He was no fool. The world was teetering on the edge of war, and war demands young lives. Vernon Carter decided to enlist while he still had a say-so in his future.
He left his North Georgia home and drove to the U.S. Army recruiter’s office in Gainesville. “Could I go to Hawaii?” he asked. Carter had seen the photos — the palm trees, that blue ocean, those women in grass skirts.
Yes, young man, the recruiter said. We have a place in Hawaii.
That was enough for young Vernon. In the spring of 1941, he signed up.
His destination: Hickam Field. At a place called Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor. On Dec. 7, 1941, the country's Hawaiian naval base and army airfields were in the cross hairs of an attack that pushed the United States into World War II. Not long after sunrise, Japanese fighter planes hit the facilities, sinking ships, destroying airplanes and killing 2,335 U.S. servicemen and 68 civilians. An additional 1,143 servicemen were wounded, as well as 35 civilians. That was 75 years ago Wednesday.
The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared Dec. 7 "a date which will live in infamy." He asked Congress for a declaration of war, and got it.
Thus did America step into a global conflagration that would see cities destroyed, millions killed and geopolitics changed forever. In America, the war encompassed nearly everyone – boys who signed up to go off and fight, the girls who learned to build killing machines, the children who gathered scrap metal to build tanks and planes and bombs.
But none of that was on Pvt. Carter’s mind that morning when the Empire of the Rising Sun attacked. He was too busy running for his life.
“It scared me to death,” said Carter. “I’ll never forget it.”
Traveling by rail and sea
Carter is 97. He is a member of an elite and dwindling number of veterans who were at Pearl Harbor on that early morning so long ago.
An estimated 60,000 service members survived that attack 75 years ago. Since then, their numbers have decreased steadily as old age has managed to do what Japanese fighter planes could not. Now no one is sure just how many are left. Two years ago, an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 were thought to be alive. It’s unclear how many remain in Georgia.
Of 16 million World War II veterans, an estimated 620,000 still survive.
At one time, Carter said, he routinely met with survivors who lived not far from his home in Jefferson, 60 miles north of Atlanta. Now, none lives nearby.
In a recent interview, he pointed at a shadow box, where reminders of his participation in World War II are on permanent display — his staff sergeant’s insignia, a sharpshooter’s medal and a good conduct medal, among others. Carter smiled at that.
“’Good conduct,’” he said. “Can you believe that?”
He was inducted at Fort McPherson near Atlanta. Not long afterward, Carter boarded a train for a cross-country crawl. For someone who'd not traveled far from Jackson County, it was a memorable trek. For four days, he watched the land rise, flatten, rise again. He crossed the Mississippi River, America's main artery. When the train passed the Great Salt Lake, Pvt. Carter wrinkled his nose. "You could smell the salt."
The trip ended in San Francisco. What a place. He rode streetcars up streets steeper than anything back home. He hiked Nob Hill and gawped at the mansions.
He recalls riding a ferry from Angel Island, where the army had an installation, to the mainland. It passed another island whose residents included bank robbers, gangsters, murderers and other felons.
"That was Alcatraz," Carter said. "The prisoners, they'd yell at us."
Carter got his orders. That summer, he boarded the S.S. President Coolidge, an ocean liner pressed into military service. In a season of new experiences, he had another: sea sickness.
The Coolidge arrived in Honolulu without incident. Carter walked off, and into a new land. It was prettier than the photos. He was entranced.
Carter settled his barracks at Hickam Field, where the Army kept a collection of bombers and other airplanes. Carter set out to learn more about his lush duty station. He swam in the ocean, hiked hills and regularly visited Honolulu.
“Oh, it was real nice,” he said. His eyes gleamed. “You could see those hula girls dancing.”
Carter paused, and the gleam in his eyes vanished. “Of course, it didn’t last.”
Listening for the enemy
The first wave came just minutes before 8 a.m. Nearly 200 airplanes attacked. Some focused on the ships in the harbor; others headed toward the army’s airplanes. Close to that were sleeping soldiers — Carter among them.
“I heard all those bombs going off,” he said. Carter jumped out of his bunk, fumbling for his clothes. Running outside, he looked up and saw an airplane. It was not American, and it was headed toward him.
The warplane passed overhead, close enough for Carter to see its pilot. “He looked down at me and grinned,” Carter recalled. “I could see his teeth.”
The second attack came about an hour later. By then, said Carter, Hickam Field was in flames, scores of airplanes reduced to smoldering metal. It was over before noon.
Later that day, the shaken soldier dashed off a quick letter home. “We got out of our barracks just in time,” Carter wrote his parents. “A big shell came through the room and about three feet from my bed. …It was so quick we did know what happened.”
That night, an officer assigned Carter to guard an ammunition dump. Standing in the darkness, armed with an out-of-date rifle, Carter listened for the snap of a twig, the crackle of a leaf. Was the enemy nearby?
“I was never so scared in my life, just wandering around,” he said. “I just knew one of those Japanese would shoot me.”
He made it through that night, and many more. Carter spent most of the war at Pearl Harbor, where he disbursed weaponry and ammunition for American forces that pushed steadily toward the nation that had dared attack Pearl Harbor. He finished his military career in Greenville, Miss., in 1945.
He returned home, where Carter met and married a war widow who already had a 2-year-old. He raised that child, as well as the three kids he and Ruth Carter had.
Carter also went into business with his brother. They grew and warehoused cotton, then manufactured fertilizer. The brothers eventually gave that up and opened a business that specialized in recapping car and school-bus tires. When his brother died, years ago, Carter decided to slow down.
These days, he lives quietly in the same town where a young man went looking for adventure and found it. On Wednesday, he’ll surely pause and recall it all — the airplanes, the bombs, the screams of the dying.
Soldiers may get old, but they don’t forget.
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