![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP18170768320707.jpg.jpg\")
Emory wanted to visit the pier before leaving his Hawaii home for Boise, Idaho. His wife died about a month ago and he plans to live with his son and go fishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the attack on Pearl Harbor, Emory managed to fire a few rounds at the airplanes that dropped the torpedoes. He still has an empty bullet casing that fell to his ship deck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2012, the Navy and National Park Service recognized Emory for his work with the military and Department of Veterans Affairs to honor and remember Pearl Harbor\u2019s dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bureaucrats didn\u2019t welcome his efforts, at least not initially. Emory says they politely told him to \u201d\u2018go you-know-where.\u2019\u201d It didn\u2019t deter him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First, thanks to legislation sponsored by the late U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii, he managed to get gravestones for unknowns from the USS Arizona marked with the name of their battleship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2003, the military agreed to dig up a casket that Emory was convinced, after meticulously studying records, included the remains of multiple USS Oklahoma servicemen. Emory was right, and five sailors were identified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It helped lay the foundation for the Pentagon\u2019s decision more than a decade later to exhume and attempt to identify all 388 sailors and Marines from the Oklahoma who had been buried as unknowns in a national cemetery in Honolulu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since those 2015 exhumations, 138 sailors from the Oklahoma have been identified. About 77 have been reburied, many in their hometowns, bringing closure to families across the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cRay, you\u2019re the man that did it. There\u2019s nobody else. If it wasn\u2019t for you, it would have never been done,\u201d Jim Taylor, the Navy\u2019s liaison to Pearl Harbor survivors, told Emory during the brief ceremony Tuesday at the USS Honolulu\u2019s old pier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taylor presented Emory with a black, folded POW\/MIA flag printed with the words: \u201cYou are not forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of the remains, especially those burned to ash, will never be identified. But the military aims to put names with 80 percent of the Oklahoma servicemen who were dug up in 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Altogether, the Pearl Harbor attack killed nearly 2,400 U.S. servicemen. The Oklahoma lost 429 men after being hit by at least nine torpedoes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was the second-largest number of dead from one vessel. The USS Arizona lost 1,177 sailors and Marines. Most of those killed on the Arizona remain entombed in the sunken hull of the battleship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pentagon has also exhumed the remains of 35 servicemen from the USS West Virginia from Honolulu\u2019s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. None have been identified so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nearly eight decades ago, Ray Emory, then a young sailor, watched in disbelief as Japanese torpedoes tore into American ships in Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":48442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":29,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[29,15,88],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2899],"class_list":["post-43031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","category-your-military"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"LCJLSYS2XRHL3DPJURCTMBZYWY","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-navy\/2018\/06\/20\/pearl-harbor-survivor-says-goodbye-before-leaving-hawaii\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP18170713045040.jpg.jpg\")