Jason McNeil

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So there we were, Edna and I, standing in Books-A-Million looking over a coffee table book filled with pictures of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, taken on and around Dec. 7, 1941, and the days that followed. The "day that will live in infamy," of course, was the day of the Imperial Japanese sneak attack that propelled the United States headlong into the Second World War. Mostly in glorious black and white, with a few color and tinted prints thrown into the mix, the pictures presented an interesting contrast between the stunning natural beauty that is Hawaii and the devastation that was the harbor after the bombing.

A natural beauty in her own right, Edna Gardner is a delightful woman "of a certain age," as we say here in the South, who's so far found the time to not only be a world-class mother and grandmother but also now devotes her considerable energies to being a great-grandmother. No, she's not my grandmother, but we worked together a few years ago and occasional run-ins still require hugs and a bit of jawing.

It seemed just too serendipitous to have a book on World War II in hand and a member of Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" nearly as close at hand, so I asked Edna what those heady, crazy, frightening days in mid-December 1941 were like, and for that matter, the years of fighting that followed. Was it anything like today? Since September 2001, we all know what it's like to be told our country has been attacked, but what was it like back then?

Edna paused and ran a hand through her shock of willful blond and gray hair. Her eyes seemed to look inward, as her thoughts traveled back more than 60 years to a time when she, having barely left childhood behind, found herself a young citizen of a nation at war.

"I was working for the telephone company then," she said, "so when the war started I was sent to the Hampton Roads/Virginia Beach area to work, to help keep phone services running smoothly. That's where the port is, so you'd see soldiers and sailors coming and going all the time, shipping in and shipping out to go fight -- mostly to Europe, from there. We were always proud of our boys going off to fight but always scared for them, too, you know? Because they were going to war, and we knew not everyone would be coming back. We never wanted to let on to them that we were worried, though, because it just would've upset them, and nobody wanted that. They might not get to see America again for a long time. Some of them might never at all."

Edna paused again, understandably struggling with the task of summing up four years of her nation at war filtered by more than a half-century of remembrance and reflection. After a moment, her thoughts suitably marshaled, great-grandma Edna laid it out like this:

"What I remember the most was how everybody pulled together. Whether you joined the Army and went off to fight or stayed here, there was a feeling of everybody working together. Even my little job felt important because the telephones were helping the war effort here at home. Even when people weren't working, they organized scrap-metal drives, bought war bonds, and everybody didn't seem to complain as much about their own little problems. If someone fussed too much about his problems or being inconvenienced somehow, people would say 'Don't you know there's a war on?' It was like we all knew that we had to sink or swim together -- that if Hitler was going to be beaten, it'd take every one of us."

I had to ask, "So what about our wars today?"

"It's not the same, darling," she said, sighing. "It's just not the same."