My grandfather was a WWI veteran. He served in France in the army of occupation, after hostilities had ended. He returned to Texas with a tulip tatooed on his shoulder and married my grandmother. Grandad passed away in 1993 and he has been missed, as he was one of the greatest men I have ever known.
Now there are three surviving WWI veterans still alive. Richard Rubin in the New York Times writes about one of them:
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.
It will be some time before the last WWII veteran leaves us. There is probably some man out there who was born in 1930 and in 1945 he faked his birth certificate and enlisted. He will live to be 105 or even 110. So we are looking at 2035 or possibly as late as 2040 before the last WWII veteran passes away. In fact, he might outlive me, and I was too young even for Vietnam.
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My uncle was one of those you describe from WWII. He found himself at age 15 in the RAF in Burma. He died early, in his 50's of the ravages of diabetes. I wish I had asked him more.
For his Eagle Scout project, my son interviewed the majority of the remaining WWII vets in our county. He finished it about 5-6years ago and many of the men have since died, including his beloved friend, who gave him the title for his book:
"Right in the Thick of It"
Now I am reading the memoirs of young soldiers of this present war. Gallant young men, too.
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