Remembrance "Things That Weren't There"

By DANIEL AKAKA

A first-term Democratic Senator from Hawaii who served seven terms in the House, he was a 17-year-old student at a Reserve Officers Training Corps high school in Honolulu.

The planes carried huge round sun figures on them and had red balls on their wings. I put on the radio and discovered we were being attacked by Japan. No one knew what to do. We were students and didn't realize the gravity of what we were seeing. We saw a huge billow of smoke rising from Pearl Harbor and later found out that it was the Arizona. It burned for hours.

That afternoon, the students were sent to search the mountains for Japanese paratroopers.

Our mission was to detect and hold the Japanese soldiers at bay. Being so young, we were really frightened to be standing guard all alone, all night long, on a dark, lonely hillside. I spent a lot of time thinking about who could be out there in the night. I was so scared that I often heard and saw things that weren't there.