It's happening again.
John Coyne is covered in oil. He is watching the burning bodies of his comrades float around him. He is watching their corpses as they bob in sync with the ocean waves.
He is wondering why he survived when so many didn't.
Coyne awakes from his nightmare - his 62-year-old recurring nightmare - and asks himself the question he asks every time this decades-ago war disrupts his sleep:
Why did I survive?
Just 18 when he entered the Navy during World War II, Coyne was aboard the USS Twiggs off the coast of Okinawa when a kamikaze pilot hit the destroyer. The ship sank, and nearly half of the crew was declared dead or missing.
At 82, it's an amalgamation of gruesome images that Coyne still can't process. He talks about the tragedy in pieces and tries his best not to fall to pieces when he does.
"It's the loss. It's still pretty tough," he said.
Coyne, of Eddystone, Delaware County, admits he hasn't shared all his war stories and probably never will. Although he realizes the importance of doing so, some stories are too hard to tell, even more than 60 years later.

Every day, more than 1,000 World War II veterans die, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Right now, there are 2.8 million people alive who served in the armed forces during the worldwide conflict between the Allied and Axis powers that erupted from 1939 to 1945. In just five years, there will be half that.
These children of the Great Depression who became the soldiers of World War II are quickly passing on. Their histories are not always in textbooks; in many cases, the burdens they carry have remained their own.
That's why the Daily News, WHYY, The Philadelphia Tribune, Al Dia and other newspapers have teamed up to preserve their stories, to humanize what was an epic moment in history and to honor those ordinary people who survived extraordinary circumstances.
Flossie Raybold, of New Jersey, whose father, Robert Howard, fought in World War II, said her dad's waning Christmas card list is proof enough for her that World War II veterans are dying at an alarming rate.
"Dad sent as many as 80 Christmas cards to his comrades and now sends just one," she said.
"They have to tell their stories because they are the people who will give us our history," Raybold said. "When they're gone there's not going to be anybody to tell the stories. When they're gone, who is going to realize the details?"
Like many World War II veterans, Raybold's father didn't share his experiences about the war until many years later - until this year, to be exact.
William Hitchcock, professor of history at Temple University, said he's always admired the restraint World War II veterans have exhibited, noting that many declined to describe the gory details of the horrors they'd witnessed overseas.
"They carried much of the trauma they received in battle with them<EN>...<EN>They kept it close to the vest, which I believe was a good, noble thing," he said. "But, it also means Americans haven't grappled with the awfulness and horrors of the war.
"We have to interrogate veterans more, we have to draw out from them the things they know about war or else we open ourselves up to a romantic vision of war these men really don't share."

Members of a Delaware County veterans support group that includes World War II veterans Coyne, Donald Tapper, 82, and Bill Grant, 83, said "romantic" is the last word they'd use to describe their experiences during World War II.
"The only romantic part about it was when you got to leave and meet a girl," Tapper said. "When you saw one of your friend's heads get blown off, there was nothing romantic about that."
Tapper, who volunteered for the Army at 18, spent six months as a prisoner of war in a German POW camp. Only now is he able to speak of his experiences.
Being drafted to the Army at 18, was a "jolt" of reality to a parochial Irish-Catholic boy, Grant said.
"It was a small, comfortable world when the war split it, exploded it and broke it up," he said. "The exuberance of youth made the transition easy - until we wised up.
"We found out war is not fun. War is evil. It's a lot of mud, dirt, injuries and death."
Coyne remembers scores of Japanese civilians jumping off the cliffs on the island of Saipan, committing suicide before his eyes. Grant remembers watching civilians carry corpses from a concentration camp to a mass grave, draping their hands in newspapers so they didn't have to touch the dead. Tapper remembers eating mostly rutabagas for six months in a POW camp in Northeast Germany.
These human stories are as integral to our understanding of World War II and humanity as any textbook account, according to Charles Hardy, first vice president of the Oral History Association and a history professor at West Chester University.
"Too often, history is these grand, sweeping narratives; it's just overwhelming," he said. "Oral history gives voice and agency to the people at all levels that participated and lived through these events. It humanizes it and makes it personal."
Often, Hardy said, when someone interviews a World War II veteran, whether formally or informally, the exchange can have as great an impact on the interviewer as it does the interviewee.
"We're hard-wired as humans, we tend to defer history to leaders or respected authorities," he said. "But there are those epiphanal, life-altering moments when you're conducting an interview and you recognize the heroism and greatness of ordinary people."

At the same time, a sense of nostalgia - for a time when right and wrong and hero and villain were more clear - has led many in today's fractured society back to World War II.
Nobody doubted the threat posed to the country during World War II, something that hasn't been the case with subsequent wars, Hitchcock said.
"America's role in the world has changed a lot. It's become more complicated," he said. "It's comforting to go back, and understand who the bad guys were and to know we were on the side of right, unequivocally."
"It was the last just war this country was involved with," Grant said.
While nobody, at home or abroad, was "particularly happy" to be in the middle of a world war, there was an "enormous satisfaction" that came from the solidarity the war provided, according to Hitchcock.
"An overwhelming feeling of ‘I'm not alone' was happening on a national level," he said.
The splintering of American society is one of many concerns World War II veterans express to Dr. William Kavesh, director of the geriatric clinic at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.
"They worry. They'll complain to me about where the country is going. They recall a cohesive society back then and they have a certain nostalgia," he said. "Despite all the difficulties and the lack of what we consider technology, the sense of a cohesive society really meant something to them in a special way they don't always see in our lives today."
Not only are World War II veterans troubled by the divisions war causes in society today, they're troubled, more importantly, that war still exists at all.
"Was World War II really worth what we did?" Tapper asked. "What will really be the war to end all wars?"
Above and beyond his frustration with mankind's tendency toward warfare, Tapper believes America has not lived up to the position it created for itself as a world leader after World War II.
"We developed into a great nation and we've blown it," Tapper said.
"Other countries have no respect for us anymore."
Hitchcock said many World War II vets share a sensitivity to the role America plays on the world stage.
"They were enormously proud of the U.S. and the global role its achievements had at home and overseas," he said.
"Most vets believed the U.S. should live up to the victory and sacrifices that were made in the war to make sure this kind of threat did not happen again."
But despite all his frustrations, Tapper said he still feels an overwhelming sense of duty and love for his country.
"When 9/11 happened I wanted to sign up but my body told me ‘No,'" he said.

Many concerns face World War II veterans, not the least of which is their generation's legacy, Kavesh said.
"They have the same concerns of anybody in their age range - physical ailments, losing their compatriots, memory, and the loss of it," he said.
Loneliness, idle time and companionship are among the concerns shared by the Delaware County veterans.
But the most overwhelming remnant of war left on the men's psyches is guilt.
"When you see a lot of losses of your companions, your buddies you have a lot of guilt complexes," Tapper said.
"Why was I spared? You have to learn to live with."
And live with it they have.
For six decades, World War II veterans have carried with them the memories of their fallen comrades, the memories of battle and the memories of a moment in history that will never happen again.
The time has come for us to share their load.