Rows of white marble markers fill the floor of Punchbowl Crater at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, one of the most moving military cemeteries in the world. Established in 1949 on the floor of an ancient Hawaiian volcanic crater, this cemetery holds the remains of more than 53,000 American service members from the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War — along with veterans of other conflicts and a small number of civilians of special distinction. Among those interred here is Ernie Pyle, the beloved war correspondent who reported from the front lines of the Second World War with such empathy and precision that he became the voice of the ordinary American soldier.
He was killed by Japanese machine-gun fire on the island of Ie Shima on April 18, 1945, just weeks before the war ended. The Courts of the Missing list the names of 28,788 men and women who were lost in the Pacific and never recovered. Walk slowly between these rows of white marble markers and let the scale of what happened here — in these Pacific waters, on these Pacific islands, across these Pacific years — settle over you.
The green volcanic walls rise all around, and the sky above Honolulu is very blue.