Sixty-eight years ago today (Dec. 7, 2009) the landlord pounded on the door of our upstairs apartment in Tallahassee and announced: "the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor." I was only four and a half years old, but I understood everything he said.
My dad was a Tech Sergeant in the Army Air Corps. Just two days before, he had returned from the Carolina Maneuvers. Earlier in the summer, while my dad was away at the Louisiana Maneuvers, my brother was born in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Later, when my grandmother drove us back to Tallahassee, we were caught in an endless military convoy poking along at about thirty-five miles an hour along two-lane highways, through small southern towns, around courthouse squares.
Three months after Pearl Harbor, my dad left for Mobile, Alabama to prepare for overseas movement. We stayed with my grandparents in Holmes County, Mississippi and didn't see my dad again for more than three years.
During those three years, we received one five-word Western Union telegram from him and occasional letters. We had no telephone. So the normal means of communication was by hand-written "V-Mail" letters reviewed (and often redacted) by censors.
No e-mails. No twitter. No digital photos. No satellite communications.
It was another time. And New Guinea was far, far away.
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