When I walked into the office a little after two o’clock, it was the unexpected silence that puzzled me. Newsrooms by definition are loud, raucous, alive with energy and enthusiasm. People are always in motion; you can feel the determination. Not this time. Just about everybody in the office was standing, staring at the large monitors in front. A couple of people were shaking their heads. Someone was crying.

I caught Joanne Curtis’s attention. Auntie Jo was our high priestess of punctuation; she had never met a semicolon she didn’t like. “What’s going on?”

She took her headphones off and looked at me as if I had just arrived from another planet. “Mighty Chair didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head. I’d turned off Cher’s alert system for the interview and neglected to turn it back on.

She indicated all the screens with a wave of her hand. “Somebody attacked Pearl Harbor.”

Rod Serling was the first thought that popped into my mind. I was floating through time. But an instant later I snapped back to reality. Each of our twelve screens were showing essentially the same disjointed images: visual bits and pieces of whatever they could grab as local crews scrambled to get cameras to the site. Reporters stepped in front of the camera, several of them donning headphones as they got there, like soldiers gearing up for battle. Chyrons at the bottom of the screen summed up what was known: EXPLOSIONS ROCK ARIZONA MEMORIAL IN PEARL HARBOR. Some stations were already reporting mass casualties. The recently issued government seal appeared on each screen: a red, white, and blue badge mounted by a bald eagle, with a bold N in the middle confirming this was actual news, not opinion.

The professional images were mixed with pickup shots from people who had rushed there and uploaded video to YouBroadcast.

I slid in behind my desk. The attack was coming to life in disparate pieces. Cameras were sweeping the area, searching for that one symbolic image that would visually sum up the story. The Pacific Ocean was on fire; thick plumes of ugly dark smoke spiraled triumphantly into the air. On CNN a reporter in plaid Bermuda shorts was doing his stand-up in front of a large block of jagged concrete embedded in the white sand. Bits of unrecognizable debris were floating on the tide. Fox focused on a body floating facedown; it was up only a few seconds before the director cut to another image, perhaps deciding it was too gruesome even for their audience. There were several pans of spectators with the usual horrified expressions on their faces: an older woman covering her mouth with her palm; two teenagers crying and hugging each other; cops pushing people back, back. Swirling responder lights colored the scene. Suddenly, there it was, the shot of gold.

As soon as I saw it, I knew that this was the image that was going to be looped endlessly for the next few days. It was going to be splashed on the front page of newspapers and the opening image on news sites: a single tannish bone on the shoreline, shifting just slightly as it was nudged by each rippling wave. I knew what it was, the remains of one of the men of the Arizona. Free, finally free, coming home.