Lou Conter, last survivor of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, dies at 102.

WVXU: Lou Conter, last survivor of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, dies at 102.

Lou Conter, the last known survivor of the attack on the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, has died at the age of 102.

Conter, who was a 20-year-old quartermaster at the time of the naval assault, was on the back decks of the battleship on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese forces decimated the U.S. Pacific fleet. The unprecedented attack killed 1,177 on the Arizona, with over 900 of those individuals never recovered.

As the bombs rained down on the naval base, one landed between two main guns at the front of the Arizona. The explosion ignited a huge store of TNT black powder that was used for the ship's battery guns.

"There went a million pounds of powder," Conter recalled in a 2018 interview with the American Veterans Center. "It blew up!"

The explosion was so intense that it split the ship in two, "and the bow came up about 30, 40 feet out of the water and fell straight back down," he remembered.

The strike was catastrophic and it only took about 10 minutes for the ship to sink, David Kilton, a spokesman for the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, told NPR.

Meanwhile, amid the chaos, Conter abandoned the ship and eventually made it to safety, only to be ordered onto a rescue boat to help pull bodies from the water. "Some of those were individuals in distress, trying to figure out how to swim around the huge quantities of oil that had leaked out and the flames that were on the water," Kilton said.

"Guys were coming out of the fire, and we were just grabbing them and laying them down," Conter later said. "They were real bad. You would pick them up by the bodies, and the skin would come off in your hands."
[.]
After WWII, Conter went on to serve in the Korean War. Later, he became the Navy's first SERE officer — an acronym for survival, evasion, resistance and escape. For years, he helped establish the program, training Navy pilots and crew how to survive if they were shot down in the jungle and captured as prisoners of war.

By the end of his 27-year career in the Navy, in 1967, he'd risen to the ranks of lieutenant commander. He then moved to California, became a real estate developer, and married his second wife, Valerie. They were together for 47 years.

Conter passed away on Monday at his home in Grass Valley, Calif., following congestive heart failure. 

Rest In Peace.