thedrifter
03-10-07, 11:19 AM
March 10, 2007
Charleston Daily Mail: Hats off
The Marines rejected him because he was too light, but the Army took him. Now, 90 years later, Frank Buckles is one of maybe 12 surviving American veterans of World War I.
He was a ambulance driver. “There was nothing dramatic about it,” Buckles said. “Sometimes I was driving in Wincester, England, sometimes France.”
While Buckles saw no action in World War I, he did in World War II. Fate put him in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. He was a prisoner of war. At 106 he still can remember the day he was liberated: Feb. 23, 1945.
Buckles, whose wife died in 1999, still runs a cattle farm in the Eastern Panhandle, and gave up driving only two years ago.
“He better not get any ideas,” his daughter said. “I want him around as long as possible.”
There is something comforting in knowing that a doughboy still survives to this day.
Ellie
Charleston Daily Mail: Hats off
The Marines rejected him because he was too light, but the Army took him. Now, 90 years later, Frank Buckles is one of maybe 12 surviving American veterans of World War I.
He was a ambulance driver. “There was nothing dramatic about it,” Buckles said. “Sometimes I was driving in Wincester, England, sometimes France.”
While Buckles saw no action in World War I, he did in World War II. Fate put him in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. He was a prisoner of war. At 106 he still can remember the day he was liberated: Feb. 23, 1945.
Buckles, whose wife died in 1999, still runs a cattle farm in the Eastern Panhandle, and gave up driving only two years ago.
“He better not get any ideas,” his daughter said. “I want him around as long as possible.”
There is something comforting in knowing that a doughboy still survives to this day.
Ellie