Punchbowl crater

In high school, the loose kids always joked about making that mid-night caravan up Tantalus drive to do some 'scuba or submarine diving.' Exploring it by day, because I was not yet a fallen Catholic girl, I discovered some amazing look-outs on Tantalus...one of the more spectacular views being Punchbowl crater, the national cemetery of the Pacific dedicated to the soldiers who had fallen in the Pacific campaign. I thought of Punchbowl while watching the HBO series, The Pacific. Raised by parents who heard the bombs exploding at Pearl Harbor, and growing up an islander with very little knowledge of the war in the Pacific theater except for Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal (and really what exactly did I know besides the flag raising), my interest was piqued by the production. Unlike the ground war fought in Europe, with recognizable land marks, and European allies, the campaign in the Pacific fell primarily to the Navy and the US Marines. The series based on 2 Marine memoirs, 'With the old breed at Peleliu and Okinawa' by Eugene Sledge and 'Helmet for my Pillow,' by Robert Leckie follows the 5th Marine regiment, 1st Marine division. Battles on Peleliu, and Cape Gloucester, Okinawa, and Guadalcanal, most of them tiny atolls, fingerlings of death, rift with unbearable heat, unrelenting tropical rain, mud, blood suckers, poisoned water ponds, landscape so terrifyingly unfamiliar, barren, and twisted that it consumed the bravest of men, began in the summer of 1944 against an empire who had dug in and was willing to die in unconventional military fashion. Watching those episodes, I remembered one of my best friend's brother. Don enlisted in the Marines during Vietnam because he wanted to prove to his father that he was tough enough to make it in the corp. He made it, and died on a jungle reconnaissance mission in 1966. Yeah, war is always hell. But, my island or chain of islands survived not because the guys were 'somewhere over there,' but because they were in flotillas bobbing on Pacific waters waiting to disembark, or slogging through some godforsaken atoll up to their Marine asses in mud and guts. The first internment of the remains of thousands of soldiers who had died in the Pacific theater was made at Punchbowl on Jan. 4, 1949. Punchbowl is located in the 'Puowaina' Crater; in Old Hawaii it was known as the 'hill of sacrifice.'