The long day was ending in the twilight of another beautiful Hawaiian sunset.
Tom Smith couldn’t bear to look. He’d seen too much ugliness. He’d spent the day pulling corpses from water topped by burning oil slicks.
“I just wanted to know what tomorrow would be like,” he said.
It was Dec. 7, 1941, in Pearl Harbor. Smith was 19 years old.
Smith was born and raised in Lewistown, Mont., a place where winter means snow, and people say the only fishing is fly-fishing. His mother made cinnamon rolls and lemon cakes for his birthdays.
In the eighth grade he fell in love with boxing. He fought on Friday nights until his senior year in high school.
Surrounded by mountains and horses, life was good but slow, Smith said. Like many of his friends, he dropped out of high school and joined the U.S. Navy, intent on exploring the world.
In August 1941, Smith was sent to Pearl Harbor and became a molder 2nd class aboard the repair ship USS Rigel. Smith was on his own in a place where the sun shone nearly every day. He even tried to learn to surf.
He continued to box and soon became the Navy’s middleweight Golden Gloves champion. On Friday nights, he fought in an arena with about 2,500 people watching. On Saturdays, he had nights out, enjoying his youth and independence.
Smith visited friends outside the Navy base and stayed overnight on Saturday, Dec. 6, 1941.
Next morning, he was walking by a big warehouse back at the base when he heard “buzzzzz” from the blue sky. Navy pilots were showing off their skills, Smith thought.
Then, he saw “meatballs” – Japanese Zero airplanes with red sun emblems on their wings.
In seconds, everything around him was on fire. The smells of burning oil and scorched paint stung his nose.
Smith volunteered to hop on a 50-foot rescue boat with a few others. The boat maneuvered around wrecked ships and burning oil.
Smith worked nonstop saving people and pulling corpses from the water. The dead outnumbered the living.
Smith’s memories are most vivid about some of the little things. Many of the sailors pulled from the harbor threw up tomato juice once they were hauled into the rescue boat. That’s what they drank with their breakfast.
The rescue effort left Smith wiped out. That night, he went back to the USS Rigel, which was only slightly damaged. He didn’t take a shower. He just went to bed and tried as best as he could to sleep.
Smith, now 84, lives in Arlington with Marilyn, his wife of 51 years. He sometimes wears a baseball cap that says he is a Pearl Harbor survivor. The license plate on his pickup truck also carries the same message.
More important to him, he says, is the black-and-white photo he keeps of a Japanese couple, Hajime and Midori Ono. They became his friends after the war when Smith frequently visited Japan while working as a civilian employee of the U.S. Department of the Navy.
Smith said he and the Ono family exchanged Christmas cards for years, but eventually lost track of each other.
The friendship was important, Smith said, because it reminded him that people are people, regardless of whether they come from Japan or the farmland of Montana.
Smith and his wife raised four sons. He said he enjoys retirement and spending time with his grandchildren.
He doesn’t talk much about what happened 65 years ago on this date. But it is still a part of him.
Smith can drink tomato juice, but he still can’t stand the smell of burning oil.
Reporter Yoshiaki Nohara: 425-339-3029 or ynohara@heraldnet.com.
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