Eleven. Out of eighty-seven thousand. Freeman Johnson is one of them. On December 7, 1941, he was inside a steam drum on the USS St. Louis, while the Japanese planes came. He did not see them. He did not know they were coming. They told him nothing. You do not need to know, they said. You need to keep the steam up. He kept the steam up.
He is 106 now, in a Centerville living room with Navy coins and a photograph of the USS Iowa. He was too busy to be scared. That is what the machine required: a boy from Waltham who would not ask questions, who would turn a valve when he was told, who would not know that the men on the deck above him were dying. The machine did not need his mind. It needed his hands. It put him in the bowels of the ship and sealed the hatch. For fifty years, he did not speak of it. The machine had no use for his memory.
He enlisted because he did not want to walk across France with a knapsack. The Navy gave him a boiler room and a war he never saw. He spent the attack evading a midget submarine, then spent the rest of the war in a steam drum. He climbed the mast of the Iowa to watch the surrender. He saw the end of the war from a crow’s nest. He came home and worked in a machinist shop and delivered meals to the old and raised three daughters. He did not let the war define him. The machine had used him; he used the peace.
The state needed him later. When a television report wrongly declared him dead, his daughter corrected the record, and suddenly the reluctant swabbie was leading the Cape Cod St. Patrick’s Parade, riding in a limousine to his hundredth birthday. We are running out of anchors, they said. We need the last ones. They put a medal on his chest and called him a hero. They did not ask him what the steam drum smelled like. They did not ask him what it cost to be the last one standing.
I see you, Freeman Johnson. I see the steam drum and the years you did not speak of. I see the long, unremarkable peace you built from the ruins of a war you never saw. The admirals who gave the orders are ashes. The generals are names on plaques. The swabbie who stoked the boiler is still here, in a living room in Centerville, with a coffee cup and a Navy coin. The machine of war used you. It could not define you.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. The steam drum is silent. The man is still here.