As eyewitnesses and people who remember or were directly affected by the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor continue to die, keynote speaker Max Cleland hopes to remind attendees gathered for today’s Pearl Harbor remembrance event what it was like to be a member of America’s "greatest generation."

"Tomorrow it’s about him, him and my mother," Cleland said Friday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl as he proudly showed off a photo taken of him and his parents shortly before his dad shipped off to serve in the Navy at Pearl Harbor.

"It’s about their personal story that’s representative of the ‘greatest generation,’" he continued, "(NBC reporter) Tom Brokaw was right: They survived the Great Depression, and they fought and won World War II, and then they came back quietly, picked up their lives and enabled their sons and daughters like me to move on to a better life. And you can’t get any better than that."

For a man who lost both legs and part of his right arm in the Vietnam War, became administrator of the Veterans Administration at age 34, was elected to the Georgia state Senate and U.S. Senate and now serves as secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission, today’s 72nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is about the man who made his nearly 50 years of public service possible: his father.

"This is personal to me," he said. "It’s not just professional; this is personal. … My father was one of 16 million men and women who were mobilized to fight World War II after the attack here at Pearl Harbor. This is what Pearl Harbor did to my mother and daddy, and (their story) was replicated by the millions."

Cleland remembers being a 31/2-year-old boy when his father, who was in his 30s, returned home on the night of Dec. 8, 1945, after serving as a shore patrolman at Pearl Harbor for more than two years. He thought the service ribbons that hung neatly on his father’s Navy blues were pieces of Dentyne gum.

"I will never forget that because that’s all I’d ever seen that was little and like that," he said, pinching his fingers close together.

Hugh Cleland grew up on a Georgia farm and only had about a fifth-grade education, his son said. Cleland smiled wide when he recalled the story of his father visiting Hollywood before he traveled by ship to Pearl Harbor. He mailed home photos and postcards from the trip, but nobody ever received them.

"He never put a stamp on them!" Cleland said with a laugh. "He had no idea, you know."

Cleland’s dad was almost a driver for famed Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, but that fell through, he said. He was eventually tapped to be a shore patrolman because he had experience guarding mock-ups of the B-29 bomber while working at the Marietta Bell Bomber plant before he enlisted in the Navy.

"The irony too is that … he had seen the first flight of the B-29 there over Atlanta, and then he gets shipped to Pearl Harbor, and it’s from Pearl Harbor that he hears about the B-29 dropping the bomb that ended the war in the Pacific," Cleland said.

Cleland himself went on to join Army ROTC at Stetson University, a small private school in central Florida, and serve in Vietnam. But even after being discharged due to his injury, his service was far from over.

"(My father) would have never guessed, never in a million years, that he would raise a son that would ever be head of the Veterans Administration (and) run the Punchbowl Cemetery where a lot of those Navy veterans that were killed at Pearl Harbor are buried," he said.

Shortly after President Jimmy Carter, a fellow Georgia resident, appointed Cleland to lead the VA in 1977, he made sure to bring his father back to where the war began.

"He got off the airplane, and he looked up in the hills here and he said, ‘It’s like waking up from a dream,’" Cleland said. "It’s the first and only time he had ever come back."

Hugh Cleland died at age 95 a few years ago, so he was able to see his son blossom into the public servant he is today.

"Those guys, they came back and most of them had nothing," Cleland said. "They started with nothing, and yet they built the country and raised people like me.

"And for that I’ll forever be grateful."