'We don't ever forget': Antioch woman saw the Pearl Harbor attack as a child in Hawaii
Now 89 years old and living in Antioch, Jean Paulos Self remembers waking shortly before 8 a.m. to the rising sun on the "very, very, very noisy" morning of Dec. 7, 1941. She and her twin older sisters were asleep in a bedroom of their family's U.S. Army housing in Schofield Barracks in Oahu, Hawaii.
"The sun was quite bright that morning and we could see the shadow, just the shadow, of something sweeping by on the window shades," Self remembers. "It scared us. We jumped out of bed and went running to Mom and Dad."
Still in her pajamas, she went outside with her parents and siblings. The barracks were across the street from Wheeler Army Airfield, and sometimes those planes conducted aerial drills.
"Dad thought it was maneuvers at first, until he saw the Rising Sun on the planes," Self says of the iconic red sun painted on the wings of Japanese warplanes.
"This is not maneuvers," said her dad, Master Sgt. Robert Stanley. "By God, this is war."
Seconds later, the planes strafed the barracks on their way to attack Pearl Harbor.
"There were bullets flying and one of the bullets barely missed my father," says Self. "We could actually see the pilot in the plane. That's how low they were."
Eighty years haven't erased the fear she felt on that date, which still lives in infamy.
"It's hard to describe the feeling all of us had. Even though I was 9 years old, I saw it in my parents that there was something really bad wrong," Self says.
Her dad and the other soldiers reported to duty, and it would be three days before they got word he was OK. Her Uncle Joe, who had stopped by for a glass of Madeira wine after finishing his night shift at a nearby dairy farm, jumped in his car to drive home.
"When he got in his car, the plane was behind him," Self remembers. He wasn't one of the 49 civilians killed in Oahu that day, but a neighbor was. "She was hanging clothes outside and one of the bullets got her," Self says.
In minutes, the planes had moved on to Pearl Harbor.
"All the wives and children were left," Self says, recalling how the moms made everyone run back inside. "They had a fear of the Japanese coming back."
So did the leaders, who declared martial law, ordered a blackout and loaded all those women and children onto buses with armed guards. They drove along a winding road next to a steep gulch with their headlights off, so they couldn't be seen by any enemy forces.
"I'll never forget this. It started getting brighter. What it was, was the blaze of the ships on fire. The closer we got to Pearl Harbor the blaze was unreal," Self remembers. "All of the ships had sunk, but the fire was still there. It was all lit up."
Self, her mother, Isabel, sisters Geraldine and Evelyn, 10½, and brothers, Daniel, 7, and baby Robert spent the night huddled in an elementary school gymnasium.
"Everybody was scared. Even the soldiers were scared. Nobody knew what was going to happen next," Self says. "We were curled up together. We did more talking than sleeping. We stayed there for two weeks and we slept on the floor with a blanket."
She remembers meals of mush and cocoa, and dozens of families with "lots and lots of children." Her mom and the baby got sick and were taken to a hospital. "All of a sudden, we were just by ourselves," Self says, noting that Army officials did all they could to help. "We were being protected, and that was scary in itself."
Her family celebrated Christmas, "but I don't think we had a tree," she says. The families were moved into newly built nicer barracks outside the Army post in January. But life didn't return to normal.
"My mother didn't let us go back to school for a year," says Self, who completed third and fourth grade the following year.
"They painted the windows" so light couldn't be seen by any enemies, and blackout rules and martial law were strictly enforced. "The nighttime was the most spooky time, You weren't allowed outside and everything was dark," she says. Those rules were in effect until the end of the war.
"Slowly and surely, you just became a kid again," Self says.
Her future husband, Lawrence Self, enlisted in the Army at age 17 and moved from Alabama to Hawaii. They married in 1950 and traveled to Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas and Okinawa, and he also did a tour in Korea. Their daughter, Deborah Bingham, remembers attending 13 schools in 12 years.
After 21 years in the Army, Lawrence Self was recruited into the U.S. Secret Service, where he served President Johnson on his ranch in Stonewall, Texas, and at the Federal Building in Austin, before being promoted to head of security at the Western White House in San Clemente, California, for President Nixon. In later years, he taught criminal investigations and evidence collection at Fort McClellan in Alabama, and died at home in Dothan, Alabama, in 2011 at age 81.
His widow lives with their daughter and husband, Mark Bingham. Self's only living sibling, Daniel, joined the Army, served in Vietnam and eventually became sergeant major of the Schofield Barracks. Self has three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. She also has a story from her childhood that very few people have.
"These children were the first since the Civil War to be attacked on their own land," Deborah Bingham says of her mom.
"We know what it's like to be frightened of another country coming into your country," Self says. She says it took years before she came to realize that many Japanese children regarded U.S. warplanes with the same fear and hatred she directed at the Japanese fighters.
But she doesn't need to be prodded with "Remember Pearl Harbor," which became a popular slogan in the wake of that 1941 attack that sent the U.S. into World War II.
"You live it," Self says. "We don't ever forget."