Pearl Harbor changed his idea of adventure

Sixty years ago today, I stopped into the original Howard Johnson's beside the Wollaston railroad station on my way to a religious meeting.

Suddenly, we all turned toward the small, crackly radio on a shelf behind the cash register. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

I don't remember patriotic threats or promises, I remember silence, and as I left to walk up the hill to the Wollaston Baptist church, I felt a strange combination of relief and adventure.

I was 17 years old and had known all my life that World War I hadn't been the ''war to end all wars."

I was 9 years old when Hitler came to power in 1933. I heard the arguments in my Scottish home that we should join the British at the front and the arguments on the street in my Irish neighborhood that we should never fight on the side of the king.

When I was in seventh grade, we moved to an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood where envelopes were stamped ''return to sender" long before the official start of the Holocaust. I was 15 when Hitler invaded Poland, and World War II was underway.

In an unexpected way, Pearl Harbor was a relief.

We weren't as innocent as I expected. We knew wars were made by old men but fought by boys, and we were the boys.

Still, there was that sense of adventure. National Geographic maps of the Arctic and Antarctic were taped to my ceiling, and Admiral Byrd's account of spending months alone in the Antarctic was on my bedside table.

Without a war, I probably would've trekked north to experience the geography that fascinated me and to test myself.

The tests came before combat. I worried I would not be able to shoot at another human being and then, on MP duty, a soldier killed a bartender in front of me and took off across a field. I didn't hit him, but he surrendered, and I knew I could shoot at another human being.

The next test came in Tennessee during jump training when my parachute did not open and my reserve chute tangled with another soldier's parachute. I grabbed the knife strapped to my right leg and cut myself free; my main chute partially opened and I landed safely. That test took 47 seconds from plane to field.

They were adventures until I smelled the soldiers burned to death in a tank, saw land mines and artillery shells and booby traps and machine gun fire and rifle fire and bombs and . . . We had become soldiers, able to kill, and those fortunate few like myself who survived the war that followed Pearl Harbor still live an unexpected life of pride and shame.