Driving on the freeway with my 12-year-old son on the morning of Jan. 13 — a date which will live in infamy, at least in my mind — Hawaii got the doomsday warning about a ballistic missile headed our way. It literally felt like my heart stopped.
“THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
I immediately got a number of calls asking if it was real. “Yes, if it says it’s not a drill, then it’s real,” I told my bewildered friends.
My husband, who was driving a short distance behind me, frantically directed me to head to an underground parking garage. “What underground parking garage?,” I yelled. “I don’t know!” he shouted.
My son started crying. I told him to pray.
Overcome by a number of emotions that included fear and panic, I took the nearest cutoff by the Waipio Costco to take shelter (I knew we could survive on big-box provisions for at least two weeks!).
A couple of panicked employees — eyes wide open — were on their phones pacing outside the warehouse, which was not open yet. “Are you gonna open the door?” I asked. One baffled worker stood dazed and confused. “Are you gonna let us in?” I asked again.
He responded: “If this is for real, I’m going home!”
Thinking I had only minutes to hunker down, I headed back to my mother-in-law’s house, where they were scrambling to fill up water jugs and prepare rations for the unknown. Shortly afterward, my husband shouted that it had been 15 minutes — it would’ve already happened — and that it must have been a mistake.
I felt blessed to have another day of life.
MORE THAN 76 years ago, my grandparents, who are in their late 80s, still vividly remember witnessing the Japanese bombers descending upon Pearl Harbor on that fateful morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when America was thrust into World War II.
My grandmother, who was around the same age my children are today, recalls waving to the low-flying planes that were so close she could see the face of one of the pilots. She didn’t realize they were the enemy. My grandfather lived in the Pearl City Peninsula and watched as the bombers flew into the warships and the smoke and fire erupted over the bay. His father, a police officer, took the family up the hilltop to hide in the cane fields and later was absent for days as he helped in the chaos.
In the following years, life in paradise was not the same. My grandparents remember carrying gas masks to school, rationing food and supplies, taking care of military families in their homes and having to black out the windows after sunset in case of another attack on the islands.
Since then, the world — at least on this tiny island in the middle of the Pacific — has been in relative peace. In my more than 40 years here, those fears had never crossed my mind until now.
Thank God it was a false alarm. We can only hope and pray we never see another day of infamy — real or not.
“She Speaks” is a weekly column by women writers of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Reach Kristen Consillio at kconsillio@staradvertiser.com.
