I am feeling very old today.
The last veteran from World War I died at age 110. The Los Angeles Times:
Frank Woodruff Buckles, a onetime Missouri farm boy who was the last known living American veteran of World War I, has died. He was 110.Buckles, who later spent more than three years in a Japanese POW camp as a civilian in the Philippines during World War II, died Sunday of natural causes at his home in Charles Town, W.Va., family spokesman David DeJonge said.
A total of 4,734,991 Americans served in the military during World War I.
When 108-year-old Harry Landis died in Sun City Center, Fla. on Feb. 4, 2008, Buckles became the war's last standing U.S. veteran.
"I always knew I'd be one of the last because I was one of the youngest when I joined," Buckles, then 107, told the New York Daily News. "But I never thought I'd be the last one."
When I was a kid, our Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Veterans Day parades featured a couple of dozen vets from World War I. Now, they're all gone - including my grandfather who died 20 years ago. Frederick Goodrich fought with the Rainbow Division and was a decorated soldier. At the time of his death, there were just a couple of thousand WWI vets left.
Interesting, but the last Civil War veterans died when I was very young - 1956 and 1958. Some civil war vets had grandfathers who fought in the Revolution. That's how young of a nation we are; At age 4, I could have shaken the hand of a man who shook the hand of someone who was old enough to have shaken Washington's hand.
Not even six degrees of separation.
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