On Dec. 7, 1941, minutes before 8 a.m., Ivan Booke was washing his dungarees at the receiving station in Pearl Harbor when he heard two big explosions.

Booke, then a 16-year-old underage seaman from Billings, Mont., rushed to the roof of the receiving station, where he had arrived a few days earlier.

That’s where he saw the first waves of Japanese planes fly over as they headed toward Battleship Row and other military facilities in Pearl Harbor in the surprise attack that violently ushered the United States into World War II.

“It’s something you never forget,” he said of the ensuing chaos during the attack on this date 67 years ago.

U.S. sailors were getting killed as gunners from nearby ships fired at the planes, Booke said. Ordered off the roof, the men were sent to the USS Pennsylvania, a ship in drydock three blocks away from the receiving station, to help.

The sailors were ordered below deck. Within minutes, a bomb hit the ship, Booke said. The blast knocked him out temporarily before he and other sailors headed out to fight fires.

Booke, now 84, is one of eight Pearl Harbor survivors who live at the Veterans Home of California at Yountville, where a Pearl Harbor Commemoration is planned at 12:30 p.m. today.

Another Pearl Harbor survivor, David Miller, was sipping coffee that Sunday morning at Wheeler Army Air Field when he saw the waves of Japanese planes arrive, destroying the planes parked nose-to-nose and tail-to-tail outside. The ammunition was locked up.

The next 2 and a half hours, during which 2,400 Americans were killed, were the worst of his life, said Miller, now 93.

“You can’t forget,” he said.

James Dvorak, who like Miller and Booke lives at the Veterans Home of California at Yountville, was a 23-year-old 1st Class petty officer on Ford Island’s airfield at the time of the attack. Had he been at Pearl Harbor, he said, he would have been dead.

The hours after the attack were hectic, Dvorak and the other veterans said. Rumors flew.

Booke remembers he and his fellow sailors fully expected the Japanese to invade the following night. Dvorak, now 90, said he and the other mechanics spent hours repairing planes.

Booke — who had persuaded his father to sign his enlistment papers and white-out his real age — and the other veterans went on to fight in the war.

Booke and the other veterans at the Vets Home this week said they plan to spend Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day quietly, though Miller said the chaplain has asked him to speak at Sunday services.

Booke enjoys meeting other survivors, including those who were on the roof of the receiving center at Pearl Harbor.

Napa resident J. Wayne McClure, a seaman on the destroyer USS Case at Pearl Harbor, remembers transporting wounded men to other ships for treatment after the sole hospital ship quickly filled with wounded soldiers.

“It’s been said that the attack created a condition in which we could enter the war and win,” McClure wrote. “It brought together the American people, as did the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001,” he said.

Until recently, McClure served as president of the local chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. McClure, a retired businessman, estimates about 30 Pearl Harbor survivors live in the county. But the chapter no longer meets, he said.

“We whittled down to so few people we haven’t met in more than a year,” McClure said.