Difference Maker: Vina Mikkelsen keeps the memory of Pearl Harbor alive

As the U.S. careened into World War II, the battle cry to “Remember Pearl Harbor!” was plastered on recruitment posters, titling both a film and song produced in the immediate aftermath of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on a U.S. Navy base on Oahu that killed 2,403 Americans.

More than 80 years later, it remains the goal of Vina Mikkelsen, who for years has been the driving force to organize annual remembrances in Spokane in honor of both those who died that day and those who survived to carry it with them.

Her late husband, Denis, woke that morning to shouts and sirens aboard the USS West Virginia, which later sank from torpedo damage. A 19-year-old Navy radioman, Denis abandoned ship and swam to shore after trying to prevent the rushing water from sinking the battleship, but was later ordered to return to put out fires, he told The Spokesman-Review in 2007.

Vina was 10 when Japan attacked the Hawaiian naval base, living through a quieter, more personal tumult in Montana with her nine siblings as the nation went to war. Her mother was 16 when she married Vina’s 36-year-old father, who died when Vina was a child. Vina’s mother was unable or unwilling to care for her children, she said.

“I was 14 when welfare came and took us away,” Vina said.

Her siblings were sent to foster homes and an orphanage, and some were quickly adopted, but Vina was sent to live with the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Helena, Montana. It was a lonely, difficult place, she recalled, but she found comfort in a recurring dream: a tall man in uniform carrying a book, a man she believed she would one day marry.

She’d meet him just a few years later.

Vina moved to Billings, Montana, where an older brother worked, and leveraged her immaculate handwriting to get a job in a medical office. One day, as she returned to the boarding house where she lived, she saw a man in the shared living room. He was tall, wearing his naval uniform and carrying a book.

Denis survived the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war that followed, despite at least one other near-miss when a bomb broke through the decks of his cruiser but didn’t explode. In 1946, a year after the war ended, he watched the first U.S. nuclear bomb tests in Bikini Atoll. He was stationed in Billings, where one of his sisters lived, in 1950.

There he was, the man of Vina’s dreams. There was just one problem.

“He couldn’t dance!” Vina said. “I wanted a man who could dance.”

Vina was being courted by others at the time, and soon went out with a man who was an excellent dancer. Unfortunately, in the car ride toward their date, he also proved to have “10 hands,” Vina said wryly.

She declined to let her date take her back home from the restaurant. Vina spotted her landlady at another table with a date and asked for some cab money, but neither had cash or a car.

But the landlady had a thought, leading Vina over to another table where a young man with a car was sitting. It was Denis.

They were together into the next morning, when Denis took Vina to 5 a.m. Mass, despite not being Catholic at the time. Ten days later, they were married.

Life as a military wife could be difficult. The couple lived in Hawaii and Japan, the latter of which in particular Vina did not recall with fondness, remembering public drunkenness and disorderly conduct vnear the base. They had two children, tough births that caused a doctor to remark that Vina could die if she became pregnant again. Still wanting a larger family, the couple adopted two more children.

In 1964, Denis retired from the Navy and moved the family to the Spokane area in what would later be incorporated as Spokane Valley. He took a job with the Becherini Scale Center, which sells scales and balances, that turned into a 23-year career. They bought 20 acres in Medical Lake, where they raised cattle, specifically buffalo-cattle hybrids called Beefalo, and Vina took a job running the Catholic religious school program for the Fairchild Air Force Base’s chapel.

Vina was eventually able to get Denis to take up square dancing, which the two did together for decades to come.

All the while, Denis carried the war with him. He mostly didn’t talk about it with Vina, but she knew the battles he fought at night.

“He fought that war until the day he died,” Vina said quietly outside of an event she organized Dec. 7 in commemoration of Pearl Harbor. “At nighttime, always fighting.”

In the early ’90s, Denis became an active member of the local chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. Today, all of that chapter’s members have died, most recently Ray Garland, a Marine who died at 96 in 2019.

Vina, now living in a senior facility on the South Hill, hasn’t let their memory die with them. For years, she has been organizing Pearl Harbor Remembrance days, where an honor guard and bugler oversee the laying of leis on a plaque commemorating the tragedy that changed the trajectory of the nation and the young men who fought for it.

Vina has been carrying the mantel of remembering Pearl Harbor and sharing that memory with the generations that have come after her. But at 92, her eyes and health failing, she will not be able to carry that torch forever. Will there be anyone to take it up after she’s gone?

Vina paused at that question.

“I don’t think so,” Vina said after a moment. “So I have to live for a long time.”