Wayne Morgan, top, and Jack Scruggs, bottom, as second-graders in Arroyo Grande, California. On the right: Electrician’s Mate 3c Charles Taylor, killed, missing in action, USS Arizona.

There was something terribly morbid and terribly wrong about FBI Director Kash Patel’s VIP snorkeling dive on USS Arizona. It’s yet one more example of this administration’s casual indecency.

I take it personally, and this is why.

Two sailors who died on Arizona were from my hometown, Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in the 1940 Census. Wayne Morgan and Jack Scruggs had been second-grade classmates in Arroyo Grande in 1932.

Arizona’s destruction had a tragic impact here: 25 of the 58 seniors in the high school’s Class of 1942 were Nisei, or second-generation Japanese. On April 30, 1942, they were taken away to be incarcerated in the Arizona desert. Many never came back.

More than eighty years later, Project 85 is devoted to using refined DNA science to identify the battleship’s casualties. Many of the unidentified sailors and Marines were buried, some in mass graves, in the Punchbowl Cemetery on Oahu.

In December, those remains will be disinterred for DNA testing.

I just sent Project 85 a sample of my DNA. An Arizona sailor, Electrician’s Mate 3c Charles B. Taylor, is my cousin—we share a common grandfather—and, God willing, they might find him so that my family can bring him home.

“Home” would be the Boone Creek Cemetery in Missouri. His mother, my Aunt Aggie, is buried there, along with Charles A. Taylor, the sailor’s father. Despondent over his lost son, in July 1942, Charles A. Taylor walked out to the middle of one of his farm fields, put a .22 rifle to his heart, and pulled the trigger. Aggie Gregory Taylor carried the burden of those losses for the rest of her life, for thirty-eight years.

We got Christmas cards from her, and my dad a birthday card, every one of those years.


So, yes, Kash Patel, in my mind, you had no right to your little “joy dive.”