The day of December 24, 1941, was recorded in Eila Juutilainen's memory only as a barely liminal smear of moments, distinct in themselves but blurred to complete indecipherability at their edges. Later in her life, she could not even be certain what order they happened in, or that all of the things she remembered really had happened at all.

I'm reading the late James D. Hornfischer's Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal at the moment, and in the part of the book about the first of the major fleet engagements during that campaign—a night battle that was bigger and even more confused than the earlier Battle of Cape Esperance in which Fubuki was sunk, which is discussed in Fleet Record—I ran across this passage describing the action, which gives me a very similar vibe to the above and other bits of the sequence it appears in.

This is apropos of nothing in particular; I just felt like pointing it out. It's nice to see how another writer has tackled conveying what I think must have been a very similar sort of experience.

What followed was a melee, Colosseum-style, with the lights out, and a heavy fog blown over the fighting arena. What can be settled and known is the time of first contact, and the time, ultimately, of disengagement. The terrible middle became a swirl of slash and thrust, ship against ship, captain against the enemy of the moment—which, battered then vanishing, was replaced by a new enemy who delivered or received the next blow unwitting. The records muddle the precise sequence of things. Individual memories are indelibly vivid but pointillistic. Dead certain to the beholder, but seldom tracking with anyone else's and unhelpful to the big picture. The events of November 13, 1942, in their chaotic simultaneity, defy the benign lie that is narrative.

James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2011), 282.

--G.
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