Dateline April 1, 2011, Pearl Harbor, Oahu

The circle of remembrance overlooks the Arizona and the other berths along Battleship Row. Etched in the stone is Eleanor Roosevelt's wartime prayer:

Dear Lord, Lest I continue My complacent way, Help me to remember that somewhere, Somehow out there A man died for me today. As long as there be war, I then must Ask and answer Am I worth dying for?

So appropriate during the Second World War, and just as appropriate today for the citizen soldiers who live and die for our protection around the world.

Most of us were not alive on December 7, 1941, but our parents and grandparents recall it like it was yesterday. That is when the Greatest Generation began to put its mark on our country and the world.

Today we visited Pearl Harbor and it was an unbelievable experience. The visitors spread from small children to senior citizens who remember the day as if it happened yesterday. Hearing a young boy tell his father that we won brought a smile.

The visitor center showed a twenty-five minute film. Hollywood can make all the movies it wants about Pearl Harbor, but the actual footage stitched together in that short film told a story that was spellbinding. After the film we boarded a Navy launch for the trip out to the Arizona Memorial. Seeing the moorings where each ship had been tied that morning brought the film to life.

So many died, and so many men left peacetime for war the moment the attack began.

Arriving at the memorial we were in awe. You look down into the water and there she is, the Arizona's hull, over six hundred feet of battleship, resting on the floor of Pearl Harbor.

High-altitude bombers scored a direct hit on the ship that morning. The bomb penetrated to the forward ammunition magazines and detonated them, killing most of the crew almost instantly. The men who died that day are still aboard. Small amounts of oil still escape from the hull, more than seven decades on.

The names of every sailor lost are carved on the wall at the far end of the memorial.

In front of the wall is a second, smaller list, of those who survived the attack and later asked to be interred with their shipmates from December 7. That devotion brought up tremendous emotion in everyone there. A silent prayer of respect and thanks for those noble people.

Every ship anchored in Pearl Harbor faces the harbor's opening, with one exception. The USS Missouri faces inward, directly at the Arizona, watching over the ship and the sailors beneath the water.

It is the appropriate ship to stand guard. The Japanese surrender that ended the Second World War was signed on the Missouri's deck in Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945.