Last of the Doughboys

A belated Armistice Day post, from the New York Times:

BY any conceivable measure, Frank Buckles has led an extraordinary life. Born on a farm in Missouri in February 1901, he saw his first automobile in his hometown in 1905, and his first airplane at the Illinois State Fair in 1907. At 15 he moved on his own to Oklahoma and went to work in a bank; in the 1940s, he spent more than three years as a Japanese prisoner of war. When he returned to the United States, he married, had a daughter and bought a farm near Charles Town, W. Va., where he lives to this day. He drove a tractor until he was 104.

But even more significant than the remarkable details of Mr. Buckles's life is what he represents: Of the two million soldiers the United States sent to France in World War I, he is the only one left.

There are apparently two other survivors who were still in training Stateside when the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month rolled by in 1918. Yet isn't it remarkable that we have come to this with so little notice taken in recent years of the fast-dwindling numbers of surviving veterans? As the article notes:

. . . 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. . .

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.

How was it when the last of the Civil War veterans passed from the scene? That would have been before my time, but when my parents were young adults. The '50s were more a time of looking forward than of looking back, though, which really only changed, from what I understand, with the Civil War centennial in 1965.

Saving the planet, one bottle at a time

When did bringing water bottles to the gym begin to fall out of fashion? Those who don't just use the drinking fountains carry bottled water, or buy it out of a machine. OK, the cost isn't prohibitive -- unless you are giving the vending machines a buck per half liter -- but it does add up. I've been using the same few 750 ml bike bottles at the gym for years now, using filtered water from home. Lets say four bottles a week times fifty weeks, that comes to 150 liters a year. Go back ten years and that adds up to a pretty big pile of plastic.