“Sir, I-I w-was just was looking…” I stammered, caught off-guard.
“That’s alright. Perfectly fine,” he said holding his hand up. “You are here to interview me, and you should have some idea who you are talking to,” he continued as he stepped around to the chair behind the desk and sat down. “Besides, the only reason I can think of to put all of this stuff on the walls is for people to look at anyway. For some odd reason, my family thinks my den should be a museum,” he said, waving his free hand around. “You go ahead and look, and when you have questions, well, here I am. Ah, here comes June with the coffee.”
The old woman came in again and set the tray she was carrying down on the desk. “One coffee, black,” she said handing a large mug to me, “and one with cream and sugar. Is there anything else I can get you boys before I go?”
“No dear, we’ll be fine. Thank you.”
“Well alright, you know where to find me if you need anything,” she said as she left the room.
“My daughter,” the Admiral said, “is a wonderful girl. Both her mother and her husband passed away within several weeks of each other. I had the cottage next door built for her soon afterwards. She manages all of my affairs tirelessly. I can page her from right here if you need anything. It’s no bother.
“So shall we get started?” the Admiral added after a brief pause.
“Yes, sir.”
“Please, call me Jake. The sir stuff, for the most part, ended after I retired from the service. Although some people still call me Admiral, it’s not my favorite. I much preferred being called Captain, if anything. But it just goes to show that even admirals don’t always get things their way,” he said with a smile and a wink. “I think other people like the Admiral title better because there are less of them around than regular old captains.”
“Very well, Jake,” I said awkwardly. “What do you attribute your longevity to?”
“Now on that, I’m sure you wouldn’t believe, but I get a lot of questions like that at my age,” he replied, smiling. “But most of it, I think, has a lot to do with having a good sound purpose for living to begin with, whatever that purpose may be. A good hard honest day of work to back that purpose helps keep you going more than you would think.”
“Do you think there are a lot of people in society without a purpose?” I asked.
“Far be it for me to tell others how to live their lives, but I can tell you that what I did with mine worked for me. It just seems to me a lot of people these days, rather than earning their own way, want to try to force prosperity from somebody else in the name of ‘humanitarianism.’ Living like that doesn’t make sense to me because if you ‘Rob Peter to pay Paul,’ you will end up enslaving them both. And the chances of survival are pretty small for anybody with slaves around.”
“Your one hundredth birthday is approaching. How do you feel?”
“Like a man being cut down in the prime of his life by a hundred-year-old body,” the Admiral said with a bit of a chuckle. “Not that this body is in bad shape for its age, but I sometimes wish I could trade it in for another. It just doesn’t seem to keep up with me the way it used to,” he said, still smiling.
That statement, as if he were something separate from his body, seemed a bit odd to me for a moment until I thought of the PhD in philosophy on the wall.
The Admiral, looking at me with the bright, piercing blue eyes of a man with a hundred years experience of sizing people up, obviously saw my puzzled expression and added, “Look son, when you have gone as far as I have in life, you have to believe in something more than yourself, or you are more than what you have been led to believe.”
“Really?” I asked out of genuine interest.
“I think we are more than what we have been led to believe we are. I tend to lean toward the Eastern way of thinking. That when we die, we drop our bodies, much like a dirty pair of socks, and then get born into this world again as someone else. That’s why I try my hardest to make the world a better place. So when I come back, it will be in better shape for us the next time around.
“I guess I’m kind of like General George Patton in that respect, except he was the consummate warrior, whereas I seem to have developed a slight aversion to being bombed and shot at. War just never seemed to be that much fun to me, and it tends to make otherwise good people do very bad things.”
“Speaking of the war,” I asked seizing the opportunity to switch the conversation to Pearl Harbor, “were you involved in World War II much?”
“From the moment it began for the United States,” he answered.
“So am I to understand you are a witness to Pearl Harbor?”
That was the first time I noticed the smile on the old man’s face dim for a moment. Reaching up with his left hand, he took off his glasses, folded them, and laid them on his desk. “Glasses are for old people,” he commented, looking back up at me and staring at me for an awkward amount of time.
Just as I was thinking I had messed up bad and the old man was going to give me the boot he asked, “Do you really want to learn about Pearl Harbor or just get some sound bites for your program?”
“Yes,” I replied with some hesitancy given the sudden seriousness of the Admiral’s voice. “I would like to know about it; anything you could tell me would be great. But honestly, at the same time, Jake, I do have to use some of it for the program because it is my job.” I figured I was walking a thin line and had better be straightforward and honest with him because he was obviously the master, and I, the student.
“Now, let me be very clear about this,” he said, “because there are two things we can talk about here. We could talk about learning about Pearl Harbor or we could talk about learning from Pearl Harbor. Do you understand the difference?”
“No. What do you mean?” I asked, both trying to regain control of the interview and realizing I was now talking to a history professor.
“Well, if you want to learn about Pearl Harbor, the History Channel could tell you everything you want to know. You could learn, for example, that Dori Miller was the first African American to win the Navy Cross, or if the hatch would have been closed to the black powder magazine, the Arizona might have survived to the end of the war, or if the radar operator who saw the Japanese planes coming, or his officer in charge, would have sounded the alarm, we could have put up a better fight,” he said with a comical, almost robotic-sounding voice.
“They will tell you about facts, facts, facts, and more facts until you have them coming out of your ears and don’t know what to do with them. And ultimately, there is nothing you can do with them, except maybe use them to occupy time with your trivial pursuit game.
“It’s how you apply those facts that really counts. If you want to look closer, behind the cold facts, you will discover there were real people living and dying there. Fighting to stay alive during the most brutal and deliberate acts of violence—and struggling to take or learn something from it. The survivors left looking, sometimes for the rest of their lives, for something that could give any of it any kind of meaning at all, looking for anything to make it so your friends and shipmates did not die needlessly or in vain while you continued to live. My friends and my shipmates,” he added, looking across the desk at me with his blue eyes turning slightly red at the corners.