One of the last veteran survivors of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Ray Chavez, is getting a California post office named after him posthumously.
President Donald Trump signed the bill last week, authorizing the "Ray Chavez Post Office Building" in Poway, a San Diego suburb.
Chavez died in 2018 at the age of 106 after a battle with pneumonia. He was aboard a Navy minesweeper, the USS Condor, which reported sightings of a Japanese submarine before the Dec. 7, 1941, attack, NBC News reported.
"I still feel a loss,” Chavez said during a 2016 ceremony marking the attack's 75th anniversary. "We were all together. We were friends and brothers. I feel close to all of them."
Chavez died of pneumonia just two months after visiting the White House in May 2018.
"What a guy, and, Ray, you are truly an inspiration to all who are here today and all of our great country," Trump said then.
In Trump's 2018 Presidential Proclamation on National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, Trump hailed Chavez's "legacy" as "forever etched into our country's rich history, along with the legacies of all our brave veterans."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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