Witness to Pearl Harbor

Posted at 9:37 PM, Dec 07, 2016
and last updated 2016-12-07 23:38:00-05

It is a date that will live an infamy. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor changed the course of the world forever. So Imagine a young boy growing up on the island, living everyday carefree of any danger.

Then came December 7th. Patrick Teixeira was twelve that Sunday morning when Japanese planes sprayed the Naval base and dropped endless torpedoes into the water causing extensive damage to the U-S fleet.

Now seventy-five years later, Patrick recalls what it was like to witness the attack.
He says, "I remember a lot of things about that morning, I remember hearing then seeing planes above and then hearing the noise and them all the smoke."

Obviously, the school was canceled on Monday, and then again on Tuesday, but when he returned to classes on Wednesday, he noticed something different about his school.

Patrick says something was missing, "I had a lot of Japanese friends and when I went back to school, my friends weren't there. They took them to camps."

Something that was hard for a 12-year-old to understand. They were his friends, his classmates, and in a matter of days, they were gone.

Patrick soon enlisted as soon as he could which came at the end of the war. Ironically he was sent to the country that had attacked his home five years earlier. "When I joined the service, I went to occupy Japan in 1946. He returned home in 1949.

Looking back, seventy-five years later, Patrick hopes the attack on Pearl Harbor will be a lesson for all future generations. Patrick says, "that's the war you got to remember. That's the war you got to remember."