After his father is killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adam, his mother, and sister are evacuated from Hawaii to California, where he must deal with his feelings about the war, Japanese internment camps, his father, and his own identity.
A fourteen-year-old boy who was raised by an abusive old woman and who has always had questions about his parents sees a picture of a missing child and sets out to discover if he is that child.
Wounded in Iraq while his Army unit is on convoy and treated for many months for traumatic brain injury, the first person Ben remembers from his earlier life is his brother who has autism.
To honor his father who died during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, seventeen-year-old Adam eagerly enlists in the Marines in 1944, survives boot camp, and faces combat on the tiny island of Okinawa.
While fishing with his friends off Honolulu on December 7, 1941, teenaged Adam is caught in the midst of the Japanese attack and through the chaos of the subsequent days tries to find his father, a naval officer who was serving on the U.S.S. Arizona when the bombs fell.
With their mother in the hospital and their father's whereabouts unknown, two boys take to the streets of New York to escape being sent to a children's shelter.
