MCPHERSON ? A Kansas man who almost didn’t make it into the military for World War II service ended up on a special mission taking a historic flag halfway around the world for the Japanese surrender 60 years ago Friday.

McPherson resident John Bremyer’s mission involved the hand-sewn flag that flew aboard Commodore Matthew Perry’s ship when it anchored in Tokyo Bay in 1853, a trip that led to establishment of trade with Japan.

Bremyer, then 25, was assigned to take that flag from Washington back to Tokyo for the surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945.

Today, the orders for that mission are in a frame on the wall of Bremyer’s McPherson law office.

“It was all so unbelievable to me,” he said, looking back on his experience.

Bremyer was in law school at Kansas University when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He applied for a military commission, but at each physical he took, he was turned down because of color blindness.

After his last physical for the Navy, he talked the doctor into sending in his papers anyway.

“He replied, ‘OK, but I will stamp them not recommended,”‘ Bremyer said. Still, Bremyer got a waiver for the color blindness in May 1942, and by mid-June he was on a destroyer in the Pacific.

As the war neared an end, Bremyer was back stateside, in a desk-bound job at Washington in charge of the Messenger Mail Center, which sent couriers around the world with top-secret documents.

The Japanese surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945, after the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A week later, Bremyer was “leapfrogging across the Pacific” to deliver the Perry Flag to the formal surrender site.

“It was a big secret where and when the ceremony would take place,” Bremyer said. He left Washington so quickly he didn’t even have time to call Jayne, the woman who was to become his wife, to cancel their date.

Leaving on the first plane he could, Bremyer started a 124-hour journey of more than 9,000 miles. Flying with a “One Priority,” he had to take the first plane available wherever he went – and the first one out was a cargo plane with bucket seats that made for an uncomfortable ride.

“It was like sitting on a pie pan,” Bremyer said.

About 30 hours later, a tired and hungry Bremyer arrived in San Francisco, where the Naval Air Priorities Board told him he could get the next plane in an hour and a half. But since he had left Washington in such a rush, he didn’t have his health records with him.

“So they ran me over next door to the dispensary and shot three times with cholera, smallpox and I don’t know what the other one was, black plague or something,” Bremyer said.

The next stops along the way included Honolulu, Guam, Iwo Jima and finally Tokyo.

By the time he got there, all Bremyer wanted to do was eat and sleep. After dinner, he met Adm. William Halsey, commander of the Pacific’s Third Fleet, then slept for two days.

On Sept. 2, the parties gathered on the deck of the Missouri for the ceremony formally ending the war, with the flag Bremyer brought framed above them.

“I was two decks above the ceremony, and we could see everything,” he said.

Later, Bremyer made the trip back to Washington with the Perry Flag.

Bremyer’s daughter, Jill Bremyer-Archer, recalls that as a school girl she used to be able to pick her father out in history book pictures of the surrender ceremony.

“I think there is a renewed interest in it,” she said of World War II veterans’ stories. “Not just nationally, but as I get older, I enjoy hearing the stories he shares. It is just a remarkable story, and he is a remarkable person.”