Frank Buckles, America’s last WWI soldier, died February 27th at age 110. He came to my notice on a trip to the National World War I Museum in Kansas City. While there chaperoning a high school history class, I was totally impressed with the remodeled museum’s posters, photos, displays and multi-media exhibits that grabbed the students’ attention and held it.
One of those terrific exhibits, an ambulance, also displayed a photo of a Missouri boy who drove a similar vehicle in Europe in WWI. Mr. Buckles’ picture had been taken beside the truck when he toured the museum as the honored guest on Memorial Day earlier that year. Later, in the gift shop I spied and purchased a “Welcome Home Frank W. Buckles, Memorial Day 2008, National World War I Museum” t-shirt and my fascination with the last American veteran of WWI began.
As a child in the early 60s I had known a WWI veteran. My tall, thin, quiet Great-Uncle Chester who created wooden toys for us had been gassed in the trenches and re-assigned as a convoy escort. He crossed the Atlantic many times on troop ships. As an adult in the 80s I witnessed two area men attending a Veterans’ Memorial dedication and was told they were the last of the local WWI vets. But here two decades later I discovered 107-year-old Frank Buckles had been to the Liberty Memorial just months earlier representing all the long gone men who fought the “War to End All Wars.”
Through sheer longevity Frank Buckles permitted us to touch distant family, distant memories and a distant past for longer than we could have imagined. Because of this, his death is much more than the loss of an individual. His death means we have lost those people and that generation with a weighted finality.
Uncle Chester, Frank Buckles, and all those who endured WWI: Thank you and farewell.
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