[Rhodes22-list] History - The Last Veteran

[Rob Lowe]

this story was in our local paper. - rob

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/139352


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brad Haslett" <flybrad at gmail.com>
To: "The Rhodes 22 mail list" <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 5:13 PM
Subject: [Rhodes22-list] History - The Last Veteran


November 12, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
 Over There — and Gone Forever By RICHARD RUBIN

BY any conceivable measure, Frank Buckles has led an extraordinary life.
Born on a farm in Missouri in February 1901, he saw his first automobile in
his hometown in 1905, and his first airplane at the Illinois State Fair in
1907. At 15 he moved on his own to Oklahoma and went to work in a bank; in
the 1940s, he spent more than three years as a Japanese prisoner of war.
When he returned to the United States, he married, had a daughter and bought
a farm near Charles Town, W. Va., where he lives to this day. He drove a
tractor until he was 104.

But even more significant than the remarkable details of Mr. Buckles's life
is what he represents: Of the two million soldiers the United States sent to
France in World War I, he is the only one left.

This Veterans Day marked the 89th anniversary of the armistice that ended
that war. The holiday, first proclaimed as Armistice Day by President
Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and renamed in 1954 to honor veterans of all wars,
has become, in the minds of many Americans, little more than a point between
Halloween and Thanksgiving when banks are closed and mail isn't delivered.
But there's a good chance that this Veterans Day will prove to be the last
with a living American World War I veteran. (Mr. Buckles is one of only
three left; the other two were still in basic training in the United States
when the war ended.) Ten died in the last year. The youngest of them was
105.

At the end of his documentary "The War," Ken Burns notes that 1,000 World
War II veterans are dying every day. Their passing is being observed at all
levels of American society; no doubt you have heard a lot about them in
recent days. Fortunately, World War II veterans will be with us for some
years yet. There is still time to honor them. But the passing of the last
few veterans of the First World War is all but complete, and has gone
largely unnoticed here.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Almost from the moment the armistice took
effect, the United States has worked hard, it seems, to forget World War I;
maybe that's because more than 100,000 Americans never returned from it,
lost for a cause that few can explain even now. The first few who did come
home were given ticker-tape parades, but most returned only to silence and a
good bit of indifference.

There was no G.I. Bill of Rights to see that they got a college education or
vocational training, a mortgage or small-business loan. There was nothing
but what remained of the lives they had left behind a year or two earlier,
and the hope that they might eventually be able to return to what President
Warren Harding, Wilson's successor, would call "normalcy." Prohibition,
isolationism, the stock market bubble and the crisis in farming made that
hard; the Great Depression, harder still.

A few years ago, I set out to see if I could find any living American World
War I veterans. No one — not the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the
Veterans of Foreign Wars, or the American Legion — knew how many there were
or where they might be. As far as I could tell, no one much seemed to care,
either.

Eventually, I did find some, including Frank Buckles, who was 102 when we
first met. Eighty-six years earlier, he'd lied about his age to enlist. The
Army sent him to England but, itching to be near the action, he managed to
get himself sent on to France, though never to the trenches.

After the armistice, he was assigned to guard German prisoners waiting to be
repatriated. Seeing that he was still just a boy, the prisoners adopted him,
taught him their language, gave him food from their Red Cross packages, bits
of their uniforms to take home as souvenirs.

In the 1930s, while working for a steamship company, Mr. Buckles visited
Germany; it was difficult for him to reconcile his fond memories of those
old P.O.W.'s with what he saw of life under the Third Reich. The steamship
company later sent him to run its office in Manila; he was there in January
1942 when the Japanese occupied the city and took him prisoner. At some
point during his 39 months in captivity, he contracted beriberi, which
affects his sense of balance even now, almost 63 years after he was
liberated by the 11th Airborne Division.

Nevertheless, he carries with aplomb the burden of being the last of his
kind. "For a long time I've felt that there should be more recognition of
the surviving veterans of World War I," he tells me; now that group is, more
or less, him. How does he feel about that? "Someone has to do it," he says
blithely, but adds: "It kind of startles you."

Four years ago, I attended a Veterans Day observance in Orleans, Mass. Near
the head of the parade, a 106-year-old named J. Laurence Moffitt rode in a
Japanese sedan, waving to the small crowd of onlookers and sporting the same
helmet he had been wearing in the Argonne Forest at the moment the armistice
took effect, 85 years earlier.

I didn't know it then, but that was, in all likelihood, the last small-town
American Veterans Day parade to feature a World War I veteran. The years
since have seen the passing of one last after another — the last
combat-wounded veteran, the last Marine, the last African-American, the last
Yeomanette — until, now, we are down to the last of the last.

It's hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will
lose when Frank Buckles dies. It's not that World War I will then become
history; it's been history for a long time now. But it will become a
different kind of history, the kind we can't quite touch anymore, the kind
that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We
can't stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.

Richard Rubin, the author of "Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New
Old South," is at work on a book about America's involvement in World War I.
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