Showing visitors around the worn teak deck of the retired battleship USS Missouri, tour guide Reggie Johnson looks out over Pearl Harbor and notes how peaceful it is. Even though it’s still a major U.S. Navy base, the tone is always hushed—just as it was that fateful Sunday morning in December 1941, before the strafing and bombing began.

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The Missouri sits in the spot on Battleship Row that was occupied on December 7, 1941, by the USS Oklahoma, which rolled over and sank during the attack—one of eight American battleships sunk or seriously damaged when waves of Japanese planes raided Pearl Harbor and surrounding military installations.

A couple hundred yards away is one of the nation’s most hallowed sites: the USS Arizona Memorial, a graceful white structure that sits athwart the hulk of the ill-fated battleship. A 1,760-pound bomb dropped by a Japanese Kate hit the Arizona’s forward magazine a few minutes after 8 that morning, sinking the ship in about 40 feet of water in 9 minutes.

Looking down at the submerged remains of the Arizona’s deck, I see a small oil slick. This is not modern pollution. Almost seven decades after the attack, the Arizona’s fuel tanks still leak. A few quarts a day bubble to the surface—droplets known as Pearl Harbor’s “black tears.”

My visit to the USS Arizona Memorial began at the onshore visitor center, a soon-to-be-replaced collection of concrete buildings containing exhibits that tell the story of that date that lives in infamy. Artifacts, photos, maps, models, a short film—even letters home from those who served at Pearl Harbor—illustrate the story of the attack. Admission is free, but a $5 self-guided audio tour is worthwhile.

Before we boarded the boats that take visitors across Pearl Harbor to the memorial, a tour guide cautioned, “The USS Arizona is not just another tourist attraction, not just another sunken ship.” Indeed, the ship is the gravesite of about 900 service members still entombed in its wreckage. In all, 1,177 sailors on the Arizona died—nearly half the 2,388 Americans killed in the attack. The churchlike atmosphere of the memorial, including a wall full of victims’ names, reflects the gravity of the place and its memories.

But perhaps the most precious element of the memorial is its living exhibit: a handful of Pearl Harbor survivors in their 80s and 90s who volunteer a few hours a day, bringing to life the history of what happened that quiet Sunday morning.

Hawaii native Al Rodrigues was on duty at Bishop’s Point at the entrance to the harbor, at a facility that handled small navy craft and maintained the antisubmarine nets at the harbor’s entrance. He was just sitting down to breakfast when the general quarters alarm sounded. He and the other navy seamen were given .30-caliber rifles and .45-caliber revolvers to try to defend the base. “That’s all we had to shoot at the planes with,” Rodrigues says. He never got to finish his breakfast.

Rodrigues is 88 now, and comes to the memorial’s visitor center three times a week to meet visitors, appear in “Witness to History” videoconferences for schoolchildren around the United States, and talk about the history of Pearl Harbor.

“If I didn’t live on the other side of the island I’d come here every day,” he tells me, smiling. For visitors to the site, “having us here—to them it’s unbelievable.” And what does it mean to the survivors? “I love coming out here—I love to tell my story,” Rodrigues says. “I like the love they show us—the respect.”

Morse code radio operator Bob Kinzler was a few miles north of Pearl Harbor, at Schofield Barracks, when he heard an explosion at 7:55 a.m. that Sunday. “Initially, we thought one of the oil-fired stoves in one of the mess halls had blown up,” he remembers.

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