I’m a pacifist, a position I came to later in life. I can’t say I ever really thought about war during my life, even though, yes, in college during the late 1960s I made white armbands with black peace symbols and supported Vietnam era protests. Everyone did.

But it didn’t really mean anything to me. Maybe I was too young. Or maybe something else.

Very little touched me in those days, which is a story for another time.

But when I finally got hold of what war really was, I couldn’t possibly see any justification for it. Men clubbing each other over the heads for power and control (what else) since humankind began–that makes no sense to me.

The beaches at Normandy came alive for us Boomers through the World War II stories told by our fathers, uncles, our family friends. That is, when they chose to talk about them. My own visit to Normandy a few years back brought those stories to life in my imagination. The fear those men must have felt. The exhaustion.

War is hell, truly.

A recent visit to the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor reinforced yet again the horrific stupidity of war.

“Sometimes war’s unavoidable,” a friend once said to me. And that’s probably true. Doesn’t make it more palatable. Or right.

The Missouri. Pearl Harbor.

Launched in 1944, well after Pearl Harbor, this battleship, the Missouri, was also at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. She had a 51-year career, including serving during the Gulf War. Most famously, she hosted the surrender ceremony in Japan in 1945 and that’s why she has a prime spot at Pearl Harbor today..

The Vestal was a repair ship for the Arizona…when the bombs hit everyone on its deck was blown off, including the Commander. But he swam back to the ship and cooly countermanded orders to abandon. There was enough crew available for her to move away from the Arizona and even though damaged, her divers freed people on other ships and cut a hole in the hull of the Oklahoma so its crew could escape.

The Vestal’s captain got the Congressional Medal of Honor. The ship, honored at Pearl Harbor today, worked throughout the war until it was decommissioned in 1946.

More than 2,400 died at Pearl Harbor. The memorial wall in the Shrine Room at the USS Arizona Memorial honors her 900 crew members killed at Pearl Harbor. It and the USS Utah there are actually considered war graves. Many of the survivors also chose to be interred at the now sunken ship when their time came and in 1982, the Navy began allowing this.

A moving ceremony with family is held after hours, during which Navy divers take the cremated remains to their final resting place under the barbette of their sunken ship, pictured below. They carefully hold the urn aloft as they dive under so that the last thing the family sees is the urn as it is taken to its watery grave.

In 2019, the last survivor who asked was interred at his ship, the Arizona.

Barbette (part of gun turret)  from the USS Arizona

I thought about these men and how they lived and worked together in wartime. How their bond was so strong that some chose to be interred together.

And I considered how unnecessary any war should be. How its existence represents some of the worst of humanity even as these men represented some of the best of humanity.

If that makes any sense. Which it does, at least for me.

If you’ve got any thoughts, I’d love to hear them.