By Eric Schuck

Seventy years on, she still bleeds. In sun and in rain, in wind and in calm, she slowly weeps away a drop of black oil for each of the souls lost on that now distant Sunday. The drops rise slowly, countless small spheres ascending through crystalline waters only to break in an iridescent sheen on the harbor, mirroring the colors of the rainbows that glow so often in the Hawaiian sky. But there can be no mistaking this for a place of beauty: Each drop reeks of sulfur. Each drop carries the unmistakable smell of death.

Here lies the USS Arizona, late of the U.S. Navy. Her grave rests in shallow water on the eastern side of Ford Island, her shattered, burned and broken hull forever holding more than 1,100 sailors and Marines for whom the world ended shortly after 8 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941. I have seen her a dozen times, and each time I mourn the same as the first.

Despite the remoteness of seven decades, Pearl Harbor is, for me, an intimately personal place. On the day of the attack, my grandfather had been in the Navy for nearly nine years. He was part of the "old Navy," the $21-a-month professionals who stood watch through the Depression and who still formed the bulk of the Navy on Dec. 7. His ship was not in port that day, instead desperately attempting to deliver a deckload of Marine scout planes to Midway. It was only through the fickle but most providential favor of Neptune and Mars that his ship was at sea.

His time would come. Six months and a day later, he would find himself on the bright, burning deck of a dying carrier in the Coral Sea. Battered and beleaguered, he would survive, earn an officer's commission and retire from the Navy 14 years later, going on to a magnificent second act as a gentleman farmer and grandfather. But he never forgot the tragedy of that December day. For while to most of us the dead of Pearl Harbor are nothing more than marble-carved names or sepia-tinged photos, for him they were living, breathing men, eternally young in his memories. They were always with him.

That sense of loss cannot be understated. The Navy was much smaller then, a much more intimate fraternity than it would be in 1945. As historian S.E. Morison notes, through most of the 1930s the Navy typically numbered around 10,000 officers and 100,000 men. The losses at Pearl Harbor fell disproportionately among these long-service brethren, and it was these men who bore the brunt of those first bitter months of the war.

The modern Navy -- the modern military -- probably has more in common with the sailors, soldiers, Marines and airmen of Pearl Harbor than they do with the victorious forces that sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1945. The Army and Navy of 1941 were absolute professionals, a small cadre of long-serving experts who had honed their craft for years.

When my grandfather's ship, the USS Lexington, was lost in 1942, there were men aboard who had served on her since her commissioning in 1927. They had known no other world than the Navy. Through the years, they had grown distinct, unique and separate from the society that had created them. And there were not many of them: As a group, the prewar military made up slightly less than 1 percent of the entire U.S. population, a fraction that is nearly identical to the current number of service members.

It is worth reflecting upon that number. After Pearl Harbor a torrent of draftees and volunteers swelled the ranks of the military, and nearly 16 million Americans would serve in uniform at some point during World War II, more than 10 percent of the total population. That so many could be transformed from civilians into soldiers and sailors so quickly speaks volumes to the knowledge and skill of the prewar naval and military cadres.

Today is different. Today, after a decade of war, the 1 percent still serves. It is as if the sailors and Marines who survived Pearl Harbor were then asked to continue fighting through to Tokyo Bay -- twice. That they do so without flinching and without fail marks them as worthy heirs to their professional forebears, the Navy of my grandfather and his shipmates in 1941.

This brings us back to a clear winter morning in Hawaii, watching the oil rise elegiacally from the Arizona. I am an officer now myself, proud to wear the same uniform my grandfather and parents once wore. I stand at the Arizona, finding that I weep for her crew not through the distance of time, but through the closeness of our shared profession. I mourn neither in anger nor anguish, but in pride in counting myself among those who have followed them to sea. We are sailors of the United States Navy.

Eric Schuck is a professor of economics at Linfield College and a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve.