Test test test. This is a captioning test. Test test test laird was kind of a stoic guy who wasnt big on emotions, not particularly eloquent he was sturdy and hard working and really saw right and wrong in things, but he wasnt a speech giver and so i think his family i think this was kind of lairds own healing. You know that only he can do it. They couldnt help him so much. You know, its a hard thing when you do i mean, hes a decorated hero. Hes a decorated hero. From one of the greatest things he did in his life. He had great regrets. How do you handle that . Would you want to talk to your kids about that . He talked with his wife about it. But, you are know, we talk about feelings probably more now than we did then. I was 9yearsold like many of you here when pearl harbor happened and i have a lot of memories of growing up in a small town in michigan during the war. But i have one memory that occurred during 1942 that is as clear in my mind today as i was back when it happened. I was in school when a worker brought a note in and handed it to the teacher. She walked back to my desk. I thought, my god, im in trouble. The note said go to the Principals Office right now. So i did. The principal was standing outside of his office, saying, joe, you got to go to the train station right now . I got on my bicycle and started riding towards the train station. I realized it was a long, usually long passenger train cutting off on the streets. So i had to go around the streets to get to the station. When i finally did, i saw my mother and my dand my sister and my uncle bob standing there on the train station and i came up, she said uncle bob is leaving to go to the army. Uncle bob was my fathers youngest brother and he graduated from high school, never been out of the town let alone the state. He was getting on the train. The strange thing about this train was back in those day, they didnt have airconditioning. All the windows were opened and out of every window is a young boy hanging out of the window and farmers life and people who were walking along the train handing him apples, fruit, pieces of pie and so forth so my uncle bob got on him with all of these young boys and went some place they didnt know where they were going. They didnt know when they would ever go back. Just out of high school and bob never did come back. He went to like all the other boys to the swamps of louisiana to train to go to war in the beginning in the pacific and he was uncle bob wrote me a letter, at one time, i still have it. He wrote it from australia. It was a census letter. He couldnt say where he was. He managed to say he was probably going to have to go back to the beginning of the war and he did and bob was killed oddly enough, he was talking about after he was killed on the landing in ottowa in the beginning. The eerie thing all of the young boy, the farm boy, they were straightening them up taking them. They didnt know where they were going or when they were coming back and it reminds us all and actually world war ii was fought by young boys. Every battle you think of, they were young boys. It strikes your memory. Thank you. Thank you. I have a question, you talked about the diary. You didnt talk about the entries into the diary, im curious, what one of the more interesting entrys into the diary was. Well, you can read the book. I think just in general, you know what, this is really the only surviving account of what it was like to be on the receiving end of the american milita military and what its like to be doomed, you know, if you got a commander saying that this is it, were going out in a few hours what are you going to do is this what are you going to write to your wife . What are you go only the write to the daughter you never met . And we ask a lot of these boys and they gave a lot. You talked about visiting at you and no one was living on the island. What happened to the native people who were there . Yeah. We didnt learn our lesson with natdive americans and reservation, but in general, after the invasion of the u. S. Evikd all natives from the islands and resettled them in places like anchorage, seattle, and in many cases they were never allowed to return to their home islands. And weve, the culture was destroyed. In some cases their values of trying to put together, reclaim the vestiges of what held them together but atu, for example, was elliots never lived on atu again on a number of islands. It is a spectacular place when the weather is okay r. Okay. I am grateful. Thanks so much. [ applause ] 150 years ago on march 30th, 1867, the United States purchased alaska from the russian empire for 7. 2 million. After the attack on pearl harbor in 1941, the territory became strategically vital for the american war effort because of its close proximity to japan. Up next on American History tvs reel america, report from the aleutians, a 45minute War Department film about the 1,200mile island chain running between the u. S. And