On Dec. 7, 1941, Lauren Bruner escaped the fate of 1,177 fellow crew members on the burning and sinking USS Arizona by climbing — with burns over 73% of his body — hand over hand across a rope 70 feet above a burning Pearl Harbor to safety on the adjacent repair ship Vestal.

The petty officer second class, a fire controlman, who at the time had recently turned 21, carried the heavy memory of his fallen shipmates — and the fireball and screams and carnage that accompanied that moment — the rest of his life. Post-traumatic stress disorder would follow him on that journey.

The La Mirada, Calif., man died Sept. 10 at age 98.

On Saturday, the anniversary of the surprise Japanese attack, Bruner was reunited with his best friend, Billy Mann, and more than 900 other crewmembers still on the sunken battleship grave under the peace and calm that has settled over the USS Arizona Memorial in 78 ensuing years.

His brother, 95-year-old Chet Danforth, helped hand an urn with Bruner’s ashes to divers on one side of the memorial. The divers placed it with 43 others in turret No. 4 at the stern of the ship in a sunset ceremony.

A celebration of Bruner’s happier times in Honolulu also was to be held in the form of a wake last night at Smith’s Union Bar on Hotel Street, a haunt of Bruner’s in 1941 and in more recent years.

The scheduled entertainment included the “Arizona Hula,” previously commissioned for the crew, to be danced by Delys Recca, “Aloha Oe” sung by Mona Lum, and bagpipes.

“This is so much in tune with Lauren — it’s a rip-roaring celebration of his life,” said friend Ed McGrath, who organized the wake.

With just three living Arizona survivors left — including Lou Conter, 98, who was on the memorial for the interment with dozens of family members and friends — it’s likely that Bruner will be the last crew member to ever be returned to the ship.

The remaining three have other burial plans.

“Lauren was a great friend. He was a great sailor and a great shipmate,” Conter, a retired Navy lieutenant commander, told more than 200 people on the memorial. “When he was injured in Pearl Harbor, burned, went to the hospital — he fought to get back to duty to go to war and help the United States.”

Army, Navy and National Park Service divers helped transport Bruner’s ashes to turret No. 4, with an Army diver wearing a vintage hardhat used in the salvage after the attack, and walking the burial urn across a portion of submerged Arizona deck before placing it in its final resting place.

The memorial flag flew at half staff, taps was played and flower petals were dropped into the viewing well over the battleship.

McGrath, a co-author on Bruner’s book, “Second to the Last to Leave” — so-called because he was the second to last of six men to shimmy across the lifeline sent over to the Arizona by Joe George, a sailor on the Vestal — said Bruner didn’t want to be buried in a graveyard.

“He said, ‘You know, when people die, nobody goes to visit them at the graveyard after a while,’ and then he says, ‘but if I go back on the Arizona, I’m going to have a whole helluva lot of people visiting me every single day,’ ” McGrath said.

After seven months of hospitalization, Bruner served aboard the destroyer USS Coghlan in eight major battles before being discharged in 1946.

He was married twice (both wives died), had girlfriends after that and worked at a plant making industrial-size refrigerators, but only in his latter years did he start to reconnect with Pearl Harbor and his pre-war days.

In his book, Bruner describes the anticipation of arriving in Hawaii in 1940 to “chase some girls in grass skirts,” holystoning decks and drills on the Arizona, nickel beer on base and shore patrol duty on Hotel Street. He made $21 a month.

Bruner didn’t like to talk about what happened on the Arizona.

In the Pearl Harbor attack, a 1,760-pound Japanese armor-piercing bomb penetrated the Arizona’s decks 40 feet from the bow, igniting a million pounds of gunpowder that sent a fireball roaring over the ship.

Bruner and other men were in an anti-aircraft gun director — a metal box 70 feet off the water — when the bomb hit, nearly cooking them in the ovenlike environment.

“My T-shirt had caught fire. And my back, both arms and right side were charcoaled,” Bruner said in his book. Bodies floated everywhere in the harbor.

Decades later, McGrath talked Bruner into returning to Hawaii in 2013.

“He realized that at that point in his life, now he was a rock star,” McGrath said. “And the pretty girls and everyone else wanted to have their pictures taken with him — and he loved it. He ate it up.”

In 2017, on his last trip to Honolulu and Smith’s Union, Bruner sat at his favorite table with a Longboard beer next to photos of the USS Arizona and said, “It’s like coming home. Always had good times here.”

Bruner’s name is now etched in marble in the shrine room in the Arizona Memorial with that of 1,177 who died on Dec. 7, 1941, and the 44 who have been interred there since 1982.