GRATEFUL TO BE MY FATHER’S PEARL HARBOR BABY

Photo by Ryan Parker on Unsplash

I was born on December 7th, exactly ten years after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. That date which lives in infamy was the reason my father enlisted and served as a Navy photographer in World War II. For the rest of his life, he called me, his firstborn daughter, his Pearl Harbor baby. Knowing what that connection meant to him, I could never bring myself to tell my father how I really felt about the association. How there were times I hated being called his Pearl Harbor baby, especially as a teenager navigating the turbulent 60s.

During my adolescence, I wanted no connection to the war my father fought or to war in any form. My generation was the anti-war, peace and love generation. Boys my age were trying to avoid the draft and not be sent to the jungles of Vietnam to fight a war no one really understood. Idealistic and perhaps naïve, I wanted to divorce myself from my birthdate and the name my father called me. And while I never said it out loud, I believe my father sensed it.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the generation gap raged at my house. Conversations at my family dinner table often got heated and I would run from the room in tears. My dad hated everything to do with my generation, from the politics to the clothes, hair, and music. Everything that symbolized a break between my generation and his. It didn’t help that we lived less than a mile from the…