December 7, 1941.

May we as a nation, never forget.

On Dec. 7, 1941, just after 8 a.m., a 1,760-pound armor-piercing bomb penetrated the decks of the USS Arizona, striking the forward magazine. The resulting explosion was volcanic as nearly a million pounds of gunpowder erupted into a fireball of death and destruction. The Arizona would sink in nine minutes, taking to the harbor floor 1,177 sailors and Marines. Just 337 crewmen aboard the Arizona survived the blast. The fire was so intense that it would burn for two days. By the end of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 21 U.S. ships had been sunk or damaged.

To my amazement, as I read further, there have been sections of the USS Arizona preserved in an undisclosed (until recently) location.

Daniel Martinez, National Park Service historian who has worked at the Arizona Memorial since 1985 and is an expert on the bombing of Pearl Harbor, says, “Someone, and we don’t know who, since documentation does not exist, realized the importance of this wreckage of the martyred ship and put it in a place where it would be preserved.” The specific location of what Ms. Tauyan calls the “sacred relics” is a closely guarded secret. The Navy will acknowledge for the record only that sections of the Arizona are on Waipio Peninsula, strictly off limits to the public and safely guarded in a storage area on a military reservation, but it granted access for this article to further tell the story of the famed battleship and its continuing contribution today.

To reach the site, a visitor must proceed through locked gates, down roads and deep into an area that is protected by wasps and the thickets and thorns of Kiawe trees. There, in a clearing, is a debris field that is not large but unmistakably contains a unique look into history.

How could one disagree with the Mr. Sobel’s final paragraph?

Just as the attack on Pearl Harbor reminds the world of the worst of human nature, it was the heroism of those who fought back and later on to victory who live in America’s memory. Now, as the ranks of Pearl Harbor survivors are diminished by time, the distribution of relics from the Arizona helps serve as a constant reminder of those who lost their lives on Dec. 7, 1941.