But he and the other soldiers at Schofield soon spotted the attacking Japanese planes. They were bombing nearby Wheeler Field—the first wave of the assault. Sitting at a folding table in the visitor center, Kinzler, 86, autographs biographical sheets and other mementos for visitors.

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“I feel I have to be here to answer questions, whether they’re exciting or not,” Kinzler says, “to keep the legacy and story of Pearl Harbor alive.”

The National Park Service employees who run the Arizona memorial and visitor center cherish the work the survivors do, and are preserving their memories via oral histories and other means. “At Gettysburg, they can see the battlefield and visit the new museum,” says Daniel Martinez, the park historian since 1988. “But they can’t talk with anybody who was there.”

Hospital Corpsman Sterling R. Cale had just come off duty in the shipyard dispensary on the morning of December 7 when he saw planes over Battleship Row.

“I saw planes diving,” he recalls, “and thought something might be wrong. Then I saw the rising sun” on the wings. Cale grabbed a fire ax, knocked down an armory door, and grabbed a Springfield rifle to shoot at the attacking planes. He spent the next few hours pulling survivors—and bodies—from the flaming wrecks. The break-in almost got him court-martialed. “Fortunately, President Roosevelt declared war the next day, so I got an award for breaking into the armory.”

The Arizona memorial was completed in 1961, and while it is in good shape, the visitor center, built on reclaimed land in 1980, is sinking, falling apart, and generally inadequate to its historic task—especially handling the thousands of people who visit it every day, some of whom have to be turned away. Ground was broken in November on a two-year project to replace the visitor center with a modern facility; the memorial will remain open throughout the construction.

The new visitor center will preserve the survivors’ stories after they’re gone. “Now is the time to be talking to the survivors…they’re living history,” says Eileen Martinez, the chief of interpretation at the memorial, who recently was part of a Park Service project to compile oral history interviews with 50 survivors (about 4,000 are still alive). “That’s the challenge—how do we speak for them once they’ve passed?”

Scheduled to open on December 7, 2010, the new center will be able to accommodate more visitors and exhibits and take better advantage of the site’s waterfront location overlooking Pearl Harbor and the memorial.

“The hope of the new center is that it’s a pleasant experience that supplies an opportunity to learn,” says Ms. Martinez. The private, nonprofit Pearl Harbor Memorial Fund has raised more than $30 million of the project’s $52 million cost; a six-city road tour last fall brought the effort more attention, and actor and World War II buff Tom Hanks has pitched in as a fundraiser.

Back on the Missouri, Reggie Johnson explains the ship’s place in history to me. The retired marine leads tours of the battleship and loves to tell its story. The Missouri’s keel had just been laid in Brooklyn, New York, when its sister ships were attacked in Pearl Harbor. The “Mighty Mo” was launched in 1944—the last American battleship—and served in the Pacific fleet. On September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay, Allied and Japanese leaders gathered on the Missouri’s deck to sign the documents by which Japan surrendered, ending World War II.

Standing on that historic spot on the Missouri, I can see the Arizona memorial in the near distance—a unique confluence of space and time that simultaneously puts me at the beginning and the ending of America’s involvement in the war. The black tears continue to stain the gently lapping waves around the memorial, iridescent in the bright Hawaiian sunshine. It’s a sacred and solemn place, and the surroundings reflect that. “Pearl Harbor,” says Johnson, “is still quiet.”

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