By the time this gripping, 23-minute documentary ends, there are more wet eyes than dry ones in the theater. It's a sober crowd that files from the darkened room onto a sun-washed dock to board the launch that will carry it to the USS Arizona Memorial. Operated by the U.S. Navy, the launch is manned by sailors in crisp, white uniforms almost identical to the ones their Navy forebears wore on that Sunday morning in 1941. The memorial itself is a gleaming white concrete structure bridging the midsection of the sunken battleship, in which 1,102 crewmen remain entombed. The Arizona's hull, which lies in just 48 feet of water, shimmers, ghostlike, just below the memorial floor, with rusted remnants of the superstructure breaking through to sunshine here and there.
Oil still gurgles from the ship's bowels, creating small, rainbow-colored puddles on the surface.
Conversation is hushed as visitors, many of them from Japan, look out over the water to contemplate that long-ago day. Immersed in the Pearl Harbor story, many passengers, especially the older ones, dab at tears that blur the view. They toiled in temperatures over 100 degrees and suffered from dehydration. The air they breathed was often stale and rank. Hundreds of feet below the surface of the Pacific, fear was their constant companion.