“As soon as we drove up there, their mother came running out to tell us the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor,” Hamilton said in a 1991 Courier interview. “So we got in there and listened to the radio.”

George and Francis, or “Frankie,” the two oldest brothers, were listening intently, because each had just returned from a tour of duty in the Navy.

“Those two boys could tell what was happening,” Hamilton said. “I’m not sure whether they were on those ships, but they had part of their friends on ships that were being blown up over there.

“So they talked right away about going into the Navy,” Hamilton said, tears in his eyes. “We had dinner that day, but it wasn’t a very happy occasion.”

The brothers enlisted on the condition they be allowed to serve together on the same ship, a departure from Navy policy. After some initial resistance, the military acquiesced.

“I was talking to an ensign the other day,” Red Sullivan wrote Hamilton. “From the way he talked, all five of us brothers are going to get on the same ship. I wish the rest of you guys could go along.”

That ship was the Juneau.