At Veteran Valor Coffee we talk a lot about service that continues after the uniform comes off. Some names in the Navy never really leave the watch either. One of them is Arizona.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Pennsylvania-class battleship USS Arizona (BB-39) was moored along Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor with the repair ship Vestal alongside. Shortly after the air-raid alarm sounded, a bomb penetrated her forward decks and detonated the magazines. The explosion tore the ship apart, killed 1,177 of the men aboard, and left her settling into the harbor bottom where she still rests. Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd and Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh went down with her; both received the Medal of Honor. So did Lieutenant Commander Samuel Fuqua for the damage-control work he directed while fires burned for two days. More than 900 of her crew remain entombed inside the hull. The white memorial that spans her midships section, dedicated in 1962, has become the place the country goes to remember not only those men but everyone lost that day. The flag still flies from a pole attached to her severed mainmast.
December 7, 1941. The Arizona burns after the magazine explosion.
The flag still flies from the mainmast of the ship that never left Pearl Harbor.
Eighty-one years later, on the exact anniversary, the Navy authenticated the keel of a new ship that carries the same name: the future USS Arizona (SSGN-803). She is a Block V Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine—the first of the class fitted with the Virginia Payload Module—and the first vessel named Arizona since the battleship was lost. Her sponsor is Nikki Stratton, granddaughter of Donald Stratton, a Seaman First Class who survived the explosion on the old Arizona with severe burns, was discharged, reenlisted in 1944, and returned to the Pacific aboard the destroyer Stack. At the 2022 ceremony she welded her own initials into the steel plate that will ride with the completed boat. That small act keeps a living line between the men who were there and the crew that will eventually take her to sea.
The new Arizona is not a battleship. She is something the surface fleet of 1941 could barely have imagined: a nuclear-powered, stealthy platform whose Virginia Payload Module adds roughly 84 feet of hull and four large vertical launch tubes. Combined with the two tubes already in the bow, she will be able to carry up to 40 Tomahawk-sized missiles or a mix that can include hypersonic weapons. She helps fill the gap left as the Ohio-class guided-missile submarines retire, and she gives the Navy a more flexible way to put precision strike, sensors, and unmanned systems where they are needed without being seen. Delivery is projected around 2029. She is still under construction at Electric Boat, but the name is already back in the fleet.
The new Arizona is a Virginia-class boat. The name is back on the active list.
There is no separate “Arizona class.” She is a Virginia-class boat whose configuration and namesake make her the bridge. The old Arizona represented the capital-ship age of big guns and fleet actions. The new one belongs to the nuclear, silent, precision era. Both carry the same name into the work of deterrence and, if necessary, into the fight.
For those of us who wore the uniform, that continuity is the point. The men lost on December 7 are not left behind by the change in platforms or the passage of time. Their ship’s name stays on the active list. The keel was laid on the anniversary. The sponsor’s family line runs straight back to a survivor who refused to stay on the beach. When the new crew eventually takes her out—perhaps even with a Pearl Harbor association—they will do so knowing the name they wear was paid for in full.
At Veteran Valor Coffee we exist because veterans keep showing up for one another long after the orders end. The Arizona story is the same idea written in steel: the cost is remembered, the capability is maintained, and the name is handed to the next watch.
The oil still seeps from the old hull. The new hull is still being built. The watch continues.
The oil still seeps from the old hull. The new hull is still being built. Between those two facts sits the ordinary, ongoing work of honoring service—whether that service was given in 1941 or is being given today.
If you get the chance to stand on the memorial and look down at the water, or if you later read about the submarine that carries the same name into the deep, remember the same thing: the watch continues.
Kevin Laughrin
Medically retired LSSN, VFA-103 “The Jolly Rogers”
Marketing and Communications Director at Veteran Valor Coffee
www.veteranvalorcoffee.com
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