World War I veteran Frank Buckles, 107, in March.Posted on 05/26/2009 9:31:53 AM PDT by BGHater
Numbers come precisely from the agile mind and nimble tongue of Frank Buckles, who seems bemused to say that 4,734,991 Americans served in the military during America's involvement in the First World War and that 4,734,990 are gone. He is feeling fine, thank you for asking.
The eyes of the last doughboy are still sharp enough for him to be a keen reader, and his voice is still deep and strong at age 107. He must have been a fine broth of a boy when, at 16, persistence paid off and he found, in Oklahoma City, an Army recruiter who believed, or pretended to, the fibs he had unavailingly told to Marine and Navy recruiters in Kansas about being 18. He grew up on a Missouri farm, not far from where two eminent generals were born -- John "Black Jack" Pershing and Omar Bradley.
"Boys in the country," says Buckles, "read the papers," so he was eager to get into the fight over there. He was told that the quickest way was to train for casualty retrieval and ambulance operations. Soon he was headed for England aboard the passenger ship Carpathia, which was celebrated for having, five years earlier, rescued survivors from the Titanic.
Buckles never saw combat, but "I saw the results." He seems vague about only one thing: What was the First World War about?
Before leaving England for France, he was stationed near Winchester College, where he noticed "Buckles" among the names that boys had carved in their desks. This ignited his interest in genealogy, which led him to discover that his ancestor Robert Buckles, born in Yorkshire on May 15, 1702, arrived at age 30 in what is now West Virginia.
World War I veteran Frank Buckles, 107, in March.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
BUMP
Wow, what a goober I am. Correct date is 25 May 2008. Repost, please pull.
‘And gentlemen in England now abed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.’
Read later.
Couldn’t fall asleep last night, so I tuned on the TV at 1 am..watched the “Fightin’ 69th”...great flic
Don’t you dare pull it. Your thread made my day. He is still alive. The last doughboy, on Memorial day 2009, is 108 years old. Fancy that!
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