AP Over the years, I have walked many a Civil War battlefield, from Gettysburg to Shiloh to Antietam; and, as I walk, I always stop and ponder the "witness trees" – the massive old trees that were actually there in the 1860s and witnessed the battle. Joe Whitt. Credit Ohio Department of Veterans Services / Facebook I've always thought of my old friend Joe Whitt of Clermont County, who died April 14 at the age of 97, as a human witness tree . To Joe, whose long life ended as a resident of the Ohio Veterans Home in Georgetown, the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was not a distant event, or the subject of books and movies and academic discussion on how and why the Japanese attacked that Sunday morning.