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- PEARL HARBOR, Page 44REMEMBRANCE"Things That Weren't There"
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- By DANIEL AKAKA
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- [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.]
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- 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.
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- That afternoon, the students were sent to search the
- mountains for Japanese paratroopers.
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- 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.
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