Saturday, December 7 marks the 72nd anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The Japanese sneak attack killed more than 2,400 sailors, injured many others and crippled the US Pacific Fleet.

It also plunged the United States into World War II. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked for and received a declaration of war, calling December 7, 1941 "A day that will live in infamy."

I may have mentioned this before, but my father used to talk about his remembrances of that day. It was a Sunday morning, and he, his parents and his brothers were returning home from church when they stopped at a nearby country grocery store and heard the news.

He put it this way: "We were sad because we knew we were going to have war." And war they had, which brought rationing and hardship on the homefront and thousands upon thousands of US soldiers killed or injured.

A teacher at my high school was rumored to have been a Pearl Harbor survivor, but I never asked about it and the rumor was all I knew.

Survivors are few these days, but we as Americans can never forget.

The lessons, and the sacrifices, remain today.

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