Pearl Harbor's USS Arizona and the Oil That Still Rises

The USS Arizona Memorial sits above the sunken battleship in Pearl Harbor, and it is the most visited site in Hawaii that nobody talks about over dinner. You reach it by Navy shuttle boat from the visitor center, and the seven-minute ride across the harbor is the longest seven minutes you'll spend on Oahu, because the water below you is the graveyard of 1,177 sailors and Marines who never left the ship.

The memorial itself is a white, open-air structure designed by Alfred Preis that straddles the sunken hull without touching it. Through the openings in the floor, you can see the ship below — rusted, encrusted, still leaking oil after more than eighty years. The oil rises to the surface in small, iridescent beads, and the Navy calls them "the tears of the Arizona." It's not metaphor. It's petroleum. And it's been bleeding from the wreck since December 7, 1941, at a rate of about two quarts a day.

The marble wall at the far end of the memorial lists every man who died on the ship, and the room goes silent when people reach it — the same involuntary silence that happens at the Vietnam Wall and at Gettysburg, the hush that occurs when a number becomes a list of names and each name was a person who woke up that morning expecting a Sunday.

What visitors miss: The visitor center museum, which most people rush through to catch their boat time. The exhibit on the Japanese-American experience during the war — the internment camps, the 442nd Infantry Regiment that became the most decorated unit in Army history — complicates the simple narrative of heroes and enemies, and it does so with a honesty that makes the memorial itself more powerful, not less.

Pearl Harbor matters because Hawaii is marketed as paradise, and it largely is, but the Arizona Memorial insists that paradise has a history, and that history includes a morning when the sky filled with planes and 2,403 Americans died and the century changed direction. Standing above the wreck, watching the oil rise, you understand that some wounds stay open on purpose — not because they can't heal, but because healing them would mean forgetting, and forgetting is the one thing the memorial was built to prevent.