Maggie's Farm

Look at it this way. Some faceless commissar in the leftist hierarchy,or perhaps even George Soros himself, has deemed Maggie's Farm an important and influential enough part of the blogosphere that it has been assigned its own full-time troll(s). And this one (or more) is forced to do more than the standard leftist approach of spewing computer generated profanities and insults; somewhere there may even be an actual person involved. Fortunately, Americans have these folks on the run.

Both my Mom (still alive) and my father-in-law (now dead) went through Pearl Harbor.

My Mom was a teenager whose family lived in Nuuanu (suburb of Honolulu). They didn't know what was going on, at first they thought it was some sort of military maneuvers. Then the bombs started coming down. Most of the damage in her neighborhood is now believed to have been caused by mis-timed anti-aircraft shells which came back to earth and exploded. A woman living near them in Nuuanu was killed when her house exploded. My Mom says the scariest time was the first night, when they didn't know if there was an invasion imminent. My grandfather gave everyone in the house hunting rifles or revolvers (I guess gun ownership was much more common then, but that was probably partly because my family owned a cattle ranch on another island on which they would have spent a lot of time hunting, etc.) In the middle of the night they heard gunfire near their home and thought the Japanese were coming. It was actually two columns of American troops, one coming up from Honolulu and the other coming over from Kaneohe/Kailua. They ran into each other in the dark and opened fire, each thinking the other was the enemy. Fortunately no one was killed or wounded before they figured it out.

My father-in-law was Japanese, born and raised in Hawaii. He was living in Chinatown and was a construction worker at Pearl Harbor. It being Sunday, he was at his boarding house when the attack started. At one point, he was looking out his window when a shell/bomb came down in the street intersection outside, killing people. The next day he showed up at work as usual. Suddenly, all the workers were surrounded by Marines with rifles and bayonets, and all workers of Japanese ancestry were pulled out, including him. They were all marched to the gate and told, "You Japs never come back here again." He never did get his tools back. After the attack, first he volunteered for the Territorial Guard, where those of Japanese descent were not allowed to carry guns but became the labor brigade with shovels, etc. Eventually, he and the others in the Territorial Guard of Japanese ancestry joined up with the 442 Regimental Combat Team made up of Japanese Americans and fought in Italy and France.

At this time of year, Hawaii is 2 hours behind PST.