During their nearly 50 years together, Alice Darrow was fond of saying the bullet left a hole in his heart that she filled with love.
She cherished the bullet as an emblem of their love, but after years of soul-searching following his death in 1991, she decided earlier this fall to donate it to the National Park Service’s Pearl Harbor National Memorial museum.
“That bullet and Alice’s story really humanizes the history of Pearl Harbor,” museum technician Mikael Fox said by phone Wednesday.
Darrow, now 106, was in Honolulu this week for the 84th commemoration of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, and during an interview Monday she recalled the bullet’s literal and romantic trajectories.
Dean Darrow, then 24, was a fire controlman aboard the USS West Virginia, one of the ships docked on Battleship Row on the morning of the attack.
A torpedo blast on the ship hurled Darrow into the oily, fiery harbor waters.
As he strained to pull his shrapnel-pocked body onto a small rescue boat, a Japanese plane strafed them.
After weeks of recovery, Darrow was assigned to the destroyer USS Porter. While aboard, he had an attack of appendicitis and was transferred to a hospital ship.
There he told doctors that he had been experiencing growing fatigue, a pounding heart and fainting spells.
X-rays revealed an intact bullet lodged in his heart, and he was transferred to Mare Island Naval Hospital just north of San Francisco.
Alice Darrow recalled the hubbub over news that a patient with an unusual condition was arriving for care and “so we were all kind of looking to see the guy that has a bullet in his heart.”
She became one of the primary nurses caring for him in the days before the surgery to remove the bullet, which was performed by a doctor from Stanford University.
“In those days, they weren’t doing things with the heart,” she said. “It was unusual.”
Despite the risks of surgery, the wounded sailor apparently dwelled on thoughts of a happy future.
Before going under anesthesia, he asked Alice if she would go out with him on liberty if he survived.
“Well, when he was just opening his eyes coming out of the anesthesia, he looked up and saw me, and he said, ‘Oh, we’re going on liberty, aren’t we?’” she said.
Darrow said she felt it was “my duty” to accompany him on liberty.
They were married four months later.
His surgeon and the medical staff wanted to keep the .303-caliber bullet, which was made of armor-piercing steel rather than lead. It was mostly intact because it was believed to have ricocheted into his body and thus had lost lethal velocity.
“They wanted it, but Dean said, ‘No, this is my bullet,’” Darrow recalled.
After her husband’s passing, she declined an entreaty by a Pearl Harbor survivor to donate the bullet to the Pearl Harbor museum. For her, it was still more a symbol of love than a marker of history.
But earlier this year, Darrow and her daughter Becky Mitchell planned a cruise to Honolulu for an overnight stay.
Would you be interested in donating the bullet then? Mitchell asked.
“Yes, that’s where it belongs,” Darrow recalled saying. She delivered the bullet to the museum on Sept. 18.
Fox said the bullet may eventually be on permanent display. “This is a story that very much should be shared,” he said.
Darrow feels the same, saying that her husband was just one of thousands who were wounded and treated during the war.
“I felt like people should know what the war has done to these boys,” she said.
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