By Ray Nothstine

When most people think of Hawaii and military sacrifice, Pearl Harbor quickly comes to mind. Pearl Harbor gives us those indelible images: smoking ships, a staggering death toll, and FDR’s famous words, “a date which will live in infamy.” But up the hill of an extinct volcano over Honolulu is the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, better known as “Punchbowl.” In the Hawaiian language the crater carries the name “Pūowaina,” meaning “human sacrifice.”

I’ve been to Punchbowl at least a half a dozen times when my dad was stationed at Hickam Air Force Base on Oahu. One day, I watched my grandfather visit the grave of Lt. Donald K. Tripp, his best friend from high school in Northern Michigan. Tripp, a naval aviator in the Pacific Theater, was killed in action during a 1944 fighter sweep mission over Formosa in World War II. It struck me, even as a boy, how strange it was to see a man in his 70s staring down at a classmate frozen in time. “Why Tripp and not somebody else?” I wondered.

Air Force veteran Ellison Onizuka (1946 – 1986) is buried at Punchbowl. As a public-school student in New Hampshire in 1986, some of the teachers at my elementary school knew Christa McAuliffe personally. We were all excited and gave our rapt attention to the Challenger mission. That excitement turned to grief. After lunch, I saw my teacher crying at her desk. Ms. Keenan, not particularly known for her warmth, implored us to pray. My mom, an emotional mess, crying for hours over the news, picked me up from school with a red puffy face. In 1985, Onizuka was the first Asian-American and the first from Hawaii in space, perishing a year later along with McAuliffe and five other astronauts aboard Challenger.

There are 33 Medal of Honor of recipients buried at Punchbowl, including Hawaiian native Herbert K. Pililaau, who was killed in action during the Korean War, but not before taking a wave of more than 40 enemy assailants with him as he stayed behind to cover a withdrawal so the men in his platoon could go on living. His Medal of Honor citation is worth reading. I’m not sure I’d believe in such heroics if Hollywood still made those kind of films today.

The famed war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize recipient Ernie Pyle rests there, too, killed by a Japanese sniper on Okinawa.

I have a lot of flaws but try not to be overly proud. I’ve always had a little pride in being born on Okinawa, an island off Japan where over 12,000 Americans lost their lives in their fight to liberate the Pacific from imperial evil and aggression. Of course, I did nothing, but it’s a connection and I feel like I should remember the hell and carnage they went through.

I was moved to tears reading Eugene Sledge’s memoir “With the Old Breed,” which covers his account of the savagery of the fighting on the island. Historian John Keegan called it “one of the most arresting documents in war literature” and Professor and Literary Historian Paul Fussell called it “One of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war.” While a Marine, Sledge was sensitive to suffering, and it shines throughout his memoir.

There is a line from the English trench poet Wilfred Owen who wrote that, “Those who feel most for others suffer most in war.” Looking out over all the graves at Punchbowl is Lady Columbia, representing so many grieving mothers. Who suffers more than the mothers?

The inscription under the Lady Columbia statue is a portion of a letter from Abraham Lincoln’s words to a Mrs. Bixby who lost five sons in the Civil War: “…The solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”

Not all the names at Punchbowl have a body resting beneath it. Eight courts of the missing beside the grand stairs up to Lady Columbia record the more than 28,000 bodies never recovered from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. On the Vietnam portion are these words from the American poet Archibald MacLeish, “They say, we leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.”

We can start by remembering.

Ray Nothstine is a senior writer and editor and a Future of Freedom Fellow at the State Policy Network. He manages and edits American Habits, an online publication focused on federalism and self-government.