OT: Over There — and Gone Forever

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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.

 

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company