"Some of the students had no clue about the event, others had limited knowledge based on misinformation, and still others offered flippant answers that bordered on disrespect," he said.
That experience, plus the notion that the attack on Pearl Harbor shouldn't be remembered by today's college generation only as a melodramatic movie, moved Jensen to action. The instructor of journalism now teaching at USC Spartanburg quickly assembled an anthology of 18 eyewitness accounts of living Pearl Harbor survivors--five of them living in South Carolina--and published it himself in a 100-page booklet for distribution to as wide an audience as possible.
Pearl Survivors: Eyewitness Accounts in Their Own Words, was officially set for release from just before Veterans Day on Nov. 11 through Dec. 7, the 60th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Jensen published the book through First Foundations, Inc., a 501c(3) non-profit organization he founded in 1986 to disseminate works that support what he believes are "the three foundations of any society": family, government, and religion.
The Pearl Harbor book is available for $5.99 in South Carolina at BiLo grocery stores, military post exchanges, and other selected independent outlets. Jensen said he would also donate copies of the book to history professors at USC and other universities, high school history teachers, and public libraries.
"We tried to get a representative sample of all the military services that were represented in the action on Dec. 7, 1941," said Jensen, who found the survivors by going through the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. Jensen wrote about half of the stories himself after interviewing the survivors. Other accounts were reprinted from previously published sources such as newspapers.
Included in the remembrances are those of the late Ensign Joseph K. Taussig, an officer of the deck aboard the battleship Nevada who went on to become undersecretary of the Navy; Lt. Ruth Erickson, a nurse at Naval Hospital Pearl Harbor who, after the war, became director of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps in Washington; and Charleston native Alonza Grant, an officer's cook aboard the USS Avocet, a seagoing tug moored at Ford Island in Pearl Harbor.
Also in the book is a collection of photographs, a list of the ships at Pearl Harbor when the attack occurred, a post-attack resolution from Congress, and a tribute to Pearl survivors by Jensen. The tribute includes a remembrance of Jensen's late father who served in the Navy during World War II.
In an odd twist of fate, the book went to press just as the attacks of Sept. 11 occurred, providing a searing reminder of Pearl Harbor's significance and a very real sense of how the parents and grandparents of today's young readers must have felt after the attack. Jensen hastily penned a brief epilogue to the book in which he observed the way in which the nation has become united "in a way that we haven't seen since 1941."
He added, "If the purpose of the 2001 attack was to demoralize Americans the enemies of freedom failed again, as they did at Pearl Harbor.
"Our symbolic eagle not only survives, it continues to soar."
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