As featured speaker Monday for this year’s Bulloch County Memorial Day Remembrance, John Sullivan will talk about a visit he made to Pearl Harbor just prior to this 75th anniversary year of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack that brought the United States into World War II.
The annual remembrance, hosted by American Legion Dexter Allen Post 90, will be held in the Emma Kelly Theater on East Main Street. It’s free and open to everyone. A prelude in music performed by keyboardist and composer Dr. Michael Braz will begin at 10:30 a.m., followed by the speaking program at 11 a.m.
Sullivan served with the Marine Corps from 1961 through 1965. The closest he came to combat was during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when indeed, the United States and the old Soviet Union came closer to war than many people know, but that is not his planned subject.
“For my Memorial Day speaking, what I’m going to really speak about is, my wife and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary last year, and our aim was to go to Hawaii with the main goal of visiting Pearl Harbor,” Sullivan said. “The majority of my talk will be about our visit to Pearl Harbor and what we saw there.”
John and Patricia Sullivan’s 50th anniversary was Aug. 28, 2015. They made their trip to Hawaii last summer, and after visiting Pearl Harbor, took a cruise among the islands.
Not to give away too much of John Sullivan’s speech, but he says he is proud of how the United States remembers its veterans and war dead, as demonstrated at Pearl Harbor and many other places.
Pearl Harbor is the resting place of the battleship USS Arizona and more than 1,100 of the sailors and Marines who died there. Its monument building, like a pier straddling the sunken ship, is the best known of the historic sites around the harbor. Several commemorate Americans killed in the surprise attack by imperial Japanese forces the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.
Still afloat, the battleship USS Missouri, where World War II formally ended, is now also a historic site permanently docked at Pearl Harbor, Sullivan notes. After the United States detonated atomic bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, Japan effectively surrendered Aug. 15, but officials signed the surrender documents Sept. 2 on the deck of the Missouri.
Missile Crisis
If Sullivan were to talk about his own Cold War experience from the 1960s, he would explain how, as a young Marine corporal, he was deployed to Okinawa, a Japanese island that had been occupied during World War II and is still home to U.S. bases. His almost 18-month deployment was extended after U.S. surveillance flights proved in October 1962 that the Soviet Russians had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Besides the well-known blockade of Cuba, U.S. forces were moved into more aggressive postures in other places before the Soviets withdrew the missiles.
“Not too many people knew this, but we were informed that if the United States and the Russians fired upon one another in Cuba, that we were going to Russia,” Sullivan said. “The 7th Fleet came in to pick us up from the Naha Naval Base in Okinawa, and we stayed aboard the 7th Fleet for about three days until the Cuban conflict sort of cooled off a little bit.”
Ceremony participants
Clifton Holt, an American Legion Post 90 member who served to the rank of commander in the Navy, will be master of ceremonies for Monday’s program. Post 90 Chaplain Charles Williams, World War II veteran and 61-year American Legion member, will give the opening and closing prayers.
The local Knights of Columbus will post the flags, and American Legion Post 90 Commander Lonnie Ellis will welcome everyone. Other veterans and county and state officials have roles in the ceremony, which includes intoning the names of Bulloch County people who died in wars from the Civil War to the present. After the audience sings “America the Beautiful,” teenage musician Enreco Soriano will play “Taps.”
Post 90’s Dan Foglio organized the program, as he has done since taking over from the late Kemp Mabry about a decade ago.
Herald reporter Al Hackle may be reached at (912) 489-9458.