The USS Arizona Memorial and What It Asks of You

Navy shuttle boat from the visitor center. Seven minutes across the harbor. The water below you is the graveyard of 1,177 sailors and Marines who never left the ship.

The memorial is a white open-air structure designed by Alfred Preis, straddling the sunken hull without touching it. Through openings in the floor you see the ship — rusted, encrusted, still leaking oil after more than eighty years. The oil rises in small iridescent beads. The Navy calls them "the tears of the Arizona." It's petroleum, not metaphor. About two quarts a day since December 7, 1941.

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

The visitor center museum is worth your time, not just a waiting room for the boat. The exhibit on the Japanese-American experience — internment camps, the 442nd Infantry becoming the most decorated unit in Army history — complicates the simple narrative, and the complication makes the memorial more powerful, not less.