The monument: The remains of the U.S.S. Arizona, a World War I-era battleship that was destroyed in a spectacular explosion during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, in 1941. To this day droplets of oil from the ship’s fuel bunkers continue to bubble up to the surface of Pearl Harbor’s placid waters.

Why to go: Before Sept. 11, 2001, the date that most lived “in infamy” in older Americans’ minds was December 7, 1941, the Sunday Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and brought the U.S. into WWII.

Oddly enough, American naval strategists had theorized since the late 1890s that a war with Japan would start with a Japanese attempt to destroy the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. By doing so, the Japanese would have a free hand in the western Pacific for several months, even years, before having to deal with a U.S. counterstrike.

When theory turned into reality, the U.S. found all of its Pacific battleships either sunk or badly damaged. The heart of any armada that the Americans could have dispatched to come to the aid of the beleaguered Philippines was listing in or resting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

The Americans, working feverishly, raised and restored six of the eight capital ships that the Japanese attack had so badly damaged. One of them, though, the U.S.S. Arizona, had been broken beyond repair by one of the best-aimed bombs of WWII: a Japanese plane managed to drop a large armor-piercing bomb straight down through the forward deck, penetrating to the ship’s ammunition magazines, where it went off. A film shot that day by a Navy doctor on a nearby ship shows a sudden spume of black smoke belching skyward from the center of the ship, flanked by a stupendous explosion that quickly turns into a 100-foot-high wall of white-hot fire running along the ship’s middle. The explosion was so quick and catastrophic that the ship could never have survived the blast. The Arizona listed and burned, then sank to the bottom of the shallow harbor, taking 1,102 doomed sailors with her. Her great guns and superstructure remained above the waterline.

(A legend has it that the Arizona was sunk by a Japanese bomb that dropped straight down its smokestack into the guts of the ship. But subsequent film analysis and underwater studies of the wreckage show that this never happened.)

At first, Arizona was simply an obstacle to work around. She was so thoroughly wrecked that lifting her would have taken prodigious effort. Her above-the-water remains were cut off and either recycled or scrapped.

The search for her sailors’ remains yielded several score bodies, but in the end 900 sailors remained locked up in her as their final resting place. There simply wasn’t enough time or resources in those grim days after the attack to find and remove them all. The war against Japan consumed all of the Navy’s energy and attention, and the Arizona’s final disposition had to wait.

Her name was struck from the Navy registry of ships on Dec. 1, 1942. Eventually the ghostly lines of her hull, easily visible through Pearl Harbor’s waters, became a de facto monument as the custom of raising and lowering the colors over her hulk began in 1950. Finally, in 1962, the U.S. built a permanent structure over the ship. Like the Vietnam Memorial, this is the simplest of monuments. A bridge-like span straddles the Arizona, letting visitors see straight down to her outline. On the walls of the memorial, the names of her dead are chiseled in alphabetical order.

What to add to the journey: Pearl Harbor is a quick drive northwest from Honolulu. Oahu is the transportation hub of the Hawaiian Islands.