On Monday, Dec. 7, 2009 it will have been 68 years since the Japanese Navy launched their attack on Pearl Harbor, a United States Naval Base in what was then the Territory of Hawaii. In a few minutes’ time that morning, the Japanese sunk four U.S. battleships and killed over two thousand servicemen. The United States declared war upon Japan, and Japan’s ally, Germany, declared war upon us. What followed is, of course, history.

As a child of the 1980s, I grew up thinking of the time before I was born as one in black and white: sepia-toned images of men in suits and uniforms, of women in blouses and skirts. I recognized them as people, like me, but as two-dimensional images, they lay passively on the page as I walked and breathed: for all intents and purposes, that history was dead for me. The people in those pages were just paper.

I came of age in a world in which history, I thought, had already happened. The glorious dead were dead and the people I observed around me didn’t seem like the heroes and princes my mother described to be at bedtime.

It was a while before I began to learn that heroism lies in the little things, in small acts of courage and bravery, and that not just presidents or generals had access to it. It wasn’t until Sept. 11, 2001 that I realized heroes live among us.

On Sept. 11, I was nineteen years old, beginning my sophomore year of college in Shreveport. It was a beautiful day—unseasonably cool for Louisiana—and the sky was a deep blue. It was my daily habit to turn on the Today show before going to class at 8 a.m. When I saw the World Trade Center on the screen, saw the smoke and eventual collapse, my first thought was, “Why are they demolishing the towers?” I didn’t know what was happening until my 11 a.m. voice lesson. I warmed up, sang some scales, and then my professor said, “Did you hear about the Pentagon?”

My fear was indescribable. But he told me to keep singing, that in moments like this, that’s all we could do. So I did.

That day was one of total panic in Shreveport. Air Force One landed at Barksdale Air Force Base; dozens of cars lined up at gas stations, in case of “evacuation.” Where would they attack next? When?

It’s through this experience, through this specific lens, that I imagine what the attack on Pearl Harbor might have felt like: the panic, the hypervigilance of having to make life-altering decisions in mere seconds; the destruction and fear. In this vision, there is no defined “enemy”. The enemy, then, is anywhere and everywhere. Intangibles, like grand ideals, mean nothing. Survival means everything—your own survival, and the survival of those you love.

You will do anything you must. I imagine that is what shaped the last moments of Todd Beamer, the man heard saying “Let’s roll” just before United Airlines Flight 93 took a nosedive into a field in Pennsylvania. When I heard the story of that flight, of how a group of passengers probably stormed the cockpit, forcing the terrorists to crash the plane, or lose control, I suddenly realized that heroes weren’t fictional characters. They live among us. They are us.

As actual memories of Pearl Harbor, or life in wartime America, begin to fade away, I think the only way to be certain those men and women in books can really live—can exist in minds as something other than images, or thoughts—is to look for the heroic not in some distant ideal, but in the things around us. To remember that heroism isn’t about fame or fortune; it’s in your grumpy neighbor who rakes his leaves onto your sidewalk; it‘s in the business man on his cell phone as you board a flight. It’s in anyone who, when moments of panic or fear strike, turns to survival, who turns to love.