it for the rest of his life, and of his many WW2 experiences, he talked about this one the least. What I gleaned came from unguarded snippets of story and his hollering in his sleep when he was having those dreams.
Here are a few recollections of his - you can no doubt piece together the horrible scene from just this:
He mentioned pulling bodies and body parts from the water, which although gruesome and vivid, did not seem to stick with him as much as the fact that they were covered (along with everything else) with bunker oil that had spilled into the harbor. I'm sure he flashed to that every time he smelled diesel or kerosene, since smells trigger memories way down deep in our lizard brains.
The other recollection he had was of guys in capsized ships banging on the hull or bulkheads to signal they were trapped inside. From the outside in their little motor launches, my grandfather and his colleagues could hear this banging as recovery efforts got underway. Some of those guys stopped banging before rescue came...
He told a few other bits and pieces to me over the years, but these are the two that resonated with me the most.
He also had a little bit of the red sun from a crashed Japanese plane from that day - it was about the size of a silver dollar and had clearly been cut from a larger piece with tin-snips for distribution to US troops as mementos (souvenir is too light a word). He gave this to me many years ago - unfortunately through college and several moves, I lost it.
