USS Arizona: The men who survived

GRASS VALLEY, Calif.

Lou Conter is telling the story of the night his patrol bomber was shot down seven miles off the coast of New Guinea, dumping the seaplane's 10-man crew into the Pacific Ocean.

The crew was not alone in the water.

"We had 10 or 12 sharks around us all the time," Conter says. "I told the men, 'If a shark comes close, hit it in the nose with your fist as hard as you can.'"

The men stayed afloat until another plane saw the burning wreckage and tossed out a life raft. The exhausted crew dragged ashore an hour later and hid in the jungle, fearful they would be captured by Japanese soldiers. The next night, an American PT boat retrieved all 10 men.

As Conter told it, the story wasn't about punching sharks, or skulking in the jungle or chasing shadows to the waiting rescue boat. Conter was talking about survival, about coming back alive.

His time in the war started that way.

He was 20 when he escaped the burning wreckage of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. He tried to save as many injured crewmen as he could, but when the sun set on Dec. 7, 1941, he was one of just 335 sailors who did not perish.

Conter fought on through World War II, scraped past a lot of close calls, then went to Korea. After that, he started teaching U.S. troops the skills of survival, evasion, resistance and escape. He wrote a training manual whose precepts the Navy still follows. Today, he tries to pass on what he knows to students of history.

At 93, he is one of the last survivors of the attack on the Arizona. He endured what he did, he says, because that was his job. And that's what he told every soldier and airman who took his courses.*

Whatever happens, find a way to survive.

Conter was stationed on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor in September 1941, when he turned 20. He and a buddy had been talking about their future in the Navy.

"Lou, let's go to flight school," Conter's buddy said one day.

"We won't get in," Conter said. "We're right-arm rates." At the time, sailors wore patches designating their rates, the enlisted expression of rank, on the right or left sleeve, depending on their assignment. Aviators most often arose from left-arm rates.

Conter had made friends with a young lady in Honolulu. Her father was an engineer and a top executive for a dredging company with a big Navy contract. Conter was at the young lady's house one day when her father received an important visitor: Admiral William Calhoun, the commander of base force for the Pacific Fleet.

Calhoun quizzed Conter about his posting, his job on the ship. Conter told the admiral he was interested in flight school, but doubted he would earn admission.

Calhoun told Conter to put in for the assignment. A few weeks later, Conter and his buddy passed a flight test at sea and on Nov. 1, they got their orders: Report to Navy flight school in Pensacola, Fla.

Two weeks later, the Arizona's captain called the two sailors in and told them the ship was headed back to Long Beach in early December. They could ride to the mainland then and leave for Florida.

Their orders were lost on the Arizona when the battleship sank on Dec. 7. Conter and his buddy waited for new instructions, but heard nothing.

In early January, Conter visited his young lady friend again and again, Admiral Calhoun was there.

"I thought you'd be in flight school," he said.

Conter told him about the lost orders. Three days later, he and his buddy were on a ship to San Francisco and then a train to Pensacola.

Conter got his wings in November 1942. He was soon flying one of the Navy's Black Cats, a squadron of long-range patrol bombers painted black for night missions.

The Black Cats flew surveillance, search and rescue, sea patrol, but they proved especially valuable for nighttime assaults and nuisance raids on Japanese submarines and ships. The planes could fly at low altitudes, then buzz upward for a bombing run, confounding enemy gunners trying to calculate speed and distance.

The crews were based on tender ships moored in secluded harbors. Conter served on the San Pablo and Half Moon. The planes took off and landed on the water; the pilots tied up to buoys near the ship.

"We'd leave at 5:30 in the evening and stay out 12 or 14 hours, then return in the morning," Conter said. "Sometimes, we'd come back, eat, then sleep on the beach."

Conter's crews flew missions across the South Pacific: New Guinea, Borneo, New Britain, the coast off Perth, Australia.

The crews learned the routines of the Japanese ships. The best time for a bombing raid was after 1 a.m., when the ship was quiet.

"We wouldn't get much fire back and by the time they sounded general quarters, we were on our way," Conter said. "Sometimes they'd get shooting at you and you'd look at the shells and they looked like they were going to hit you. Then they'd go by."

Conter's plane hadn't been out long in September 1943 when enemy bullets pierced one of their rear hatches and hit a parachute flare. The flare exploded and started a fire, which forced the plane into the water.

"Say your prayers, men, we're seven miles off shore and we're in 10, 15-foot swells," one of the officers said as the crew abandoned the plane. "I don't think we'll ever be able to swim to shore."

"Baloney," Conter replied. "Knock it off. Just stay together, hold hands and kick slowly 'cause there'll be sharks around. If a shark comes too close, hit it in the nose with your fist as hard as you can."

The men helped one another, holding up anyone who weakened. Not long after, a second plane dropped a life raft and all 10 of the crew made to shore and, the next night, back to the base.

In late 1943, Conter flew a mission to rescue more than 200 coast watchers in New Guinea. Coast watchers were military intelligence operatives who gathered information about enemy activities on islands across the South Pacific.

The planes flew up the Sepik River from the northern coast of New Guinea. The river wound through dense vegetation, leaving 15 or 20 feet of clearance on each side of the plane. If a plane crashed, crocodiles awaited in the river.

"In three days, we rescued 219 coast watchers without losing anybody," Conter said. "The Japanese were only a mile away. It was one of the biggest rescues in World War II, but no one knew about it because everything was top secret in those days."

In Korea, Conter flew 29 missions, but his work in Naval intelligence left him vulnerable if the North Koreans captured him, so he was shipped to Washington, D.C.

He was promoted to Lieutenant Commander in February 1954, the rank he held until he retired. His work turned toward survival training in a new military program called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.

Conter helped establish training bases in Florida and California and in 1965, he returned to Pearl Harbor to write training materials for troops headed to Vietnam.

He had stopped at Pearl Harbor more than a decade earlier, on his way to a posting in Korea. A platform marked the wreckage of the USS Arizona. Conter and others in his group boarded a boat to go out to the platform and see his old ship.

"We got halfway there and I told them to turn around," Conter said. "I wasn't going out there. I couldn't."

In 1967, Conter retired from the Navy. More than 20 years earlier, he had earned his real estate license in California and had maintained it. He settled in Palm Springs and built a career as a real estate developer, buying up land for commercial and residential projects.

That same year, he met his wife, Valerie, in Palm Springs. Her sister knew Jack Warner, the film studio mogul, and invited Valerie to a movie premiere party Warner was hosting in Palm Springs for his latest project, "Camelot".

Conter attended the same event and was seated next to Valerie. They struck up a conversation and, after a brief courtship, married.

Today, Lou and Valerie Conter live in a two-level house at the end of a winding road on a golf course in Grass Valley, a mountain town about 60 miles outside Sacramento.

Tall pines tower over the house. Deer and rabbits wander the hillside. Golfers play through 50 yards from Conter's driveway.

"I'm going to be back out there one of these days," Conter said, his voice wistful as he watches a foursome trying to stay on the greens. Conter's doctor has sidelined him for now for health reasons, but he is certain he will return soon.

He took up golf seriously in Palm Springs and played in the Bob Hope Classic six times, once on a team with crooner Johnny Mathis. He keeps a photo from that tournament on a bookshelf in an alcove off the kitchen.

On the same bookshelf sit mementos from his time on the Arizona. Medals. Photographs. A painting of the Arizona hangs on the wall of a sitting room. He keeps a folder of newspaper clippings, magazine stories and copies of a telegram.

"Here's the one that told my mother I was missing in action on the Arizona," he says. It is dated Dec. 21, 1941.

"The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you that your son Louis Anthony Counter quartermaster third class US Navy is missing following action in the performance of his duty."

The telegram, which misspelled Conter's last name, promises further information and asks his family not to divulge Conter's posting.

A second telegram, dated Jan. 6 reported that Conter was alive and would contact his family.

"I'd already sent word, even before the first one got there," he says. "So they knew."

Though Conter turned around the first time he ventured toward the sunken Arizona, he has been back since, to see it with other survivors.

He joined the USS Arizona Reunion Association and stays in touch with a few of the remaining survivors. One, Joe Langdell, lives about 40 miles away in Yuba City.

He keeps up with what the military does, and some of it irritates him. Discipline seems less important than it was in his day. Too many strategic decisions come down from Washington instead of from the commanders on the ground.

And he has watched with dismay the changes in survival training. He once helped design programs that sent soldiers into the wilds for days or weeks at a time. Now, some courses require less than a week of field time.

"You can't get a guy hungry in three or four days," Conter says.

But there are moments when he knows what he did meant something. His old co-pilot in the New Guinea days was asked once if he'd had survival training for the war.

"He said, 'I had survival training in the ocean. We had survival training on the job. And my co-pilot, Lou Conter, saved my life.'"

Conter stares at his hands.

"Some things," he says, "you don't know about what they'll mean until years later."

LAS VEGAS

Once a month or so, Clarendon Hetrick's phone rings with a call from Utah. On the other end of the line is an old shipmate from the USS Saratoga, the aircraft carrier where Hetrick worked as a mechanic through most of World War II.

For an hour or so, the two men talk. They catch up. They trade stories. Not war stories, usually, not unless one of them has had it out with a doctor or a pushy clerk. Just stories, the kind buddies tell each other.

"He's there anytime I call him," Hetrick says. "He's there for me. I guess he'd do anything he could for me. He's more like family than just a friend."

Hetrick, who is 91, has outlived most of the men he knew on the Saratoga. He is one of nine living survivors from the attack on the USS Arizona, the battleship he boarded in 1941 when he was 17.

He will answer questions about that December day when he escaped the burning wreckage of the Arizona, reciting as many of the details as he can remember. The new shoes he left on the deck of the sinking ship, the ones he intended to retrieve later. The shock of jumping into a harbor knowing he couldn't swim.

But he kept most of it to himself until he started meeting up with other survivors, years after he retired from the military.

"I was always wanting to learn more when I was younger," says Hetrick's younger son, Robert, who lives not far from his dad in Las Vegas. "But I had a brother in Vietnam who didn't want to talk about it at all, so I guess I realized if they want to talk, they'll talk. That was the way it was."

Hetrick shrugs, trying to get comfortable in the recliner. "It just didn't appeal to me to bring it up," he says.

Fires still burned on the broken USS Arizona the morning after the Japanese ambush. Hetrick slept on the battleship USS Tennessee, which had been moored just ahead of the Arizona along Ford Island.

The Tennessee took hits in the attack, but two of the armor piercing bombs, the kind that sunk the Arizona, failed to detonate. Debris from the Arizona showered the Tennessee's stern and started fires, but the vessel stayed afloat.

Hetrick took a motor launch to the receiving station on shore, where he and other survivors were allowed to shower and given a change of clothes. The men followed orders in a fog of wonderment and confusion.

"We didn't hear much from the outside at first," Hetrick said. "It hadn't really sunk in what had happened."

The Navy began assigning sailors to new postings. Hetrick was sent to the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier. The ship remained anchored outside Pearl Harbor for most of a month as U.S. commanders planned their next move against the Japanese in the South Pacific.

One day, a Navy officer came on board and asked if anyone wanted to volunteer for an assignment in the aviation section. Hetrick thought about it. He liked the idea of working as an aircraft mechanic, so he volunteered.

"They gave me 30 minutes to get off the ship and catch a transport to San Diego for training," he said. "It didn't take me that long. I had one pair of dungarees and that was it, that and a towel and shaving gear."

The Lexington sailed out of Pearl Harbor not long after. It never returned, crippled in the Battle of the Coral Sea and scuttled by the Navy to keep the enemy from salvaging her.

After about six months of training in San Diego, Hetrick returned to Honolulu and joined the USS Saratoga, the sister ship of the Lexington. He worked on board as a mechanic for a torpedo squadron and ended up in charge of the hydraulic shop.

The Saratoga sailed across the South Pacific, to Guam, the Philippines, around New Guinea. Hetrick was on board during battles at Midway and Wake Island and for the U.S. invasion of Iwo Jima early in 1945. The Saratoga was attacked by six Japanese suicide bombers within about 24 hours.

"I put on two life jackets," Hetrick said. "I told another kid if they come back again tonight, I'm leaving."

Hetrick earned a Purple Heart for wounds during one of the bombing raids.

The Saratoga had returned to Pearl Harbor by the time the Japanese surrendered. The Navy loaded 5,000 bunks on board, along with a row of portable latrines, and the Saratoga sailed to San Francisco, passing under the Golden Gate Bridge with toilet paper streamers and thousands of sailors who needed something to do.

Hetrick was still just 21 by then, but a seasoned sailor who shared little in common with the 17-year-old kid who left high school and joined the Navy on his parents' signature.

"I didn't have the slightest idea what would happen when I signed up," he said. "I decided I'd do whatever they told me to. When they said, 'grab your sea bags and let's go,' I did."

When he first arrived at Pearl Harbor, Hetrick wasn't even old enough to buy a beer until he found a place where they didn't ask questions if a guy was in a service uniform.

Now, stateside again, Hetrick reported to a Navy station in San Diego, where he met the woman who would become his wife, Jeanne. As his stint was about to end, the Navy decided to transfer him back to Pearl Harbor. He asked if Jeanne could come with him.

"They said, 'If you re-enlist, we'll send her over.' I said, 'You send her over, I'll re-enlist.' I'd been told things like that before. They wouldn't send her over so I didn't re-enlist."

But Hetrick couldn't find work, so inside of six months, he signed up for the Navy Reserve. He was sent to the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station up the coast in Orange County.

In 1949, the newly created U.S. Air Force was trying to fill it out its ranks with experienced support crews, almost begging for mechanics who knew the aircraft. Hetrick saw a new opportunity and joined.

"On the day I swore into the Air Force, I was still in my Navy uniform," he said. "Three months later, I was in Korea."

He worked his way up to crew chief on a squadron of B-26 bombers,

After 18 months overseas, he returned to Langley Field in Virginia. ("Two of us with the same rank were up for the same kind of job," he said. "He wanted the east coast, I wanted the west coast. He got the west coast and I got the east coast. So you see how that works.")

From Virginia, he went to Utah, to France and then to Albuquerque, where he retired in November 1961.

He was on his own once again, he and his young family. They moved to Modesto, Calif., where he got a job driving a produce truck in the fruit orchards.

"They paid me by the day," he said. "After 36 hours, I still hadn't put in a day. I asked the boss, 'how many hours is in a day for you?' He said, 'whatever I can get out of you.' I quit. I wasn't working for nothing."

He hired on with a farm labor contractor and within a year, he and a guy he worked with started their own business, contracting with the orchard owners to harvest crops. They covered the growing seasons: cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, grapes.

The venture was working out well. Until his partner ran off with all the money.

Hetrick recovered. He built a reputation as a guy who could bring in the harvest on time.

Around 2005, he and Jeanne moved to Bullhead City. A few years after that, they left for Las Vegas, where their son, Bob, and his family help them get around.

Las Vegas seems to like Hetrick. He was at a restaurant last summer and someone noticed his USS Arizona cap. He didn't have to pay for dinner.

Hetrick turns a rusted chunk of metal over in his hands, running his fingers along the curves and edges. It is a piece of rigging used to secure a mooring line from a ship.

From the USS Arizona.

He first visited the Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor on the 50th anniversary of the attack and has returned since.

"It gets your breath when you first see it," he says. "It's hard to explain." He thinks back. "You know, you can see where I came out of, the hatchway. There's a little air bubble. It's the same place where the oil is leaking" — oil stores aboard the ship that, even today, still seep to the surface — "that's where I got out from below."

In 2006, Hetrick returned to Pearl Harbor for the 65thanniversary of the Japanese attack. He had visited before, but this trip meant more. He brought all of his family: his wife Jeanne, his three sons and their families. And he was allowed to visit a part of the Arizona few people ever see.

During construction of the memorial, the Navy sliced off pieces of the Arizona's wreckage to make room for the structure that sits above the sunken ship today. The pieces – the largest is about as long as a bus – sit in a salvage yard on the Waipi'o Peninsula on Oahu. The Navy occasionally cuts away small bits of the wreckage for memorials.

For Hetrick, the section of mooring line links him to those final moments of the Arizona. He will tell his story if he's asked and he will remember details along the way.

"I remember hearing explosions at first," he says. "It sounded like someone shooting guns. You don't fire guns in port, so I ran out real quick to see what was happening. I saw one airplane, with a big red meatball on the side. Nobody could debate what that was, no question about it."

He remembers the crewman trying to climb a ladder to escape through a hatchway on the deck. The man told him later he had broken both his hips in one of the explosions and had survived only because Hetrick was there to urge him on.

Hetrick still likes to talk about the new shoes he bought the day before the attack in Honolulu. As he prepared to jump off the burning ship, he took the shoes off and set them on the quarterdeck.

"I left them there and hoped to get them back," he says. "I ain't seen 'em since."

He remembers when the order was given to abandon ship. He jumped into the harbor, even though he had never passed his swimming test.

"When somebody says get out of here and you're on a hundred tons of ammunition, well, you don't question it," he says. "If somebody in authority said do something back then, you didn't question it. I think that's what kept me living to this day."

He's not sure he'd have learned that lesson if he hadn't enlisted in the Navy. He says that decision was the best thing he could have done.

"I'd do it a hundred times more," he says.

UPDATE: Clare Hetrick died in 2016. 

PROVO, Utah

Ken Potts eases around the side of the pool table, waving toward items like a museum tour guide in a back room.

"This shows where all the ships were," he says, pointing at a map depicting Pearl Harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. "There's the battleships … there's the Nevada, the Arizona, the Tennessee, the West Virginia, Maryland, the Oklahoma. The California was way down here."

He stops in front of a newspaper, the front page of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin with the headline: "WAR! OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES"

"That's one of the first extras that was put out that day," Potts says. "I bought it at the receiving station in Pearl Harbor. It's in good shape for a paper."

Farther down the paneled wall hangs a painting of the USS Arizona, the battleship Navy recruit Potts boarded in December 1939. By 1941, he worked the cranes on the ship, a job that entailed retrieving the Arizona's small seaplanes after they landed on the water.

He points out the cranes and the locations along the ship where he would tie up the motor boats he piloted to fetch supplies and ferry sailors to and from shore. He gazes at the picture.

"They were saying, when it first started, some of the ones whose station was up here – "

He traces his finger up onto the main forward mast, to the crow's nest and the bridge. He clears his throat. "They tried to jump off. Some of 'em made it, some of 'em landed on the deck. That was the end of it."

A moment passes. He returns his attention to the cranes and the catapults that flung the seaplanes into flight.

"Once after we crossed the equator, one of the planes came back," he says. "The sea was real rough when it came in and the sharks started gathering around. They called the Marines out with rifles to protect the plane and the guys while we hauled it in."

Potts was returning to the Arizona with fresh produce when the first Japanese bombers dove into Pearl Harbor. He climbed aboard the ship, ducking to avoid bullets from the gunner planes. He helped rescue some of his shipmates. Seventy-three years later, he is one of just nine survivors of the attack on the Arizona.

He keeps the mementos from his experience – the maps, the photos, the clippings, the medals, the painting – in a room behind a door on the side wall of the living room in the house where he has lived for 54 years. He doesn't like to talk about the attack. Sometimes he can't control his emotions, so he declines speaking requests.

But he is proud of his service, of the other sailors on the Arizona. And there's a trophy in the corner the paneled room that means as much as anything else there.

A few weeks after the war started, sometime in early 1942, Potts opened a letter from his mother. Why is the FBI checking up on you, she wanted to know. Someone from the bureau had been asking questions. He heard the same stories from his grandmother and his aunts.

He didn't know what to tell them. It scared him a little. Potts was working aboard an oil tanker, making short runs out of the harbor to refuel ships anchored off the coast. In the chaotic days following the Dec. 7 ambush, the Navy wasn't letting ships into the harbor, fearful the Japanese might send in more bombers.

Finally, after a few weeks on the tanker, Potts was handed a new assignment. He would work in the port director's office, delivering sealed packets to the captains of Navy ships. Inside the packets were the captains' new orders, military secrets, classified information that required clearance to handle.

That's why the FBI was nosing around me, Potts thought.

"These captains of the ships, when they left the states, they had no idea where they were going, just that they're going via Pearl Harbor," Potts said.

He resumed one of his old jobs from the Arizona, piloting motor launches from the receiving station out to the Navy ships.

Potts was based out of the port director's office – there were two, one at the harbor, one on the ninth floor of the Aloha Tower in downtown Honolulu – but he logged most of his hours at the controls of the motor boat, a Jeep or a station wagon.

"The station wagon was for the captains of some of the ships that would come in," he said. "Not Navy ships, other ships. The Navy captain who lived on Waikiki Beach gave a lot of parties and invited these guys. I had to take them to the parties and sit there until it was over."

The parties sometimes dragged into the early morning hours.

"It was boring," Potts says. "But it was a lot better than being shot at."

He tried to keep his thoughts on the work in the office. He tried not to remember the days after the attack. The day when they assigned him and a crew of divers to a motor launch and sent them to the Arizona to remove bodies of dead sailors.

"When they dropped that bomb that made our ammunition explode, it dang near broke the ship in two, so we couldn't go anywhere forward of that," he says. "We took all the bodies we could find."

When he reaches that part of his story, he stops. He can't relive those images anymore. He describes the store of booze they pulled out of safe and the money.

"One day our boat was stacked with two dollar bills," he said. "They paid everybody in two dollar bills back then. We hauled it all back in."

Potts stayed in Honolulu until the end of the war. He finally received his orders to return to the states. He would sail to San Francisco on one of the cruise ships refitted to move troops, the Lurline, or maybe the Matsonia.

As he was packing, a buddy warned him that his possessions would be searched at the port in San Francisco. If they found anything that belonged to the Navy or hadn't been approved, they'd take it.

Potts picked up the Colt 45 he'd found on Ford Island on Dec. 7, 1941. The gun took away some of the terror he had felt from the moment he saw the first bomber, the panic he felt when he found the armories on board the ship locked. With a gun, he could defend himself. He had held on to it through the war.

But he didn't want to start his civilian life in the brig, so he left it in Honolulu.

"We got into San Francisco," he says, "and they never even opened my bags. Never would've found it."

He bought another gun in the states and he is never far from it. A pistol sits on top of his television at home. He keeps it with him when he travels. And he keeps it loaded.

"It ain't worth a damn if it ain't loaded," he says.

Potts returned to Illinois in late 1945 to await his formal discharge, hanging out in Chicago. He was still active, so would report to the Navy Pier each morning to check a list for the names of sailors who had been given duties for the day. His name never appeared and he would leave for the day.

"I came back to the pier one morning and my name was on the list to do KP work," he says. Kitchen patrol. Mess hall duty. Peeling potatoes.

"I went and found the head guy and by the time I got through explaining things to him," Potts says, "my name was never on that list again."

His mother had moved to Decatur, Ill., by then, so he followed and took a job at a hardware store. He started chatting up a regular customer, a contractor, and got a job building houses.

"What houses they built!" Potts says, shaking his head. "That lumber was so damn green then, we used to kid we had to shoot the squirrels out of it."

He wasn't happy where he was, so he loaded up his big 12-cylinder Lincoln Zephyr and headed west. He stopped in the small town of Payson, Utah.

"They said what a wonderful place it was to live, with jobs and everything, so I bought a little place up in Spanish Fork," he says, "I'm still looking for that easy money."

With his experience running cranes on the Arizona, Potts figures he could have landed a decent job at the Geneva Steel operation, but he didn't want to work shifts, so he worked as a carpenter again and eventually went into the used car business with a friend.

He moved to Provo and sold cars until 1990. He and his wife, Doris, have lived in the same house for 54 years.

The paneled room behind the door in the living room of the Provo house is filled with trophies of almost any imaginable sort. Two deer racks (his wife shot one, his son the other). Guns. Knives. A bow. An impressive collection of restaurant menus from 30 years of cross-country searches for used cars.

And in the back corner, a real trophy. It sits a little higher than most items, but not necessarily on a platform. It fit in that location. And it holds deep meaning for Potts, even though he did nothing to win it.

Potts had not returned to Honolulu in the decades since he left for San Francisco in 1945. He wasn't ready to see it all again, to sharpen the memories he'd tried to dull.

In 2006, one of his sons offered to take Potts to Hawaii for the 65th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. He stayed on the 17th floor of a hotel on Waikiki Beach. He visited the memorial and was relieved to see the builders got it right.

"It's one of the best actual memorials I've seen," he says. "It's where the war started."

Five years later, in 2011, he got a call from the band director at Timpview High School in Provo. The marching band had been invited to fly to Pearl Harbor and perform at activities commemorating the 70th anniversary of the attack.

The band members had decided they wanted to honor survivors from that day. Would Ken be willing to go as a guest of honor? The band would cover all expenses for him and Doris.

Potts was touched. He could see the band was sincere. To prepare for the trip, they were studying World War II history, attending lectures, writing research papers. They offered to perform at a gathering of Utah survivors. How could he say no?

"Talk about treating you like royalty," he says. He was able to visit the national cemetery at an area called the Punch Bowl. He watched the band perform and stood as a survivor of the Arizona, one of the sailors who lived. He went out to the floating memorial.

"I got the lay a wreath in front of the names of the fallen," he says quietly.

When he returned home, he got another call from the band director. The band had won a trophy in one of the competitions during their stay in Honolulu. They had voted. They were dedicating it to Potts and wanted him to have it.

He squeezes past the pool table, past the photos and the maps and the medals. Here is a story he will tell, a memory he will keep.

The trophy sits on a small white base that raises it above other items on a shelf. It is about three feet tall, with a carved island figure on top and the silhouette of a Hawaiian warrior on a plaque. The inscription reads "Spirit of Aloha Award, Timpview High School Marching Band."

He touches the trophy.

"It's my pride and joy."

LA MIRADA, Calif.

For 30 years, Lauren Bruner punched a clock at a manufacturing plant south of Los Angeles, a World War II veteran in a landscape crawling with them.

No one knew much about Bruner's years in the Navy, not the early years anyway. The easy stories he'd tell. The ones that gave him nightmares, the stories from the day he nearly burned to death, he kept to himself.

Yet in a place where you couldn't cross the street without running into a war vet, Bruner was not just another ex-sailor who made it home. Only 335 men survived the bombing of the USS Arizona, the mighty battleship whose loss at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, inspired a nation to go to war.

Bruner was one of them.

By 1991, the 50th anniversary of the attack, the number of living Arizona crewmen had shrunk. Survivors' groups wanted to find all of them so their stories would not be lost.

A woman from Illinois drew Bruner's name. No one among the groups knew where he was or what he was doing, but the woman persisted. She tracked him to the Los Angeles area, then started a phone search.

Finally, she located some of Bruner's tax records and found his address and telephone number.

"No one knew where the hell I was," Bruner says. "I was here all the time. When they sent me my discharge, I just stayed here."

The woman helped connect Bruner with other survivors from the Arizona and Pearl Harbor. He finally found people who understood his experience.

"I never talked about it much then," he says. "I just didn't want to. I still get to the point when I'm talking about it, first thing you know, I go to bed at night, wake up and can't sleep for a week."

Bruner, who turned 94 in November, is now one of nine living USS Arizona crewmen who survived the ship's sinking. He has been telling his story to an author, Ed McGrath, who is working on a book and a film about Bruner's escape from a collapsing tower on the ship.

The survivors' group that found him was right, he has concluded: The stories of the Arizona should not die with the men who lived them.

"The kids coming up now have never heard of it," he says, his voice tinged with sadness and dismay. "Never heard of it."

Bruner was at his battle station in an anti-aircraft gun director, a metal box on the forward mast of the Arizona, when an armor-piercing bomb ignited the ship's powder magazine. The fireball from the explosion engulfed the six men in the box and trapped them.

A sailor on the deck of the repair ship Vestal spotted the men and threw a line across. Their skin charred and falling off, the men crawled down the line to the Vestal. Bruner was the second-to-last man to leave the sinking ship.

He won't talk much about the escape, or about the men who didn't make it across. Nightmares invade his sleep when he remembers those final moments.

From the Vestal, Bruner was taken to the USS Solace, a hospital ship in the harbor. The Solace dispatched motor boats to the Arizona to rescue wounded sailors and her crew pulled others from the water.

Bruner was burned over more than two-thirds of his body. He had taken a bullet to the back of his leg as he was climbing the tower, but the burns were far worse. He stayed aboard the Solace about a month. In January, another ship took him to San Francisco to the Navy hospital on Treasure Island.

He was treated there for four months. Before the war started, a hospital stay that long would have earned a sailor a discharge, but not anymore. He knew he was near release the day an officer came by and launched into a pep talk about the war and the Navy's role in it.

"I got another ship for you," the officer said at last.

"OK," Bruner said. "What's up with this one?"

"It's a brand new destroyer, the Coghlan, DD-606," he said, "built right here in 'Frisco."

As the war with Japan intensified, the Navy was building new warships as fast as it could. And the ships needed experienced sailors.

Bruner was put in charge of the gun batteries. The ship carried four 5-inch anti-aircraft guns and six half-inch machine guns, and, initially, five 21-inch torpedo tubes. The guns used the same type of control mechanisms Bruner had mastered on the Arizona. Sight-setters and pointers would locate targets visually and determine their distance and range. An electro-mechanical computer would aim the guns.

"I had to start training the new recruits on every machine," Bruner said. "The new ones, they didn't know beans."

Bruner looked each recruit in the eyes to determine the right job, but he wasn't testing their mettle, not yet. He wanted men with eyes set in the right place on their face. He looked for what he called medium spacing. With eyes too close or two far apart, a crewman could deliver faulty readings.

The Coghlan left San Francisco in September 1942 and sailed toward Pearl Harbor for an assignment. The ship was still a day away from Honolulu when the captain received new orders. The ship was to turn around and steam toward Alaska.

The Japanese military had established strategic outposts in the Aleutian Islands and had its eye on Alaska. Japan wanted the northern Pacific to control its shipping routes and block U.S. attacks from that direction.

The Coghlan approached the Aleutians in October, as winter was pushing fall aside. The sea turned rough, tossing the ship with 40-foot swells, bouncing the vessel like a rubber ball in a washing machine.

"When we got up into the Aleutians, we started banging on the Japanese that had already landed," Bruner said. "We'd patrol at night. They were trying to replenish submarines or send smaller ships in. We'd go out and blow them up."

By winter, temperatures plunged below zero. The Coghlan's crew battled just to keep the guns free of ice as they headed toward their next target.

"We had to have two crews, a regular crew and a stand-by crew lined up waiting," Bruner said. "We'd send two guys out to knock the icicles off the guns, then they'd high-tail it back in. By the time they were back, the icicles were forming again and two more guys would go out."

The Coghlan supported Army landings and Navy bombing runs. In March, the crew turned back Japanese forces in the Battle of Komandorski.

Late in the year, after an overhaul in San Francisco, the Coghlan returned to patrol duty off the Aleutians with a half dozen other U.S. vessels. The ships encountered a Japanese fleet, two big cruisers, six destroyers, some troop ships, and engaged.

"We lit into them, started firing on them," Bruner said. "This went on for four straight hours. We got into a run-and-gun battle. One of our cruisers, the heavy cruiser, got hit and water got into the oil. They were dead in the water."

Finally, the four U.S. destroyers were ordered to mount a torpedo run.

"We took off," Bruner said, "firing just as fast as we could. We got as close as 5,000 yards, which was point-blank for those ships. We cut the torpedoes loose."

The Americans stopped the Japanese ships and wiped out some of the top officers. The Coghlan turned back, almost spent. Another five minutes, Bruner figured, and they'd have run out of ammunition.

Bruner and the Coghlan returned to Honolulu and finished out the war in the South Pacific. The ship accompanied General Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines and was anchored in the harbor off Nagasaki, Japan, when the second atomic bomb exploded.

Bruner toured Nagasaki in a Jeep with other Navy officers and chief mates. A few days later, the drove through the crumbling streets of Hiroshima. The cities were in ruins. But the war was over.

"When I got back home, my doctors here wanted to know about my medical background," Bruner said. "I would tell them. They said, 'You should have been dead a long time ago.'"

He finished his stint in the Navy in Shanghai, working shore patrol the way he did back in Honolulu. He was cut loose in San Francisco and returned to Los Angeles, where he had married a girl back in late 1942.

One day, a young fellow knocked on his door.

"Hi," he said, introducing himself. "I'm planning to marry your wife's sister, but I've got to have somebody take my place at work. I wanted to know if you could do it for a couple of weeks."

Bruner thought it an odd request. He asked what the fellow did.

"I'm a painter," he said. "A brush painter."

Bruner laughs as he remembers the conversation.

"Well, I'd brushed enough paint on that damn ship, I figured I could do it," he says. "I said, 'sure, I'll take it.' I still had to wait 29 years for that guy to come back and take his brush back."

His new employer manufactured industrial refrigeration units. Bruner started as a painter, trained as a carpenter, then helped start a new sheet-metal department. Almost three decades later, he was the plant manager, second-in-command.

Three months before he would mark 30 years with the company, he was let go, bought out like a lot other older workers in those days.

By the time the woman from Illinois found him, he was ready to face his past.

Bruner lives alone, in a post-war neighborhood in the far northern edges of Orange County. Trains run close enough to hear the horns during the day, but not close enough to make them a nuisance.

An avocado tree grows in the backyard. Bruner's neighbor, who has become a close friend and a source of transportation, picks the fruit to keep it from rotting on the ground. Long a bachelor again, Bruner has also entertained lady friends from time to time.

Bruner keeps mementos of his time on the Arizona in the sitting room. Framed medals. Photos of the ship and other survivors at reunions in Honolulu. A sign over the arched door marks the room as "Captain's Quarters."

For a long time, he didn't think he would ever return to Pearl Harbor.

Now, Bruner prepares for his next trip in the Captain's Quarters. He will meet three other survivors in Hawaii for their last reunion. He looks forward to his time with the guys from his years in the Navy.

The first couple of trips back to Hawaii were difficult. The ones after that were, too.

"It never gets easy to go back," he says.

So why go back?

"To see the people I knew back in those days," he says. "They were very good days before the war. I even had a couple of dates with girls."

His mouth quirks into a smile.

"I was on a date on that Saturday night with a gal I'd been running around with," he says. He doesn't need to say which Saturday night by now. "We're were out and around. We were going to have a date the next day.

"The next day never came."

UPDATE: Bruner died in 2019. He would become the final survivor to be interred in the ship. 

MORRIS, Okla.

Lonnie Cook was born in this rural town south of Tulsa, not long after it was founded as a stop on the Ozark and Cherokee Central Railway. Only a few hundred people lived there then. Today, the population can almost reach 1,500 when everyone is home.

Cook enlisted in the Navy in 1940 and was assigned to the USS Arizona, one of the largest battleships in the fleet with a crew that, at full complement, numbered more than 1,500.

About a year after he boarded the ship, he ran into a young recruit named Clyde Williams, a fellow from Okmulgee, Okla., a few miles down the road from Morris. All those sailors from all those places and here was a guy who was practically a neighbor.

"I was back here on leave before the war started and he was here too," Cook says. "We picked up a couple of girls and made the rounds. Then we had to go back."

Cook was a gunner's mate on the Arizona. Williams was in the Arizona's band.

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Cook was changing clothes at his locker, savoring the thought of a day in Honolulu with the $60 he'd won in a craps game the night before. Williams was on deck, tuning up to play for colors, an early call after the previous day's fleet Battle of the Bands on shore.

Minutes later, the Japanese attacked and the Arizona was on fire, sinking beneath the surface.

Cook made it off alive. He returned after the war to his home along the railway in eastern Oklahoma. By then, he'd seen the world, witnessed history before it was history. His ships steamed across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Africa. He fought with other sailors in the Battle of Midway and watched the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

Back on land, Cook followed welding jobs from Kentucky and Pennsylvania to New Jersey and Long Island, west to North Dakota and Wisconsin and finally to a ranch house in Salinas, Calif., where he raised a family and stayed put for almost 30 years.

But one day and one place in Cook's 94 years seem to embody all the rest, the day in December 1941 when the young sailor from Oklahoma escaped the ship that sent America to war.

Seven decades later, he is one of nine living survivors from the Arizona. His story is always in demand, though he'd just as soon not tell it in front of a lot of people. He remembers all the details and most of what happened later.

And he still likes to talk about that other young fellow from Oklahoma, the one who didn't make it home.

When he left Morris the first time in 1939 after high school, Cook wasn't sure where he'd end up. Jobs were few, so he set off for Warner, Okla, with the idea of playing football at Connors State Agricultural College.

"They told me the team was already picked," he said. "I said goodbye and left."

His mother suggested Hills Business College in Oklahoma City. He enrolled, but after a couple of weeks, the noisy streetcars and the police sirens kept him up all night.

"I went back and told my mother I wasn't going up there anymore," he said.

By April 1940, the Navy seemed like a good idea and by summer, he was on board the Arizona, stationed at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

He was assigned a battle station in the No. 3 gun turret. His job was to put the primer in the big 14-inch gun. Other crewmen would roll out the shell, use a mechanical device to ram it in, then load four bags of powder behind it. The primer went in last, before the end of the gun was sealed shut.

"From down inside, it wasn't too bad when they fired it," Cook said. "It was like a hard jolt."

Cook made it to his battle station on Dec. 7, 1941, but the Arizona was moored in a cramped harbor and couldn't have fired the big guns even in a prolonged assault. Cook and the other men stayed below deck until the smoke from a fire forced them to leave.

The bomb that shattered the Arizona's bow exploded as Cook and the others climbed out of the turret. He stepped off the deck into a motor launch as the ship was sinking.

The next morning, the Arizona was still burning as oil flowed out of her full tanks. No one seemed to be in charge on Ford Island, where Cook had spent the night. He met up with some of the guys from the turret crew and they hopped a boat to shore, where there was a call for volunteers to join the Navy's destroyers.

"We said we'd volunteer if they'd put two or three of us together on the same ship," he said. "They agreed."

Cook was assigned to the USS Patterson, then two months later, transferred to the Aylwin, a destroyer that had been moored at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 and engaged the bombers as the attack began.

In February, the Aylwin was part of a U.S. task force preparing for a raid on a Japanese base at Raubal, on the island of New Britain near Australia. Enemy patrol planes spotted the ships and the raid was canceled. As the ships turned around, a squadron of enemy bombers appeared. The ships sent up their own planes and turned back the assault.

In May 1942, the Aylwin joined a task force in the Coral Sea with the USS Lexington, one of the Navy's early aircraft carriers. On the morning of May 8, the fighting intensified as American aircraft tried to turn back the enemy planes.

Japanese torpedo bombers hit the Lexington and crippled the big ship. Explosions rocked the vessel and fires burned into the evening. The crew was evacuated and another U.S. destroyer scuttled the Lexington to keep the Japanese from capturing her.

Years later, at a reunion in Tucson, Cook learned that one of his buddies from the Arizona had been sent to the Lexington and was in the Coral Sea when the carrier was attacked. He had settled in New Mexico with his family.

Cook got the buddy's telephone number and tried to call him. The buddy wasn't home, but his son-in-law answered.

"Can you tell me what ship did he go on after the Arizona?" Cook asked.

"The Lexington," the son-in-law said.

"Was he on it when it sunk?" Cook asked.

"Yes, sir, he was."

Cook never got a chance to catch up with his buddy, but marveled at the connections he seemed to make from his short stint aboard the Arizona.

A month after the Coral Sea battle, Cook's ship was part of the American forces in the critical Battle of Midway. After that, he steamed north to Kodiak, Alaska, where other Navy ships were trying to turn back Japanese inroads throughout the strategically important Aleutian Islands.

Before the year was out, Cook was sent to gunnery school in Washington, D.C., and to the South Boston Navy Yard, where he joined the new destroyer Pringle on its shakedown cruise.

About halfway through the cruise, the Pringle was ordered to accompany the battleship Iowa to Africa, where President Roosevelt was to attend a conference with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Morocco.

During the conference, the Pringle sailed into the Mediterranean Sea and anchored in a river. One day, some smaller boats sailed past. One of the men started yelling.

"Is there anybody there from Oklahoma?"

There were: Cook and another crewman. The man in the boat was from Muskogee, a town about 40 miles east of Morris.

Lonnie and Marietta Cook met in Morris after the war, but the road to their home here today winds thousands of miles across the country.

Cook was discharged in 1948 in San Diego and stuck around California, where he worked as a metal finisher at Van Nuys manufacturing plant. That didn't last long and he headed back to Morris, where he met Marietta.

She likes the story of how they tied the knot. He tries to abbreviate it: "We went to California and got married."

"Tell them the rest," Marietta prompts.

"She went to California and I followed her," Lonnie says.

Marietta shakes her head. "He called me one night and said if you won't let me come to California, I found a lady who's got a new black Buick and I'm going to move to Texas."

"It was a new Mercury," Lonnie says.

"I said, 'Well, come on, then,'" Marietta says, and in 1950, they wed.

That's where the cross-country adventures begin. Cook worked in California, mostly welding jobs, until the union he belonged to called a strike. He headed east and landed in Paducah, Ky. From there, he worked jobs in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and back to New York, where he welded 20-inch gas lines going through Brooklyn.

He returned to Oklahoma again and started his own business, outfitting a one-ton Ford pickup with a winch and other equipment that let him work the oil fields. A while later, he and Marietta were on the road again, to a missile base in Sturgess, S.D., to gas lines in Wisconsin and North Dakota.

Finally, they made their way to Salinas, Calif., just inland from Monterey on the central coast. They bought a small ranch and, while Lonnie continued to work welding jobs, they grew walnuts, almonds, peaches, apples, nectarines, cherries and grapes.

"I canned 500 quarts of fruit one year," Marietta says. "I really miss it."

Lonnie finally retired from welding in 1982 and in 1994, the Cooks moved back to Morris. Lonnie had taken up trap shooting and hoped to do a little hunting back home. It turned out little was the right word. He hasn't hunted in a while, though he still reloads his own ammunition on a garage workbench.

After so many years of travel, the Cooks have settled into a more tranquil pace. They spoil their granddaughters and can now move on to a new great-granddaughter. Once a week, they motor on into Tulsa, where Marietta takes a china painting class and Lonnie wanders the aisles of sporting-goods stores.

Occasionally, they head into Okmulgee for an evening out at the One Fire, a casino operated by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

Cook has returned to Pearl Harbor three times and he likes the Arizona memorial. It is respectful. He's not so fond of the crowds around Honolulu and doesn't plan to go back.

As he talks about Pearl Harbor again, other memories surface.

Cook was the gun captain on the Pringle at the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. The ship provided fire support for the Marines going ashore. Cook stood on a shelf in the gun mount with his big binoculars and watched the Marines raise the flag to mark the U.S. victory.

About a month later, Japanese suicide bombers sunk the Pringle near Okinawa.

During his voyage to Alaska, Cook remembers the flying fish, which stirred up the water like a torpedo wake. That was enough to rattle nerves on board the ship, which was at general quarters every day an hour before sundown and an hour before sunrise.

"The nights up there were already short, so I didn't get much sleep," Cook says. "That's what I'm catching up now. When she says anything, I tell her I'm catching up from the war."

A few years ago, the Cooks attended a fund-raising dinner at a local American Legion post. Cook is invited to such events occasionally and sometimes introduced as an Arizona survivor.

At this one, he was looking around the room and he saw a picture of a sailor way back in the back, in a setting arranged like a memorial. He squinted and thought about where he was.

"That must be old Clyde Williams," he thought, the Arizona band member killed at Pearl Harbor.

He walked back there. Sure enough.

It was Clyde.

UPDATE: Cook died in 2019.

ROSWELL, N.M.

His name was Cactus Jack and to his fans in southeastern New Mexico, he was the dulcet-voiced host of Sagebrush Serenade, a program of country music on KSWS radio.

He was in the studio on Valentine's Day 1955 when a nervous young man walked in. He was the opening act for country superstar Hank Snow that night at the North High School auditorium. He had a record, a new song he was trying out.

"Would you like to listen to it?" the young man asked.

Jack shrugged. "Sure, let's see it." He put the disc on a turntable and dropped the needle.

What he heard wasn't quite country music, but he liked it and he told the kid. Song's got some zip to it, he said. He agreed to play it on his show.

The song, "Hound Dog" and the singer, Elvis Presley, both went over pretty well, the way Cactus Jack remembers it.

For a lot of people, meeting Elvis and playing one of his first records on the air might sound like one of life's truly unforgettable days. But John Anderson, the Navy chief petty officer who called himself Cactus Jack on the air, had a good head start already.

He had chased Japanese soldiers along the coast of China three years before America declared war on Japan. In World War II, he fought at Guadalcanal, in the battle of the Coral Sea, at Okinawa and Iwo Jima. He fought cold and hunger on a ship nearly dead in the ocean off Alaska.

After the war, he worked as a stuntman for Orson Welles and John Wayne and helped build Alan Ladd's house in the hills outside Hollywood.

And he was aboard on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, a pivotal moment in history, but one that struck Anderson to his core. There, he lost his twin brother

"It was a bloody catastrophe, a bloody mess," he says. "I don't think I'll ever forget what I saw that day."

Anderson always talks about his brother, Delbert "Jake" Anderson, when he tells the story of his own escape from the burning ship.

He is one of nine living survivors of the Arizona and, at 97, he has amassed a lifetime of unforgettable days.

Anderson grew up in the Red River Valley of northern Minnesota, the son of a prominent local judge. He had five brothers, including Jake, and four sisters, all grouped so close in age that paying for college wasn't practical for their folks.

As a youngster, Anderson heard stories about the Navy from his uncle, a man named Ray Stokes. Uncle Ray was nearing the end of his career in 1937 when John and Jake both decided to enlist.

John was sent from training camp in Illinois to Bremerton, Wash. He was assigned briefly to the Arizona, then to the Saratoga, an aircraft carrier, then, as the Navy tinkered once more with its troop alignment, back to the Arizona.

Before the big battleship could leave Puget Sound, Anderson volunteered for another mission, joining the small Asiatic Fleet along the coast of China.

Anderson went aboard the USS Edsall, a destroyer that supported various military action at sea and ashore. Japan and China were at war again and America was trying to protect its interests without getting involved in the conflict.

"We saved people on commercial ships on the seas, we rescued missionaries in the interior of China, we shot up a bunch of pirates," Anderson said.

At Kulangsu, an international settlement on an island off the southern Chinese coast, Anderson's unit ran into the French Foreign Legion, who had been cornered by Japanese soldiers on a high ridge.

"I'd never seen so many guys with so much guts," he said. "They were holed up behind sandbags, but they never got hit."

The Edsall sailed farther north, then headed to the Philippines, where they played baseball with a group of indigenous Moros, who had fought the United States more than 20 years earlier.

"We were told to watch out for them, these guys were assassins," Anderson said. "We made friends. We left and never fired a shot at them."

In 1940, Anderson reported to the Arizona once more, joining his brother for the first time since they had enlisted. They would serve together for a little over a year.

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Anderson volunteered for duty on the Macdonough, a destroyer that downed at least one of the Japanese attack planes on Dec. 7.

The ship steamed toward the Asiatic Pacific and soon Anderson was chasing Japanese forces again, only this time the United States was at war. This time the objective was clear.

That summer, the ship joined others for the invasion at Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, one of the first major assaults against Japan by the Americans. The Macdonough stayed until September, then sailed back on patrol in the Pacific.

In the spring of 1943, the Macdonough headed north toward the Aleutian Islands, where Japan was trying to establish strategic strongholds that could control shipping lanes and thwart allied attacks on the Japanese islands.

"It was rough weather, foggy, raining cold," Anderson said. "Here we are, we can't see the enemy. We can't see our own ships. Then we got hit."

The Macdonough had collided with another destroyer, the Sicard. The ship was dead in the water. The crew unloaded anything they could do without, to keep the damaged hull above the water line. They knew the oil tanker Tippecanoe was out there, but couldn't see her.

Finally, the tanker spotted the destroyer. Anderson spoke to one of the tanker's crew about towing the Macdonough. The fellow he was talking with recognized Anderson's voice and they realized they had served together on the Yangtze Patrol before Pearl Harbor.

The tanker towed them to Adak, Alaska, and from there, another ship took the crippled destroyer to San Francisco for repairs.

Over the next year, Anderson would sail across the South Pacific, joining other ships in the American assault on the Marshall Islands, Parry Island and the Palau Islands. The Macdonough pulled picket patrol often, protecting other troops and guarding against kamikaze attacks by Japanese planes.

"We made so many landings," Anderson said. "We would go in with a landing party or we furnished artillery for the landing force. Sometimes we never landed, but we kept the line, always watching out for kamikazes."

On a fall day in 1945, John Anderson teetered on the base of a church steeple 110 feet above the ground. The steeple clock chimed and a statue of an angel wielding a sword emerged from an alcove and knocked Anderson off the steeple.

"Cut!" a director yelled. A stunt coordinator helped pull Anderson from the pile of cigarette crates that had broken his fall. Anderson had finished his first day as a Hollywood stunt man.

The job wasn't what he expected in September, when he was discharged from the Navy. He had a ticket home to Minnesota, but decided to find a place to stay and come up with a plan.

As he walked past a bar, still in his Navy uniform, a fellow popped out the door and looked Anderson up and down, checking him out more closely someone would ordinarily.

"What are you looking at?" Anderson demanded to know.

"You," the fellow said. "Are you in the Navy?"

"I was," Anderson said. "I just got discharged. The war's over."

"Would you like a job?" The fellow told him to report to the front gate of Sam Goldwyn's studio in Hollywood on Monday morning. He gave Anderson the name of a contact there.

Anderson decided he had nothing to lose. After an initial run-in with the guard at the gate ("Three weeks ago, I was shooting at people and killing them and I didn't even know who they were," he growled at the guard. "You I know.") he met his contact and not long after, he was standing in for Orson Welles in a scene from the movie "The Stranger."

It turned out most of the regular stuntmen were still in the military. The studios needed tough men who could handle dangerous situations. The job paid $700.

"Next thing you know, I'm in a movie with John Wayne," Anderson says years later. "I didn't have any speaking parts, but I was working for the studio and they paid me."

He got to know Alan Ladd, who had starred in a series of war movies. When the regular stuntmen returned and the studio cut loose the subs, Ladd hired some of them to work on his house in the Holmby Hills above Los Angeles.

At nights, Anderson was taking classes in meteorology and electronics, trying to learn skills that could help him stand out among all the returning servicemen and women.

One day, he stopped for coffee at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. He felt a tap on his shoulder. He saw Gene LaRocque, a man he'd served with aboard the Macdonough.

"Are you out of the Navy, Andy?" LaRocque asked. When Anderson said he was, his old friend was incredulous. "Andy, you had 12 years of the damnedest fighting I ever saw. You're the bravest man I ever know. You can't leave the Navy."

LaRocque took Anderson to San Pedro, where his current ship was anchored. He introduced him to other officers. By the end of the day, had persuaded Anderson to sign up for the Navy Reserve. Put in eight years at least and you'll have a pension, he promised.

Anderson would serve another 23 years before finally retiring once more.

Anderson's road to the radio booth started in Hollywood, with a screen test at a studio where he had worked. He waited for the result. You have a great voice, he was told. Why not try radio?

So he did. He started on a small station, playing organ music. An administrator at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, N.M., heard Anderson and talked him into joining the school to help improve its radio station and start a television station.

Anderson picked up and moved to New Mexico. He clashed with the station manager of the radio station and finally quit. Or got fired. Or both. That led to a job in Roswell, the Sagebrush Serenade and Elvis Presley.

"They played country music because the people here loved that," Anderson says. "Some of the ships I was on had guys who liked to play the guitar, so I knew something about it. The owner said, 'give it a name and say who are. Anything you choose is fine. You're on your own, every day.'"

As Cactus Jack, Anderson made a few concessions to his seagoing past.

"I cleaned up my language," he says, admitting he deployed a salty vocabulary, even after leaving active duty. "In the service, if you didn't use nasty words, you weren't a good sailor."

A few years later, a new station owner showed Anderson his plans to start a TV station. He said he wanted Anderson to join the on-air staff. Did he know anything about meteorology?

Anderson smiled. Did he ever. Soon, he became one of the earliest TV weathermen and an evening fixture in Roswell homes, or at least those with televisions.

Not long after he returned to Pearl Harbor near the end of the war, Anderson searched out some of the battle reports from Dec. 7, 1941. He knew his brother hadn't made it off the Arizona alive, but he didn't know much else.

He found a report by a gunner's mate. The report said most of the guys in the anti-aircraft batteries, where Jake fought, were shot down early in the assault. When the fourth bomb detonated in the powder magazine, anyone left was blown over the side.

Anderson has returned to the Arizona memorial often and has taken his family there. He has met many of his old friends and shipmates. Many have since died.

"It's always a great thing for me to see them," he says. "That's what I want to remember. The things I don't want to remember was the blood."

Although he is 97, he decided he couldn't miss a final reunion this year and he bought his tickets early. He wanted one last unforgettable day.

UPDATE: John Anderson died in November 2015, less than a year after this report.

Photographing survivors of the battleship USS Arizona

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.

Donald Stratton completed the paperwork for a concealed weapons permit at the El Paso County Sheriff's Office and approached the counter to submit fingerprints.

He was still adjusting to his new life in Colorado, hundreds of miles inland from his old home in coastal California and more than a mile higher in elevation. He had turned 90 and was starting over again.

As he waited, he had a feeling he knew what would happen, but he didn't say anything. A clerk tried to complete the process, normally a routine, if messy, step to secure the permit. She returned, puzzled.

They were having trouble reading his prints, she told Stratton. It was as if he had none.

Stratton hesitated, then confirmed her suspicion. His fingers were almost smooth, lacking all but a few of the swirls that create an identity.

Stratton told her why: He had been aboard the USS Arizona when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941. He survived, but was burned badly over two-thirds of his body. Doctors treated him and he recovered, but the his fingers never healed properly.

The clerks decided they could not send Stratton away without his permit. They found a way to take prints from the edges of his fingers, enough to satisfy the law.

As he recounts the experience, he rubs his hands together, then holds them out, turning them over. He pushes his shirtsleeves up to show his arms. He motions toward his gnarled ear. He catalogs the scars and their origin.

They are the marks of a survivor, 73 years on. They are reminders of a moment in time he can never escape, a moment he sees again and again.

"Through all that, I never did lose consciousness," he says. "I knew everything that was going on."

As the USS Arizona burned and sunk into the harbor, Stratton and five other men had been trapped on an anti-aircraft gun control platform on the ship's foremast, burned in a fireball when below-deck ammunition exploded.

A sailor on the repair ship Vestal, tied up nearby, spotted them and threw them a line. The men, their charred skin peeling away, climbed hand-over-hand across the line to safety.

Stratton and other men climbed into a small boat that took them ashore. They still had to climb onto the dock and then into a truck for a short ride to a Navy hospital. The burn ward filled with the injured. The smell of burned skin filled the air. Doctors and nurses wove among gurneys, administering morphine shots and looking for the victims most in need.

Within a day or two, someone came into the ward and said a few of the wounded would be sent to California. He asked for volunteers.

"I'll go," Stratton said.

"No," the worker said. "We don't think you'd make it. Maybe next time."

"I want to go anyway," Stratton said.

"Fine," the worker said. "If you can stand up and stay up while we change the linen on this bed, we'll see about it."

Stratton climbed to his feet and, biting back the pain, he stood and when his bed was ready, he collapsed back into it. By Christmas, he was in a hospital at Mare Island near San Francisco. He stayed there for months. He weighed 92 pounds by the time he was sent to rehabilitation in Corona, Calif. Finally, the Navy gave him a medical discharge.

A year later, he felt better, so he re-enlisted. The Navy wanted to keep him in Idaho, working with new recruits at a boot camp, but he pushed for a seagoing assignment and wound up on the destroyer USS Stack as a gunner's mate.

He saw action across the South Pacific, patrolled areas where suicide bombers were attacking American destroyers. Once he was awakened by a loud noise and a flash and thought his ship was under attack.

It wasn't, but the flash was a reminder, as if he needed anything more.

Before the end of the war, he went to San Diego for gunner's mate school. He finished his training and was discharged in December 1945.

Stratton grew up in the tiny prairie town of Red Cloud, Neb., about as far away from an ocean as any place in the country. He joined the Navy because it seemed like a better environment.

"You either had a nice place aboard a ship and were high and dry or you didn't have anything," he reasoned. "In the Army you were crawling around in the mud and everything else and I didn't want to do that."

After his second discharge, he knocked around Nebraska again, working in his dad's tavern, then on a beer truck, but he grew bored. He decided to head back to the water. In California, he earned his naval seaman's license and went to work on a drilling rig offshore near Santa Barbara.

He made bargemaster on a huge drilling rig, but yearned for something more interesting, so he got a job as a tender with a commercial deep sea diving business. As a tender, he stayed on the surface, monitoring the divers working on rigs, piers, pipelines, any piece of seaside or seagoing equipment.

Stratton logged thousands of miles of travel. Nicaragua. Chile. Colombia. Kuwait. In Alaska, he helped set up platforms that could keep up with tides that rose and fell as much as 32 feet.

In his dining room in Colorado Springs, he keeps a replica of a hard diving helmet, the kind his divers used. The face plate is glass and around the bottom are screws that would secure it to the diving suit. Stratton falls easily into the memories of his years on diving boats.

"We worked with a crane barge capable of lifting 700 tons," he sys. "I motioned to crane operator what we needed, what tools to send down." He touches the diving helmet. "I ran the decompression chamber on jobs. Once, I made a dive in a two-man submarine, down in over 1,200 feet of water off Santa Barbara coast. One of the first people to do that."

For years, Stratton wore the scars from the Arizona without talking about them much. Lots of men brought home scars from World War II and Korea. The offshore diving business could leave its own kind of scars.

In 1966, 25 years after the attack, Stratton returned to Pearl Harbor with his family. In the waters off Honolulu, he confronted his memories. It was the first time Randy, his son, had seen his father cry.

In the years after, he became active in survivors' groups and started going back to Pearl Harbor more often. At the USS Arizona memorial, he became friends with a National Park Service historian and inspired a Pearl Harbor action figure that the service sold at the gift shop.

In time, he felt no anger toward the Japanese, but he couldn't forget what they did. Sometimes, Japanese pilots attended memorial ceremonies and some of the other survivors would shake their hands. Stratton could not.

"Listen, all those men down there on that ship, a thousand of them, they wouldn't do it and I don't think they'd want me to do it," he says. "We can't forget what happened there that day. We can't let it happen again."

A while back, Stratton and his wife Velma retired to Yuma and lived there about 15 years. He played a lot of golf, but missed California. They moved to Santa Maria, not far from Santa Barbara, to be near their oldest son, then to Colorado Springs to be near Randy. They will celebrate 65 years of marriage in April.

The Stratton men have taken up a more personal cause. He wants to secure a proper medal for Joe George, the sailor from the Vestal who helped rescue the six men from the gunner's control tower.

A lot of people agree that what George did was heroic, but the Navy balks at every step, in part because George disobeyed a direct order.

"He should have the Navy Cross," Stratton says. "He saved six people's lives. Joe saved six lives and he didn't get crap. He refused to cut the line no matter what. As far he was concerned he was saving lives."

In 1971, Stratton was working long hours with a diving outfit on a nuclear power plant project not far from Santa Barbara. He needed a truck to carry equipment back and forth, so he scouted out a car lot and bought a 1965 Chevrolet pickup.

He kept the truck, held on to it through repairs, engine overhauls, new paint jobs. It sits today in the carport outside his home. He still tools around town in the truck, but it's a classic now, so he drives it almost as often to car shows.

He can tell stories about his years with the diving crews, but the truck has evolved into a reminder of another time. The license plate reads USS ARIZ. A mural on a white bed cover depicts the USS Arizona and the memorial that floats above it in Pearl Harbor. It identifies Stratton as a survivor of the attack that sank the ship.

Wherever he goes on the pickup, people ask him about his experience. Yes, he'll say, he was on the Arizona and he survived. Yes, a lot of brave men died. Yes, some of them were his friends.

He still remembers the day he saw the Arizona in dry dock at Bremerton, Wash.

"It was quite a sight for an old flatlander like me to see a 35,000-ton battleship out of the water," he says. "It was a big ship with a lot of metal, I'll tell you." He owns a chunk of the ship's burned deck, a reminder he keeps in a box with a few other items.

On a recent fall afternoon, Stratton ambles down the driveway and fires up the engine. He eases the truck out of the carport, far enough to show it off. He fiddles with the radio.

"Randy, come and turn on the music box." His son reaches in the cab and queues up one of the hundreds of songs he and his daughter downloaded onto the new MP3 player.

"Lots of big band songs," Randy says, as the first bars of a brass line pour from the speakers. "The stuff he likes."

How lucky can one guy be?

I kissed her and she kissed me

Stratton's eyes brighten. A smile spreads across his face as Dean Martin's voice fills the cab.

Like a fella once said

Ain't that a kick in the head?

The smile widens. Almost imperceptibly, he sways.

UPDATE: Donald Stratton died in 2020.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The six men stared straight ahead, almost as if they were back in line, at attention. They listened for their names and their service branch. They stayed composed as their stories were told, stories of bravery, of quick thinking. Stories of survival.

Each of the six men were at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese planes swarmed the Navy fleet in an ambush that would provoke war. On the 70th anniversary of the attack, the men had been brought to the state capitol to receive new honors.

As each name was read, Rhode Island National Guard Maj. Gen. Kevin McBride presented the man with the Rhode Island Star, one of the state's highest military honors.

World War II veterans are a special breed, Lt. Col. Denis Riel said as the men accepted the medals. Without them, Riel said, who knows where we'd be today.

McBride reached the last man, Raymond Haerry, a 20-year-old coxswain on the day of the assault. Haerry straightened in his seat as his story was told. He had escaped the USS Arizona, the battleship whose losses surpassed any other.

For Haerry, McBride had a the state's highest military honor, the Rhode Island Cross. Haerry accepted the medal, but found he could not speak. He handed the microphone to his son, Raymond Haerry, Jr., who spoke of his father's courage and resilience.

Three years later, Ray Haerry Jr. holds the cross in his hand, fighting back tears.

"I hadn't told him he was going to be individually honored that day," he says. "I had to help my father out of his seat. He stood strong and tall right in front of this general. I heard the general say, 'You're a remarkable guy.' I think it was one of the proudest days of my father's life."

His dad has never sought recognition for his service on the Arizona and barely talks about the day of the attack. He will tell his story to people he knows well and trusts, but he is 93 and the details are fading from his memory.

In 2011, he was one of six Rhode Islanders who had lived through the attack on Pearl Harbor, the only one from the Arizona. Today, he is one of nine remaining survivors from the mighty battleship.

"I do as much as I can to keep his story alive," his son says. "It's always been my fear that people are going to forget that day, that people are going to forget the sacrifice that was made that day."

Haerry ran away from home to join the Navy. He grew up in New Jersey and after high school, enrolled at MIT in Boston. He was smart enough to excel, but started cutting classes not long after the start of his first semester.

He and a buddy would sneak off campus and hop freight trains to see how far they could get. He missed enough of his classes that he was finally asked to leave. As soon as he turned 18, he enlisted in the Navy.

On the Arizona, he worked on the deck crew. He cleaned and painted day after day, but he also operated the motor boats used to ferry crew members to shore, a job that let him leave the ship periodically.

Haerry had made two runs to shore on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. It was Sunday and some of the crewmen with liberty wanted an early start. He was eating breakfast when he heard the first pops of the attack planes strafing Battleship Row.

He ran to the anti-aircraft battery, his battle station, but there was no ammunition ready. He could see the planes were flying too low for his guns anyway, but before his crew could figure out their next move, an armor-piercing bomb detonated near the powder magazine beneath the No. 2 gun turret.

Haerry felt the entire ship life out of the water. As it fell, he was thrown from the ship into the harbor. He half-swam, half-walked the 70 yards to Ford Island and manned a mounted machine gun. He spent the rest of the day retrieving bodies from the harbor.

"He remembers body parts in the water, charred burned bodies that he swam by," his son Ray, Jr., says. "Something had happened that no one could comprehend."

Haerry sailed on Navy ships through World War II and again during the Korean conflict. He spent long months on a tender, a vessel that carries equipment, parts and other supplies for ships at sea.

On one mission, Haerry's tender was tied to a larger ship as the crew delivered supplies and completed maintenance tasks. The sky began to darken and the wind grew. A storm was approaching, a big one by the looks of it.

The tender didn't want to be tied to the larger ship when the worst of the storm blew through. High winds could slam one ship into the other and sink one or both of the vessels.

Haerry held the rope that connected the ships as another crewman swung an ax to cut it. As the boat heaved, the man with the ax missed and hit Haerry's hand, nearly severing it from his wrist. He did not reach a hospital for several days, but doctors still saved his hand.

A year after World War II ended, Haerry went home for a while and married a girl he'd met not long before. He and Evelyn had their first son, Ray, Jr., in 1947.

For a while, the young family lived in Puerto Rico as Haerry, now a chief boatswain's mate, drew new assignments aboard his tender.

"He was out to sea nine months out of the year, only home for three months," Ray Jr. says. "He was very military by then, very disciplined."

After he returned from Korea, Haerry was promoted to master chief petty officer, signifying his experience and level of service. He had turned down a promotion to ensign, preferring the camaraderie of the enlisted ranks.

At his request, he was assigned to the officer candidate school in Newport, R.I. He left home at 5 every morning and took a ferry from Jamestown to the Navy base. He liked teaching and liked the chance to instill discipline.

"I've gotten letters from some of the officer candidates who had my father as an instructor," Ray Jr. says. "They said he was a tough bastard, but that's exactly what they needed."

His service on the Arizona also seemed to give him added credibility among the young sailors. They respected a guy who survived such a horrific attack.

There was a tradition at the end of training that the graduates would give the chief a silver dollar. Haerry would come home on those days with cigar boxes full of the coins.

For a long time, Haerry never talked about his experiences at Pearl Harbor. He displayed no pictures, kept no mementos that his family knew about. He would answer questions, but in short bursts of description, with no emotion.

"The only people he would talk to were either very close friends or relatives," his son says. "He'd always have to be prompted."

It took Ray Jr. years, decades to piece together his father's story. He would draw out snippets and stash them away, collecting them until he would weave the barest narrative.

As anniversaries of the attack passed, Ray Jr. would asked his dad if he wanted to visit the USS Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor.

Nope. He wanted to part of it. He's never been back.

"I can understand that," Ray Jr. says. "To go through that to me is incomprehensible. Nobody was expecting anything like that."

His dad will return finally at his death. Ray Jr. has arranged for his father's remains to be interred in the sunken Arizona, an honor accorded any of the sailors or Marines who survived the attack.

Three years ago, Ray Jr. received a call from a lieutenant colonel in the Rhode Island National Guard. He told Ray about the plans to honor Pearl Harbor survivors at the statehouse. One of the survivors would receive the Rhode Island Cross.

As they talked, Ray mentioned that his dad had been aboard the Arizona. That caught the lieutenant colonel's interest. He called back a few days later.

"We found our guy," he told Ray Jr.

Five years ago, Haerry moved into a nursing home, He stays in a room on the second floor. Thickets of tangled shrubs and rows of trees are visible from his window.

The nurse who checks in on him regularly likes Haerry. She prods him to move around more and to leave the room for meals. He has told her about his escape from the Arizona.

Ray Jr. seems surprised. "He told you the story?" She nods and smiles.

Haerry accepts the chocolate bars his son has brought him. He likes chocolate and is disappointed if Ray Jr. forgets it. There are a few personal photos on the table, but nothing from his years in the Navy.

Except the cap. The USS Arizona ballcap that almost every survivor owns and wears.

He doesn't want to answer questions about his war service, shrugging them off or insisting he can't remember the details anymore. But he clutches the cap and puts it on as he sits in an easy chair by the window.

"These guys were the first heroes of the war, even though the war hasn't been declared," Ray Jr. says. "I think my dad was one of the first American heroes of World War II."

He and his father chat a little. Haerry says he wants lunch delivered to his room, but the nurse says no. You need the exercise. Haerry nods and like a good sailor taking orders from the chief, he pulls himself up with a walker and shuffles off to lunch.

UPDATE:  Raymond Haerry died in 2016. 

YUBA CITY, Calif.

Joe Langdell found a table in the wardroom of one of the ships moored in Pearl Harbor and sat down with his breakfast.

Three days had passed since Japanese bombers had punched a fiery hole in the Navy's Pacific fleet. Three days since the war started.

Crippled ships still floated around the mooring posts along Ford Island. Repair crews were already at work on the battleships that had survived. Salvage work would begin soon on others. Sailors found food and shelter wherever they could.

Langdell's ship, the USS Arizona, lay dead in the water where she sank 14 minutes into the attack. The mast and towers near the bow tilted at a sickening angle. Fire had blackened much of the structure still visible.

Langdell heard someone enter the room.

"Are there any officers from the Arizona here?" he said.

Langdell was an ensign, an entry-level officer, not yet a year in the Navy. He was nervous about volunteering for anything, but he raised his hand.

The man walked over and looked at Langdell's name tag.

"Mr. Langdell," he said, "when you're done with your breakfast, you'll report to the pier and you'll be met by a motor whale boat and a party of 20 enlisted men with sheets and pillow cases."

What is this? Langdell thought.

"You will go to the Arizona and you will take off all the bodies and body parts above the water line," the man said. "Cover the decks, anywhere you can find them up to the top of the masts."

"So that's what we did," he says, staring out at the harbor nearly seven decades later.

Langdell is one of the last nine survivors from the Arizona. At 100, he is the oldest.

He was on Ford Island when the Japanese attacked, training for new assignment. His own battle station was beneath the gun turret shattered by the last bomb to hit the Arizona. From the shore, he helped wounded men from the water, men whose bodies had been torn apart by bombs and bullets and fire.

But he could not be prepared for what he found on the charred hulk of the battleship. He still will not talk about it. His younger son believes the experience changed his dad forever.

"How could it not?" the son wonders.

Langdell says only this: "It took two days to take all the bodies. We carefully wrapped them in sheets. The body parts we put in pillow cases. We swept the decks and took the small bones. Everything was taken ashore and properly taken care of."

Langdell arrived at Pearl Harbor along a different path than many of the young sailors, who signed up for the service because they were unable to find work as civilians.

Born in 1914, seven months after the first bolts were tightened on a new battleship in Brooklyn, Langdell grew up wooded agricultural area along the Souhegan River in southern New Hampshire.

His dad operated a livery stable and a small dairy and later earned money as an auctioneer. The family sold maple syrup distilled from the trees on their farm.

After high school, Langdell enrolled at Boston University, working nights to pay for his classes, and in 1938, he earned a degree in business administration. He went to work as a junior accountant for a prominent Boston firm.

But he became restless. He signed up for a Navy program that allowed college graduates to attend officer candidate school and emerge as ensigns within three months. By early 1941, Langdell was one of the "90-day wonders" and drew his first assignment: The USS Arizona.

After Pearl Harbor, Langdell asked for a posting on one of the new destroyers the Navy was set to launch. He was soon aboard the USS Frazier, which left the shipyard at San Francisco in July 1942.

The Frazier patrolled the South Pacific at first, but in early 1943, steamed northward toward Alaska, where Japan was trying to secure positions in the Aleutian Islands.

One day in May, crewmen spotted two periscopes in the water and the Frazier opened fire. The guns hit the periscope. Using its sonar equipment, the ship fired depth charges and eventually sank the enemy submarine.

Toward the end the war, Langdell was stationed in the Philippines, at a base in Manila. Among his responsibilities was overseeing the naval officers' clubs in the area.

One morning, he was at his desk, catching up on paperwork, when he heard a vehicle screech to a halt outside. A young sailor ran in, out of breath.

"Mr. Langdell, Mr. Langdell, you've got to come here quick," he said.

"What is it?" Langdell asked.

"It's easier if you come see it," the sailor said.

They hopped in a Jeep and head up the hill toward one of the Quonset huts, the one where liquor for the officers' clubs was stored. As they walked toward it, Langdell reeled at an odor. Alcohol.

Inside, he found broken bottles scattered in a soggy soup of booze and cardboard. Someone had stacked the boxes too high and in the humid environment of the island, the cardboard had grown damp and weak.

The boxes had collapsed.

Langdell was discharged at the war's end and returned to Massachusetts, where his wife, Libby, waited.

Joe had met Elizabeth McGauhy in Chicago half a decade earlier. He was attending midshipman's school at Northwestern University. She was attending an art academy to learn dress designing. They met at a dance at the YWCA on North State Street.

They danced. They went out for coffee afterward. They continued to see each other and, when Langdell left for Hawaii, they corresponded, often.

As he prepared for his new posting on the Frazier, Langdell decided to make a move. He asked his brother, Ted, to visit Libby and see if she could cook. The report: Oh, yes, she can cook.

Joe proposed and Libby accepted. They would be married in San Francisco, before the Frazier set sail. The only question was how Langdell would send Libby word about his arrival from Pearl Harbor. The Navy censors would never allow such information in a letter.

Langdell knew Libby was friends with a skater in the Ice Follies, which was summering in San Francisco. He wrote Libby a letter and suggested it would be a good idea if Libby visited her friend on or about a particular date. Libby got the message.

They were married in an Episcopal Church on Van Ness Avenue. Langdell had borrowed a car, a Dusenburg, for the honeymoon. Libby had arranged stays north of the city. Friends told them when the left the church, keep the water on their left.

What they didn't count on was the side-street parking. Langdell took a right turn instead of a left and the newlyweds didn't realize their mistake until they stopped for gas in Gilroy, about 80 miles south of San Francisco.

The Langdells ended up honeymooning in Monterey and Carmel on the central California coast.

After the war, Langdell returned to the family auction business in Massachusetts, but after all those years in Hawaii, the Philippines and in the tropical South Seas, he couldn't readjust to the cold. He and Libby moved west to Walnut Creek east of San Francisco.

They eventually bought a home-furnishings outlet farther inland and finally built their own store in Yuba City, north of Sacramento. They ran Joe and Libby Langdell's Village Mart for more than 20 years until they retired.

Occasionally, they would close the store and hook a 33-foot trailer to a pick-up truck. They traveled around the country, meeting up with other USS Arizona survivors, with shipmates from the Frazier. Keeping the memories alive.

Langdell returned to Pearl Harbor in 1976. His oldest son had joined the Navy and his first posting was aboard the USS Ouellet, a frigate. The family visited the Arizona memorial and toured other sites near the harbor.

Before the trip, Langdell hadn't talked much about his years in the war, about his time on the Arizona. Afterward, Langdell sought out other survivors who had formed reunion organizations. He was active in those groups for many years, serving as president of one devoted to the Arizona.

As the 50th anniversary of the attack neared, Langdell got a call from a documentary filmmaker. He wanted to interview Langdell for his project. He was also interviewing a Japanese pilot named Zenji Abe, a pilot who had taken part in the raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Would Langdell agree to meet Abe on film?

The two men not only met, they took a boat to the USS Arizona memorial and laid a wreath in front of the wall with the names of the crewmen who died on the ship.

In the documentary, "The Life and Death of a Lady," Langdell and Abe speak, side by side on the memorial. Abe offered condolences and said he prayed that all their souls were at peace.

Langdell said much more.

"It is only by the grace of God that I stand here today," he said. "I witnessed your attack from Ford Island. Helpless, I watched your bomb sink the Arizona in nine minutes."

Sentiment ran high against the Japanese, he said, but also against U.S. leaders whose decisions many questioned in the aftermath. He acknowledged the wreath.

"I appreciate your thoughtfulness. It took more courage on your part to present this wreath than it did for me to accept it."

In 2006, Langdell walked along the steep shoreline of Ford Island, the Arizona memorial in the background. He told his story as his son, Ted, recorded it on video.

"The lesson I've learned from that experience is that the 1,177 men entombed on the ship right now will never know the love of a wife or the joy of grandchildren," he said. "It's just not going to happen. We all have to remember that they did not die in vain."

On Oct. 12, Langdell celebrated his 100th birthday with with his older son, John, who flew in from Spearfish, S.D. On Veteran's Day, he participated once more in a parade through Marysville, the next town over from Yuba City. But he doesn't tell his story anymore, not on his own.

Langdell lives now in a skilled nursing center. He has trouble remembering the past. He struggles to speak at times (though when he's feeling good, he likes to flirt with the nurses). He sits in his wheelchair as his son recites the narrative, keeping his father's story alive.

Photographs hang on the walls of his room. His wife, Libby, who died two years ago. His kids and grandkids. Pictures of past parades. A framed painting of the Arizona, the repair ship Vestal next to it.

He likes to wear a cap that identifies him as a veteran of the Arizona.

"Why do you like the hat, dad?" Ted asks.

"It acknowledges to people that I'm a survivor," Joe replies, his voice soft. "The hat represents the Arizona.

Ted asks him about the ship.

"The Arizona was a fighting battleship," Joe says. "One of the last ones…" He talks about going aboard the Frazier.

Langdell will return to the Arizona once more. When he dies, his remains will be interred under the No. 4 gun turret, with the men who died there and survivors who had died since.

A final tribute.

UPDATE: Joe Langdell died in February 2015, months after this report.

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