A Russian Navy Ship Visited Pearl Harbor and Taught Me Why They Hate Us
Picture this: you’re a American sailor in uniform on duty at Naval Base Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and over the loudspeakers come the haunting strains of Kimi Ga Yo, the Japanese national anthem. You’re required to salute, and you do so because you really don’t want to get into the kind of trouble that can screw up your entire career.
Does anyone else see the irony here?
Of course you do. I mean, it’s Pearl Harbor, right?
Sailors on shore duty really, truly hate it when foreign navy ships pull in for a visit. Fortunately, the hatred only lasts for about ten, maybe twenty minutes, beginning at 0800 as one stands at attention, saluting in the direction of the nearest American flag while they consecutively play the national anthems of all the nations of the visiting ships. At Pearl Harbor, that’s what happens when our allies’ ships participating in the biannual RIMPAC naval exercise pull in for a port visit.
But 1994 was a little different — this time, it included the State Anthem of the Russian Federation, which, by the way, is the same as the anthem for the Soviet Union.
In 1994, the world seemed relatively peaceful; the USSR had imploded, the Cold War was over, and there was no longer an immediate threat of a global…
