Pearl Harbor Day, at 70

My crotchety neighbor, Archie, got to Pearl Harbor for the first time in early 1945.  There were still cleaning up after the 1941 attack, then.  Remember the price of complacency.

When he got to Leyte, months after the battle, he went up on deck (his station was below the waterline) and asked why there were all those trees growing up out of the ocean.  It wasn't trees he saw.  It was ship's mast from sunken vessels.

His ship went to Bikini Atoll for a scientific test called Crossroads in 1946, with the Demon Core, but he managed to finagle his way out of making that trip, avoiding health worries from that later in life.