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thedrifter
11-12-06, 05:26 PM
The few, the forgotten, the proud
By PAUL DUGGAN
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- It was getting toward dusk, the sun headed down on yet another day in the very long life of Frank Woodruff Buckles.

He had come to see the grave of Gen. John J. Pershing, on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery. Buckles once shook the great soldier's hand, chatted with him in Oklahoma City in 1920, after the war. Now Buckles sat in a wheelchair on a small stage near the headstone and waited for the ceremony to begin: Veterans Day again.

He's a few months shy of 106, the youngest of 13 known U.S. veterans of World War I still living. When the fighting stopped 88 years ago Saturday, there were 4.7 million Americans in uniform. Of those, a dozen men and a woman are left.

They are the last, Buckles and the others -- the adults of the Depression who struggled to feed the children who would grow to win that other world war, the big one everybody remembers.

The World War I generation, largely forgotten, left a peacetime mark on the last century, too, a legacy of 1930s activism that helped alter the nation's social and economic landscape -- although none of the 13 survivors is known to have taken part.

"The Skivin Hotel," Buckles recalled recently. That was where he met Pershing, who had commanded the American Expeditionary Forces, including Buckles, in France during the war. "After I passed the general, he had his sergeant call me back. He said he wanted to talk to me."

Buckles, a farm boy who had lied his way into the Army at 16, was in uniform that day.

"He asked me where I had served, what I had done. Then he asked me, 'Where were you born?' I says, 'Harrison County, Missouri.' He says, 'That's 43 miles as the crow flies from Linn County, where I was born.'"

In a blue blazer and black beret, Buckles came to Arlington Saturday from his West Virginia farm with his daughter and some friends for the annual wreath laying at Pershing's grave, his first visit in 30 years. Colonels, majors, corporals and men in foreign uniforms shook his hand. They snapped photos, bent down and tried to chat. Children walked up and asked him to autograph their programs. It took a while, but he signed.

Veterans Day again. He said he might come back for another: "I don't see why not."

The conflict had been raging overseas for nearly three years when the United States entered the war in April 1917. After a long buildup in France, Pershing's AEF began large-scale fighting in spring 1918. The war ended in November.

Chris Scheer, a Department of Veterans Affairs official, started a list of living World War I vets last year.

They weren't easy to find, given the paucity of records from the era. Scheer sent inquiries to hospitals and veterans offices nationwide and compared notes with researchers, including Will Everett, a radio producer.

As far as they know, the list has 13 names. The eldest, Emiliano Mercado del Toro, is 115.

The U.S. toll in World War I: 53,402 killed in action; 63,114 dead of other causes, mostly illnesses.

Caught in a postwar recession in 1919, many vets languished without jobs. The government gave disabled veterans up to $100 a month and offered them vocational training years before the Veterans Administration was formed. Healthy vets got virtually nothing.

In 1924, Congress agreed to compensation: The men got certificates redeemable in 1945 for cash. "A bonus," it was called.

The payments, typically about $1,000, would be based on military service time.

The vets were satisfied. The economy had improved by 1924, and most had found work. They started families and rode the 1920s boom -- until the Depression hit.

"They were ruined," said Paul Dickson, co-author of The Bonus Army. "For a lot them, the bonus certificate was "about the only thing they owned."

After protests that were put down violently by the military -- a public relations debacle for President Hoover -- the certificates were exchanged early.

Buckles got $800 in 1938, the equivalent of about $11,500 today. He gave it to his father, a struggling farmer.

The GI Bill came along in 1944, providing college tuition and other benefits for World War II vets, but the bill never covered the vets of 1917-18.