I was in the Navy for ten years and made many trips from Long Beach/San Diego, CA to Pearl Harbor. Most often we were tied up at the Naval Supply Center, across from the Arizona memorial, on-loading or off-loading, but sometimes we were tied up at the Naval Station. We also tied up at the (then) newly-built pier where the Missouri is today on Ford Island. As someone who studied the attack on Pearl Harbor for many years before entering the Navy in 1986, I gained a whole new perspective and appreciation for the scale of Pearl Harbor and how things looked--especially on Battleship Row--on the morning of December 7, 1941. I've been all around Pearl Harbor, Pearl City, and Honolulu during my time in the Navy and I would really like to go back as a civilian and spend some time really sightseeing and studying Pearl, since I was rather "preoccupied" with my naval duties while there. As a rather ironic side note, my second ship, the USS Mount Vernon (LSD 39) was where I was stationed for all of my trips to Pearl because we came over to help train the Marines at Kaneohe Bay by practicing amphibious landings at Barking Sands on Molokai. I left the Navy and my home-away-from-home Mount Vernon in 1996 and the ship was decommissioned in 2003. When I went online to find out where my ship ended up, I came across a page from a naval bomber squadron out of Washington State that just got back from training exercises in Oahu and they reported that they sank what used to be my ship as a training target off of Oahu in 2005. Here is the link to my ship's final webpage: http://www.navybuddies.com/ships/lsd39.htm