I originally posted this in 2005 and have updated it a couple of times. I like to present it every December 7th as the story is as poignant as ever, especially with thousands more of our troops being sent off to war in Afghanistan. They really are our best and brightest — far too many were lost 68 years ago today.

This post is one that I wrote in 2005 to commemorate this tragic, special day. Instead of just linking to it I decided to post it anew, as the stories of those that worked valiantly to save as many lives as possible deserve to be told again. The comments that I made about our brave men and women serving in Afghanistan and Iraq are even more true today. Our fathers, mothers, uncles and aunts — The Greatest Generation — stepped up, took on the mantle of terrible responsibility and did their duty — history awaits whether we will stay the course and complete the tasks that destiny has assigned to our own.

What’s making this particular December 7th [2007] more memorable is that the U.S.S. Oklahoma is finally getting the recognition it has for so long deserved.

The monument to its sailors features slabs of black marble arranged in a V and bearing the ship’s name and image. Behind it are 429 white-marble pillars, each 7 feet tall and engraved with the name of a victim.

Kevin King, an artist from Oklahoma, spearheaded the drive for the monument after visiting Pearl Harbor with his son in 2000. He was stunned to find no mention of the ship at Ford Island or at the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, the graveyard in the Punchbowl crater – part of an inactive volcano – where the Oklahoma victims’ remains were interred in mass graves after the battleship was raised in 1943.

“It just got my blood up – especially being from Oklahoma – that these 429 people are just forgotten,” King said.

He worked with the USS Oklahoma Association and crisscrossed the country at his own expense to interview the ship’s survivors. The association raised $1 million to build the monument.

It’s Pearl Harbor day, and most veterans, especially those that saw battle, never talk to non-veterans about their military service. In my own family, I know that all of my uncles served, many in WWII, but only much later, most after their passings, did I find out only a little of what they had done in the war.

My wife’s and my father were Navy guys, mine a pharmacists mate on a troop/supply transport ship named the “Mighty A”. The most dangerous thing that he ever told me about was his ship being hit with a dud torpedo. If it hadn’t been a dud, the story would have been more exciting, but he would not have been the one to tell me about it! I know nothing about my wife’s father’s Navy experiences, I just have a picture of him in his dress blues, dashing in appearance, with a small earring worn in a defiant manner, along with a scan of his honorable discharge that I worked into a pictorial tribute that accompanied his funeral almost a decade ago. Several of his brothers were also in the Navy, a couple were in the BUDs area of service that later became the Navy SEALS, and were covert operatives in Naval Intelligence and served in later branches of the intelligence services during Korea and Vietnam.

Which brings me to today, Pearl Harbor Day. I don’t know if any of my uncles were at Pearl Harbor. If they were, they never talked about it with me. In reading the LA Times this AM, I learned that the USS Oklahoma, a 27,500-ton Nevada class battleship, and the men who served and died aboard her, have finally been given their own special acknowledgment.

Tribute to Pearl Harbor Battleship Is Unveiled

From Times Wire Reports

Sixty-three years after the surprise attack that plunged the United States into World War II, hundreds of men who died aboard the battleship Oklahoma are finally getting their own special tribute.

A new exhibit of photos, artifacts and oral histories was unveiled in Honolulu to honor the 429 men from the Oklahoma who died in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack by the Japanese.

That is the second-highest number of Pearl Harbor casualties behind the battleship Arizona, where most of its 1,177 killed crew members remain entombed after the ship sank in the attack.

I guess King Neptune had plans for this mighty ship, other than allowing her to be scrapped. The Kansas City Star adds more information to the above.

The Oklahoma was refloated in 1943 and sold for scrap after the war, but it sank in the Pacific Ocean while being towed to California.

Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and other military bases on Oahu lasted two hours. Twenty-one ships were heavily damaged, and 320 aircraft were damaged or destroyed. In all, about 2,390 persons were killed and about 1,178 were wounded, according to the National Park Service, which maintains the Arizona site.

Powerline has a wonderful tribute that includes President Franklin Roosevelt’s speech asking Congress for a declaration of war and Churchill’s reaction.

As we remember those lost and those who fought so bravely on this day, 63 years ago, let us reflect on the fact that Japan is now one of our strongest allies and important trading partners. It took a long time to help them overcome the damage to their country and society caused by their leaders’ wartime ambitions, but with our guidance and financial help, Japan was brought into the modern world and became an important part of the world’s economy. They are a part of the “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq.

We must look to our past and not be too impatient in our present. The same fighting spirit of our fathers and forefathers exits within the warriors that are helping the Iraqi people even at this very minute. Many will come back, and not tell their stories for years to come, if at all, but they will be valiant stories, none the less! . . . db

[Update] LGF provides this link to the Navy’s archive of images and information, with some of the pics taken from Japanese warplanes.

According to the Navy site the following is what was going on here, as taken from a Japanese fighter:

Torpedo planes attack “Battleship Row” at about 0800 on 7 December, seen from a Japanese aircraft. Ships are, from lower left to right: Nevada (BB-36) with flag raised at stern; Arizona (BB-39) with Vestal (AR-4) outboard; Tennessee (BB-43) with West Virginia (BB-48) outboard; Maryland (BB-46) with Oklahoma (BB-37) outboard; Neosho (AO-23) and California (BB-44).
West Virginia, Oklahoma and California have been torpedoed, as marked by ripples and spreading oil, and the first two are listing to port. Torpedo drop splashes and running tracks are visible at left and center.
White smoke in the distance is from Hickam Field. Grey smoke in the center middle distance is from the torpedoed USS Helena (CL-50), at the Navy Yard’s 1010 dock.
Japanese writing in lower right states that the image was reproduced by authorization of the Navy Ministry.

U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph.

Vertical aerial view of “Battleship Row”, beside Ford Island, during the early part of the horizontal bombing attack on the ships moored there. Photographed from a Japanese aircraft.
Ships seen are (from left to right): USS Tennessee with USS West Virginia moored outboard; USS Maryland with USS Oklahoma moored outboard; and USS Neosho, only partially visible at the extreme right. West Virginia and Oklahoma are gushing oil from their many torpedo hits and are listing to port. Oklahoma’s port deck edge is already under water. Nevada has also been torpedoed.

Rescue teams at work on the capsized hull of USS Oklahoma (BB-37), seeking crew members trapped inside, 7 December 1941. The starboard bilge keel is visible at the top of the upturned hull.
Officers’ Motor Boats from Oklahoma and USS Argonne (AG-31) are in the foreground.
USS Maryland (BB-46) is in the background.

Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.

I hope that the Navy won’t mind that I’ve “borrowed” these three images and descriptions to help make this a better presentation and memorial for this day. I urge anyone interested in Pearl Harbor to follow the links to the Navy Archives site to better comprehend the full extent of the tragedy and valiant courage that defines this “day that lives in infamy”!

(Okie)

Okie — Never ask — “What next?”

Just caught the link on Drudge to Big Government where Jim Hoft breaks the following heinous story: Fistgate: Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar’s 2000 Conference Promoted ‘Fisting’ to 14 Year-Olds

Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings founded the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in 1990. In 2007 Kevin Jennings was paid $273,573.96 as the executive director of GLSEN. Recently he was appointed by the Obama administration to run the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools in the US Department of Education.

{…}

On Saturday, it was discovered that Kevin Jennings’ organization GLSEN sponsored a youth conference at Tuft’s University in March 2000. This conference was fully supported by the Massachusetts Department of Education, the Safe Schools Program, the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, and some of the presenters even received federal money. An undercover journalist with Mass Resistance was at the conference and recorded a couple of the workshops. During one of the conference workshops an activist asks 14 year-old students, “Spit or swallow?… Is it rude?” This audio clip segment is also posted here.

That’s not all. The conference also included a workshop where GLSEN activists promoted “fisting” to 14 year olds. Here is the shocking clip where the activists promoted “fisting” to the students:

Now, if you want to hear the clip, go to this Big Government page, I’ll not post it here.

Also, if you don’t know what ‘fisting’ is, don’t you dare Google it!!!!! There’s enough description in the article to explain it in enough detail to totally disgust you!

Michelle Malkin let’s us all know who sponsors GLSEN, follow the link to see the list:

You might be wondering who’s behind GLSEN.

Well, they receive financial backing from numerous private foundations, corporations and corporate foundations.

Their national sponsors “make an annual commitment to GLSEN of $75,000 or more and, in addition to our gratitude, receive recognition as National Sponsors in our publications and website. Current National Sponsors are Cisco, Citi, Goldman Sachs, IBM, KPMG, National Education Association and PepsiCo.”

And, like me, you probably thought that teaching school kids how to roll condoms onto cucumbers was way out of line.

Teaching 14 year-olds how to perform ‘fisting’ — now, that’s way, WAY out of line!

Heinous! Disgusting! Unforgivable!

Brought to US by the organization whose founder and executive director well into 2007 now has control of your children’s education as the Safe Schools Czar at the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools in the US Department of Education — just keepin’ the little kiddies SAFE, don’t ya know?

No. Congressional. Oversight. Required!

GRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

There is a special reading list being promoted to your K-12 kids in public schools that is chock full of hard-core pornographic material. This list of books was put together under the leadership of GLSEN [Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network] founder Kevin Jennings. More on this outrage later in the post. Oh, by the way . . .

Obama’s administration has an appointed Czar, this very same Kevin Jennings, and his little Czardom is called Safe Schools. We all want our children’s schools to be safe, right? Surely no one in his/her right mind would want us to have unsafe schools.

If only it were that simple. If only safe meant, well, uh safe. Gotta remember folks, these Lefties can parse even the simplest words like is — in this case, they’ve turned the word and concept of safe over and slammed its little head into the ground! As Troy Silva at American Thinker wrote in October:

Kevin Jennings is Safe School Czar not by some vetting breakdown. He was an official in the Obama Campaign as its Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual fund-raising co-chair. For twenty years until 2008, Jennings succeeded on a massive scale at pro-homosexual propagandizing of school children. His adeptness and accomplishment at semantic deception are extraordinary.

In a 1990 “report” for the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, it was Jennings himself who re-coined the very term “safe school” to mean a pro-homosexual school. Just as the word “gay” is forever tainted and can now rarely be used in its original sense without prompting the snickers or confusion of the listener, so the term “safe school” is now a post-op product of Jennings that bears no similarity to its original meaning.

{…}

In his revelatory 1995 speech, Jennings accurately stated that in order for his side to win, it was essential to keep control of the terminology, especially the term “safety”. He admittedly seized on the pre-existence of this popular Reagan theme and nomenclature of “safe schools.” The tactic worked well for him; he got his pro-homosexual curriculum in Massachusetts. And if it worked in Massachusetts, Jennings realized that it could work nationwide — and it has.

Orwellian isn’t it? The Left is masterful at subjugation of language to bend it to their own agenda — any means is acceptable to achieve their ends. Now, about those pornographic books — Gateway Pundit has the skinny:

According to GLSEN’s own press releases from the period during which its recommended reading list was developed, the organization’s three areas of focus were creating “educational resources, public policy agenda, [and] student organizing programs”; in other words, the reading list (chief among its “educational resources”) was of prime importance in GLSEN’s efforts to influence the American educational system.

The list is divided into three main categories: books recommended for grades K-6; books recommended for grades 7-12; and books for teachers. (The books on the list span all genres: fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, even poetry.)

Out of curiosity to see exactly what kind of books Kevin Jennings and his organization think American students should be reading in school, our team chose a handful at random from the over 100 titles on GLSEN’s grades 7-12 list, and began reading through.

What we discovered shocked us. We were flabbergasted. Rendered speechless.

We were unprepared for what we encountered. Book after book after book contained stories and anecdotes that weren’t merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between pre-schoolers; stories that seemed to promote and recommend child-adult sexual relationships; stories of public masturbation, anal sex in restrooms, affairs between students and teachers, five-year-olds playing sex games, semen flying through the air. One memoir even praised becoming a prostitute as a way to increase one’s self-esteem. Above all, the books seemed to have less to do with promoting tolerance than with an unabashed attempt to indoctrinate students into a hyper-sexualized worldview.

The random selection of books that GP looked at included these:

Queer 13

Being Different

The Full Spectrum

Revolutionary Voices

Reflections of a Rock Lobster

Passages of Pride

Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian

The Order of the Poison Oak

In Your Face

Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son

Love & Sex: Ten Stories of Truth

Strong Content Warning if you follow any of the links. However, you should check out one or two just to see what your President and his Safe Schools Czar feel is appropriate reading for your elementary-level, pre-teen and teenagers.

During the CA Proposition 8 campaign last election cycle — the amendment to the California Constitution stating that marriage is to be between one man and one woman — the GLBT forces called those, like this ol’ Okie, who were claiming that the homosexual agenda was going to be pushed into the elementary level of public schools radicals and crazies. In light of Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Jennings’ decades-long radical agenda to sexualize America’s innocents, not so crazy now, eh?

Must be more of that CHANGE candidate Barack Obama kept telling us we all wanted, right? Just more fine personnel put in charge of big sections of the Federal government by The One who the MSM keeps telling us is so much our better. Feel a tingle up your leg yet?

My question to you then: Just how far down the Hard-Left-Rabbit-Hole is this country going to allow itself to be dragged? Elections have consequences and 2010 is comin’ up fast! Get active damn it!

It’s up to US to turn this around before all is lost . . .

It’s getting very, vary late — Tick Tock!

Chris Matthews — SLAP!

Michael Moore –SLAP! SLAP!

Keith Olberman — SLAP! SLAP! SLAP!

You’ve simply gotta give up 15 minutes of your life and watch this Bill Whittle Afterburner segment, Where Obama Went Right: Afghanistan Decision Outrages MSNBC & Moore, at Pajamas TV.

Really — you just gotta!

[H/t: The Anchoress]