Interviewed by Alex Kershaw for theAARP Bulletin.
Ken Potts was in Honolulu when he heard people shouting.
Then he heard a loudspeaker blaring for all Navy personnel to get back to their ships.
It was early morning, Dec. 7, 1941.
As the attack progressed, the whole harbor was afire.
Oil was leaking from the ships that were hit by torpedoes.
Some 15 minutes into the attack, a Japanese plane dropped a large bomb on theArizona.
Fuel stores and ammunition magazines exploded, and the massive battleship erupted in flames.
I was on the stern of the ship.
Everything was in turmoil after that.
It was like the whole country was burning.
The word was passed to abandon ship, and those who could get off jumped into the water.
It was a mess.
Potts survived by leaping into the churning harbor.
He was one of just 334 from the 1,511-man crew who got off alive.
Among the dead were Potts best friend, a Minnesotan named Merritt Cameron Helm.
TheArizonas death toll was nearly half of all Americans killed that day.
Potts was able to reach a launch headed toward nearby Ford Island.
He and other survivors pulled a lot of people out of the water.
Everybody was doing anything they could do to help.
After the attack, Potts drew the grim task of retrieving bodies of hisArizonacrewmates.
In 2006, he returned to Pearl Harbor and visited theArizonaMemorial, which is above the sunken battleship.
It honors the 2,390 civilians and service members killed in the attack.
When you get out on it, he says, you just get a feeling that I cant explain.
More than 900 of Potts crewmates are entombed in the sunken battleship.
There is just one other living survivor from theArizona, retired Lt. Cmdr.
Louis Lou Conter, also 100.
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