Someday no one will march there at all
Feb. 27th, 2011 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumFrank W. Buckles died today.
He was the last US veteran of WW1. Which means there are only two men known who served in it. Buckles wasn't in the line, he drove ambulances.
In the realm of irony... he was in the occupation after WW1, and spent time guarding POW camps. At the outbreak of WW2, he was in Manila, and spent three years as a civilian POW of the Japanese.
I've been reading a book, 11th Month 11th Day 11th Hour, which uses the lens of the last few hours of the war to tell the whole sorry tale. It's not that Frank Buckles was extraordinary, it's not that veterans are some sort of special.
No, it's that war is vast, and incredible (I don't mean wonderful, I mean hard to credit; you can't believe what happens in one. If you made it up, no one would believe it). It sucks.
Those who survive it, they are sort of talismanic. The Doughboys got short shrift. They were promised a bonus, when they asked for it a bit early (because they were starving in the throes of The Depression) the Army chased them out of Washington). They didn't get a GI Bill. They were expected to, "return to normalcy."
And now, for us, they are gone, from two million, to none. The odds are, they will all be gone before the next celebration of the Armistice comes around again.
He did some oral history, Frank Buckles, Veterans' History Project
He was the last US veteran of WW1. Which means there are only two men known who served in it. Buckles wasn't in the line, he drove ambulances.
In the realm of irony... he was in the occupation after WW1, and spent time guarding POW camps. At the outbreak of WW2, he was in Manila, and spent three years as a civilian POW of the Japanese.
I've been reading a book, 11th Month 11th Day 11th Hour, which uses the lens of the last few hours of the war to tell the whole sorry tale. It's not that Frank Buckles was extraordinary, it's not that veterans are some sort of special.
No, it's that war is vast, and incredible (I don't mean wonderful, I mean hard to credit; you can't believe what happens in one. If you made it up, no one would believe it). It sucks.
Those who survive it, they are sort of talismanic. The Doughboys got short shrift. They were promised a bonus, when they asked for it a bit early (because they were starving in the throes of The Depression) the Army chased them out of Washington). They didn't get a GI Bill. They were expected to, "return to normalcy."
And now, for us, they are gone, from two million, to none. The odds are, they will all be gone before the next celebration of the Armistice comes around again.
He did some oral history, Frank Buckles, Veterans' History Project
