So, the morning is passing as they always do. At Refuge Farm, there were tears and sadness in the moment. There were more of those across this amazing land in this lovely awakening dawn.

It will be crowded today in the special corner of Arlington National Cemetery, the one nearest the Pentagon. I used to try to get there on this day, when I lived just up busy RT 50. A couple precise decades ago, the Old Guard that renders respect to those who have passed did their duty, one by one, for those who did not survive that morning of powerful moments. There were solemn ones that followed. The horses that drew the caissons were well turned our and equally well mannered. All the uniforms on the soldiers were impeccable.

Those moments were weeks in the future from that moment of then. We watched some of the images this morning until it became overwhelming. We turned channels to old movies that commemorated other moments from the long past, now forgotten, since those that witnessed them are now mostly passed on their part of an endless journey around our sun.

A pal still among the living sent a note about a memory that still lives. The man who had it is 100 years of age this year, still alert and living. The moment he has carried in his century was on the quarterdeck of a sleek ship of war, peacefully anchored on a Sunday in the harbor at Pearl. It was at the changing of the watch. He is the last remaining of those who were there, either in the hundreds about to die below a swarming sky.

After the dramatic moments we remember on this day, I was visiting one of the agencies responsible for part of what we called the “GWOT.” Walking down a once-familiar passageway I suddenly had one of those every day moments. I noticed a framed color print on the bulkhead to my left. It was strikingly familiar, and one of the buildings on the lower right hand corner of what I knew as “Ford Island” was a place I worked for a couple years in a time now far away. Further than the anniversary today, almost halfway to the memories of an old sailor and his sudden lurch from peace to war.

I stopped to remember in the passageway. Two of the ships depicted in the image are still there. Arizona, the famous one, still shows the ring of a turret above the placid waters. The other one, Utah, is known only to those who venture around shore to the west. A narrow span of rusty metal is all that shows above the water. Sometimes we would stop our fitness runs to gaze out across the narrow span from shore to ship. Other times we continued a dignified pace, sometimes with a differential salute to those whose moment remains encased in the steel below.

Preparing to go about the rest of an otherwise unmemorable day, I noted the artist’s name- “Dru Blair”- and determined to get a copy of my own, since my sons spent their first days on the little green swatch of land in the upper right, the Ferry landed us each working day in the lower middle, and we plotted the location of the then-current enemy Soviet ballistic missile submarines in the building complex on the lower portion of the painting.

Lieutenant Commander Kakuichi Takahashi, Imperial Japanese Navy, is at the controls of the Aichi D3A1 Type 99 “Val” Dive bomber rolling in on Hangar 6 on the southern tip of Ford Island. He survived the war after severe wounds received at the battle off Midway. He carried this moment, poised in infamy to his end of sunlit days. Artist Blair’s work now hangs in the room where I sleep, cloaked in country darkness and memory.

This morning one of our local heroes is flying his restored AT-6 trainer from our country airport. We assume he will be compensated well for this time by some who wish to preserve this morning memory on this day. This unique surviving aircraft was constructed to train pilots for their moments in a swarming sky. The rasping buzz of the powerful piston engines provides an aural link to all those frozen visual moments. From further above, amid the silky cirrus, echoes the sound of jet engines on big passenger aircraft. There was a morning in which those sounds were not the background of normalcy, but imposed a moment of dread and uncertainty.

We will try to remember them all this morning.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com