[427TJ]

In 1995 I talked to a man named Richard Fiske who is a docent at the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and a WWII veteran. You may have seen him on History Channel specials as well. He was a crewman (marines) on the battleship U.S.S. Pennsylvania on December 7th, 1941 and he and I talked for over an hour about that day as well as his other WWII combat experiences. In 1945 he went ashore during the invasion of Iwo Jima and took a spent shell fragment in the leg. He then reached into his pocket and showed me a buffalo nickel that was shaped like a funnel. The spent shell fragment hit his leg right where his coin purse was and the impact bent the nickel into a funnel shape! Yes, it knocked him out for a moment and his whole side was bruised but he kept advancing that bloody day. I just stood there in awe and listened to his stories and I kept getting him to tell more. At one point I told him that I had been a KC-135 pilot and his face lit up. He had been a KC-135 crew chief in the 1960s after he had transferred out of the marines ("too dangerous" as he said) and into the air force. He retired from the air force in 1969. One of the sad moments as he talked was the fact that he still, to that day in 1995 when we talked, heard what he described as knocking at his front door in the middle of the night. He said he'd wake up and answer the door and no one was ever there. He soon realized that he had been having dreams in which he was hearing the men trapped in the capsized battleship Oklahoma (at Pearl Harbor) using hammers to beat on the overturned hull in desperate pleas for rescue. I just stood there in shock and his eyes welled up. Can you imagine? Almost 60 years later and he still hears those guys trapped in the Oklahoma pounding on the hull with hammers--men he knew and men who slowly died trapped in that ship. Some of the Okalhoma's men were rescued but many slowly died in the weeks after the attack. Mr. Fiske said that by Christmas (1941) the sounds coming from the Oklahoma had finally ceased. My wife and I both thanked him and gave him a hug, a firm handshake, and a pat on the back. I then went into the gift shop, bought a book on the battleship Arizona (I have a huge library) and Dick Fiske gladly put an inscription on the frontspiece. My wife took a photo of Dick and I together and it's in the front of that book. One last note. Dick Fiske told me that he had been having dreams about the war for many years and it finally got to the point where he decided to move back to Hawaii "to be close to those guys," and he pointed toward battleship row.

Tom Brokaw called those men and women the "Greatest Generation" and he's right.