Pfc. Carroll Andrews had just finished another night shift guarding airplanes in paradise. Dawn had broken. Andrews walked into his barracks at Wheeler Field, an Army air field high above the pineapple fields, the sugar cane and the coastline of Oahu island. With his stomach grumbling for coffee and fried eggs, the 23-year-old private got ready to shower, breakfast and sleep.

That's when he heard an annoying metallic buzz.

"Damn Navy planes!" barked one of the other soldiers in the barracks, who knew Army and Navy pilots sometimes buzzed each other's quarters.

But then, a rapid-fire ping-ping-ping. Windows shattered. Bombs erupted. Andrews felt concussions in his gut and a sensation of "fright, fright. You're young, mind you, you're not an old man who has seen sorrow in life . . . it's strictly immediate fright."

A mysterious air force swooped low over American soldiers and sailors, who still had thoughts in their minds of attending church or lounging on the beach that Sunday morning. Many did not understand they had come under attack. "Boy," thought one soldier who assumed the airplanes were American, "is somebody going to catch it for putting live bombs on those planes."

In Andrews' barracks, someone recognized the red rising sun insignia on the attacking warplanes:

"They've got a red circle on them!"

"It's the Japs. It's got to be Japs!"

Andrews tore out of the barracks and suddenly saw that the attack stretched beyond Wheeler Field. Mountains of smoke erupted from some point below, down by the coast, "just like a volcano."

They're attacking Hickam Field, he thought.

Or maybe, Pearl Harbor.

* * *

Sixty years ago this morning, Japan bombed the United States into World War II with its attack on Pearl Harbor. The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt called Dec. 7, 1941 "a date which will live in infamy."

America finds itself in eerily similar territory now, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York City, Pennsylvania and near Washington, D.C. The surprise Sept. 11 attacks have left thousands of Americans dead and threatened our sense of safety, just as in 1941. America has again gone to war.

Groping for context, commentators immediately compared the recent attacks to Pearl Harbor. This newspaper's headline: "A New Day of Infamy."

Now, as America struggles with the threat of terrorism, Pearl Harbor survivors are thinking back to the devastating attack they lived through -- and the long war they fought afterward. Many of these survivors have retired to the Tampa Bay area, including Andrews, who lives in a South Pasadena condominium where he has an American flag on his balcony overlooking Boca Ciega Bay.

Mostly in their their late 70s and early 80s, the old soldiers and sailors have mixed opinions on how to compare the two attacks. Many point to a key difference: The Japanese attacked a military target, but terrorists who crashed into the World Trade Center deliberately chose to kill civilians.

For decades, the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association has used the motto: "Remember Pearl Harbor -- Keep America Alert."

The thought has never resonated in the way it does today.

* * *

On board the USS Vireo, a minesweeper docked in Pearl Harbor, a 23-year-old petty officer named Jerry Elliott had gotten halfway done shaving. He was wondering why he heard so much commotion outside the head.

"I felt the ship vibrating, rumbling, and then it came to me that there's something really going on out there," Elliott said.

He rushed out, shaving cream dripping from his face. "When I got outside, then the guns started going, and looking across and up you could see fire and smoke. Things were really happening then."

Elliott's crewmates already had taken their stations at both of the Viero's 3-inch guns. As an electrician's mate, Elliott scrambled to find large batteries, similar to car batteries, and connected them inside each gun.

Japanese bombers soared directly over them, as the harbor roared with the noise of their engines and filled with billowing smoke.

"They came in just like they were on a beam, heading for the battleships," Elliott said. The planes planned to pass over the Vireo and bomb the big battleships docked beyond them at Ford Island -- but no one on the Vireo knew that yet.

As a wave of bombers soared in at high altitude, Elliott glanced straight up and saw an unforgettable sight: bombs falling out of the planes, directly overhead.

"You could see the high-altitude bombs coming in and the sun reflecting off them and you weren't sure exactly where they were going to land," he said.

"I just looked up at them and thought, "Oh my God, they're coming down.' "

The bombs sailed past, toward battleships docked at Ford Island such as the USS Oklahoma and Arizona.

* * *

Gunner's mate Russel T. Winsett, 21, was getting dressed on board the USS Pennsylvania, a battleship in drydock for repairs. His liberty was set to begin at 8, and he was looking forward to visiting his cousin, assigned to another ship.

When Winsett heard booming noises outside, "I thought, "Man, that's a strange time to have battle practice on Sunday morning.' "

Then came a bugle call and "general quarters" -- the announcement for all sailors to take their battle stations. Winsett never dreamed that meant he was actually going into battle.

By the time he climbed 50 feet of ladder up the mainmast and took his post at one of two .50-caliber machine guns, "Japanese planes, they were all over. You could see the red ball on the wings and the fuselages."

Fighters streaked overhead, strafing the Pennsylvania as they passed. Winsett fired back.

"Those guys were coming in almost right over the bow of the ship. You could see the (pilot) . . . that's when you let go, when you really knew you were hitting something."

Acting automatically, he fed bullets into the guns on long belts, and corrected his aim with tracers -- every third bullet was colored red. It took 15 minutes of firing for the gravity of it all to sink in. "I realized at that point that we were in war."

Shooting from the port side of the mainmast was a weird mixture: One moment feverishly firing at airplanes, the next forced to sit and observe. His gun would not swing around 360 degrees, so at times he had to stop shooting. In those moments, he was free to look around and witness the battle.

The most awful moment came when he spotted a good friend from boot camp, a photographer. His friend was "climbing the aftermast to get some pictures. Next thing I knew he was on the way down. They shot him ... that hurt worse than anything else."

* * *

While Winsett fired at the invading Japanese fighters, Sgt. James Crocker, a 25-year-old from Kansas, huddled under a pool table at Schofield barracks, high on Oahu near Wheeler Field. That's where he had been told to stay after the attack began.

Later that morning, after the bombing stopped, Crocker and other soldiers loaded onto trucks and drove down past Pearl Harbor, so they could start manning pillboxes in case the Japanese landed on the island. The fear still had not set in for Crocker, and now the battle had stopped. But as the trucks trundled alongside the harbor, he saw the battle wasn't over for everyone.

"What I remember seeing everywhere was fire. The water -- what part of the water I saw -- was on fire. And you could see people on fire in that oil, and you would look further and see a ship on fire, and you could look further and see a ship slightly shifting to turn over."

The most devastating bombing sunk the USS Arizona, where more than 1,100 American sailors died. The bombing also capsized the USS Oklahoma nearby; workers cut through the hull and freed trapped sailors during the next 36 hours.

* * *

After the attack, 7-year-old Carol Hajek wore a gas mask to school and an ID tag showing her blood type.

Today she is 67 and a City Council member in Seminole, but as a girl she lived near Pearl Harbor because her father was a Navy captain stationed at the Hawaiian base. She vividly remembers her father teaching her mother how to shoot a gun in case the Japanese attacked their house. Little Carol resolved to whack any intruders with a baseball bat.

She also recalls practicing how to duck under her desk at school or to jump into a trench outside, in case of another Japanese attack. Rumors of a new attack abounded.

Her account is reminiscent of the first month after Sept. 11, as Americans nervously avoided airplane travel and even opening the mail.

For many survivors, the attacks brought back memories of what they lived through at Pearl Harbor.

"Immediately, Pearl Harbor flashed back to you with the ruination, the way things happened and the explosions and everything like that," said Stanley Azevedo, 79, who grew up in Hawaii, lived through the attack and spent 22 years in military service.

But Azevedo, who lives in Madeira Beach, also sees differences between the attacks of 1941 and 2001. "One was more military and the other was an atrocity. The Pearl Harbor one was, I'd say, on the military side of it and this was plain sabotage . . . planned destruction."

Andrews says the Sept. 11 attacks came from "personalities, not a nation," which is why he says, "There's no real comparison as far as I'm concerned."

He is amazed that American fighter airplanes can now consider shooting down civilian airplanes to prevent terrorist attacks. "It's a terrible prospect, isn't it? A hideous prospect. Yet what should we do?"

It's too early now to know if America will remember Sept. 11 as one single horrifying attack, or as the opening battle in a longer war, like Pearl Harbor.

But it's worth remembering that for men like Elliott, Crocker, Andrews and Winsett, Pearl Harbor is not a day to remember in isolation. For them, it was the beginning of a long, brutal war, which they all had their part in fighting.

Andrews, 83, fought in Normandy and is now retired as a church organist, choral director and composer. Elliott, also 83, saw the Battle of Midway and plenty of other action. He worked in electronics in New York, and is now retired to Spring Hill. Winsett, 81, a 20-year Navy man, lives in Largo.

Crocker, a career Army officer, lives in a Clearwater retirement home with a an enormous Christmas tree covered with pink grapefruit-sized ornaments, and a pool room. Any time he wants to, the man who once ducked under a pool table at Schofield barracks can knock a few balls across the felt.

"There was more to the war than just Pearl Harbor," says Elliott. "Pearl Harbor was like a warmup. It was very unexpected, and I don't think there was any fear there."

But that changed over time. After each battle, the men knew more about what to expect, and so they had more to fear.

"You saw people get killed, you saw ships blow up. That all became one terrible part of your life, the whole war," Elliott said.

"I saw a lot of war after Pearl Harbor."

-- This story includes information from the book Day of Infamy by Walter Lord.

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