Sixty-seven years ago to the day last Sunday, Don Mattinger was hand washing his clothes aboard a U.S. Navy battleship stationed in Hawaii when alarms blared, jarring him to attention.

The voice on the loud speaker was concise, clear and ominous: The Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor.

People scampered, but Mattinger, then 18, thought it was a joke.

Don Mattinger

“I was surprised,” he said in his Covington home Monday. “I thought I heard them wrong. I didn’t think anybody would attack us with as many battleships as we had there.”

The infamous surprise attack killed about 2,400 Navy men.

Mattinger is one of what are likely only a few hundred seamen or less alive after the infamous attack on Dec. 7, 1941 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “a date that will live in infamy.”

With a U.S. oil trade embargo threatening the Japanese welfare, its leaders secretly sent an aircraft carrier across the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii with what one online account calls the greatest “aerial striking power that had ever been seen on the World’s Oceans.”

Japanese planes struck just before 8 a.m. and sank five of the eight battleships at Pearl Harbor. Several other ships and most Hawaii-based combat plans were also destroyed. In the subsequent six decades, its atrocities were, as Roosevelt, called a thing of infamy.

“That history of that generation, of Pearl Harbor, is important to us and it’s dying quick,” Mike Peats, Commander of Robert H. Burns American Legion Post 16, which held a breakfast to honor veterans of all wars on Sunday’s Pearl Harbor Day, a national holiday. “They’re the last of a dying breed.”

Many veterans of the attack that thrust America into World War II trenches are now in there 80s at least.

And those alive, like Mattinger, now 88, are losing their memory, frail and dying. Their oral histories are being lost forever, Peats said.

“It’s important to us as veteran to know what they went through,” said Lawrence Fitzmorris, a veteran of the Korean War as a radio operator and repairman. “They’re part of our family and we want to keep their stories alive.”

For the past few years, Peats has made it his mission to bring together as many veterans as possible with events like Sunday’s breakfast hosted near Covington High School.

About 8 a.m. the same time Pearl Harbor was pummeled, about 35 veterans, down from attendance in years past of about 50, drank coffee and orange juice, slurped down eggs, toast and sausages and reminisced of their war days.

“They get together and talk about things they never would on a regular basis,” Peats said. “Sometimes it’s just too painful, but around these guys it’s like a brotherhood.”

But none, except from Mattinger, served at Pearl Harbor.

Now frail and skinny, Mattinger, who shuffles his feet slowly and still carries a laminated card issued by the Armed Services in his wallet, recalled how he scampered to find weapons when the bombs reigned down.

Surprising, he said, he and his seamen found only “three little old rifles” nearby and shot into the sky. It wasn’t enough, he said. Meanwhile his other Navy brethren sent a curtain of bullets to the heavens, allowing he and others to jump in a boat to safety.

At first, they tried to steer down a nearby canal. Again it didn’t work. It was filled with stored torpedo shells.

Then he pauses and tears up. The story, as he tells it, has come to end.

“I’m so far away from there and I can still see those ships in the harbor,” he said.

“So many, tore up, sunk. It was pitiful, but I guess that’s war. I don’t know.”