[wackychick]

Man or woman, young or old, you won't have a dry eye left after you read this... worth it - please read.

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii —
He was looking for a place of honor.

“My dad was really a very honorable man, and he was looking for a place of honor to be early in his life,” Lynn Cory Price said, speaking about her father, the first Marine to be buried aboard the USS Arizona since World War II. “I think he was looking for friends who held the same values, and he found that in the Marine Corps.”

James Evans Cory came to his final resting place during a Memorial Ceremony and Interment Monday at the USS Arizona Memorial.

In his youth, Cory loved the ocean. The Dallas native was infatuated with the stories of Horatio Hornblower. He read them all and longed for the romance of the sea. He attempted to join the Merchant Marines but was turned away because he wasn’t old enough. Cory suspected America’s involvement in World War II was imminent. With U.S. embargos in place against Japan, and little more than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Cory enlisted in the Marine Corps June 13, 1940.

“He could see the war was coming,” said Carol Cory Brown, Cory’s second youngest daughter. ”So he wanted to position himself in place for when it broke out.”

Cory was able to answer the call of the sea when he was ***igned to USS Arizona Marine Detachment, Combat Division 1 as a private first cl***. He found the camaraderie he was looking for in his brothers in arms. Finally finding the fraternal bond he had been missing in his life from the men stationed on the Arizona only made the Pearl Harbor attack all the more difficult for him.

“Losing the officers who were his mentors had a profound impact on him,” Boone said. “He had no male mentors in his life until he joined the Marine Corps, and he loved them dearly. Losing them really devastated him.”

On the day of the attack, Pfc. Cory was stationed in the secondary fire-control station located in the aft tripod mast of the Arizona. At 7:56 a.m., two explosions rocked the ship.

“The bridge shielded us from flames,” Cory said in an Oral History Report given before his death. “Around the edges in these open windows came the heat and the sensation of the blast. We cringed there … I think that at this moment I wanted to flee, but this was impossible. You’re on station; you’re in combat.”

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