Remembering the Forgotten

We've heard a lot in recent years about World War II vets. And that's a good thing. Ken Burns says 1,000 a day are dying, and we need to honor them while we can. But that's also true about World War I vets. An article in yesterday's New York Times said that there aren't 1,000 dying a day because there aren't even 1,000 left - only one American remains who fought in World War I. His name is Frank Buckles, and he's 104. This might be his last Veteran's Day; 10 other WWI vets died in the last year.

You may remember from your high school or college history books the grisly mistakes of World War I; how the leaders failed to understand the new technologies, and millions of young men - 100,000 Americans - died as a result. Please take just a moment to read this touching article and honor their memory and forgotten sacrifice and commitment. Thanks.

"Over There -- And Gone Forever" by Richard Rubin

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.

..fought two tours in Vietnam, and one in Cambodia. He was a junior officer in the Army Signal Corps at the time, and retired in the '80s as a full bird colonel. He's in Arlington National Cemetary now. WWI was certainly for a larger, greater cause than Vietnam, and more men laid down the ultimate sacrifice. I wish I had had the chance to talk to my grandfather more as an individual, and I wish we as a society had taken the chance to talk to our WWI vets more.