There was something terribly morbid and terribly wrong about the report of FBI Director Kash Patel’s VIP snorkeling dive on USS Arizona. It’s yet one more example of this administration’s casual indecency.
I take it personally, and this is why.
Two sailors who died on the Arizona were from my hometown, Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in the 1940 census. Wayne Morgan and Jack Scruggs were grammar school classmates here, long before they became shipmates.
Morgan, as an 18-year-old, had visited Japan as a crewman on an oil tanker sailing out of Port San Luis. Scruggs, a trombonist in Arizona’sband, once played “Happy Birthday” on the accordion for the wife of Adm. Isaac Kidd—Arizona was his flagship.
Scruggs’s body was recovered from Pearl Harbor. All that remained of Kidd was his Naval Academy class ring, fused to a bulkhead.
Arizona’s destruction had a tragic impact here: 25 of the 58 seniors in the high school’s class of 1942 were Nisei, or second-generation Japanese. On April 30, 1942, they were taken away to be incarcerated in the Arizona desert. Many never came back to Arroyo Grande.
More than 80 years later, Project 85 is devoted to using refined DNA science to identify the battleship’s casualties. Many of the unidentified sailors and Marines were buried, some in mass graves, in the Punchbowl Cemetery on Oahu.
In December, those remains will be disinterred for DNA testing.
I just sent Project 85 a sample of my DNA. Another unidentified Arizona sailor, Electrician’s Mate 3c Charles B. Taylor, is my cousin—we share a common grandfather—and, God willing, they might find him so that my family can bring him home.
“Home” would be the Boone Creek Cemetery in Missouri. His mother, my Aunt Aggie, is buried there, along with Charles A. Taylor, the sailor’s father.
Despondent over his lost son, in July 1942, Charles A. Taylor walked out to the middle of one of his farm fields, put a .22 rifle to his heart, and pulled the trigger.
Aunt Aggie Gregory Taylor lived for 38 years with this double loss. She moved to Minnesota. We never met, but every year, without fail, she sent birthday and Christmas cards to us in Arroyo Grande.
So, yes, Kash Patel, in my mind, you had no right to your little “joy dive.”
Jim Gregory
Arroyo Grande
This article appears in Pride 2026.
Since Mr. Gregory chooses to politicize an inspection of the Arizona, and to somehow try and turn the shameful treatment of the Nisei into a smear of someone who was not only not alive at that time, but who is also Asian himself, perhaps we should recall that the internment of innocent Japanese American citizens was the work of liberal icons FDR and Earl Warren.
Jim – Thanks for posting an Op-Ed about your family connection to the USS Arizona, and your displeasure regarding Patel’s snorkeling in sacred waters that few, if any, have done. My Dad was 22 years old on December 7, 1941, and stationed on the USS Honolulu in Pearl Harbor. He was one of the fortunate sailors who lived to tell about it, but he made it a point to never do so for obvious reasons. To me, what Patel did is akin to walking over a native American grave site that’s been closed by the US Park Service because it’s considered sacred ground. Nothing in your article “politicizes an inspection” of the USS Arizona. As you mentioned, it was a joy dive for fun, nothing else, and he did it because he could, similar to other insensitive actions by our current administration. It was disrespectful. Mr. Donegan’s knows that, but his comments are classic and predictable.