The last doughboy has gone onto his reward.
Mr. Buckles said he was just a naive schoolboy chasing adventure when he enlisted Aug. 14, 1917, after the United States joined a war that had been raging for three years, with millions dead. “I knew what was happening in Europe, even though I was quite young,” he told a Washington Post reporter when he was 105. “And I thought, well, ‘I want to get over there and see what it’s about.” …
“Every last one of us Yanks believed we’d wrap this thing up in a month or two and head back home before harvest,” he said. “In other words, we were the typical cocky Americans no one wants around until they need help winning a war.” …
He weathered the Depression at sea on his purser’s salary, regularly making port calls in newly Nazified Germany. He saw Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Summer Olympics, he said, and watched Jesse Owens anger the dictator by sprinting to victory in Berlin’s Reichssportfeld.
Then, in December 1941, he was working in a shipping company’s Manila office when Japanese invaders landed in Luzon after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“Three years, two months,” he said of his captivity in the Philippines, eventually at a notorious camp in Los Banos. There, under pitiless Japanese guards, hundreds of Allied civilian and military internees lived in squalor, subsisting on often wormy rations.
Godspeed, Mr Buckles, on your final travel Send your regards to General Pershing when you meet him in heaven.
As brief as the description is, this one man’s journey puts all our current problems into stark, dramatic perspective. Thank you.
Sir,
Thank you for your service; as twenty year veteran we stand and salute our final warrior from a selfless generation.
Fair wind and Following seas. God Bless you and continue the United States of America.
Bravo Zulu and we salute your entire cadre, our traditions of Honor, Commitment and Integrity continues despite our political class.
ATTENTION!!!! Hero “Departing!, Yeoman, lower the Ensign on the gangway, Botswain’s pipe him ashore to Heaven. Gabriel, Announcing Mr. Frank Buckles…”
I am proud to have served in the US Army Nurse Corps. it has been the biggest honor to have taken care of our brave soldiers and incrediably so to have taken care of all of the vetrans that I have had as patients. I only wish I could have cared for our WW1 veterans. The story is always the same I was just doing my job I’m no hero. To me they all are the most honorable men with integrity that I find no where else but in those that serve this great nation, and it is a great nation thanks to them and those who complain I find are people who have never served who wouldn’t even be able to handle boot camp let a lone an actual mission or deployment. They talk about how selfish americans are how, take one minute to read what incrediable hardships our soldiers then and now suffer and sacrifice the give and then tell me what americans are you talking about, the answer is the one they see in the mirror. A lot of high and mighty talk but would never think to give up 4 years of thier life to serve, infact they usually have nothing nice to say about the soldiers that provide them the vary freedom to shoot thier mouths of about how bad america is. Yet if you ask a soldier if that makes them angry, they will say that is their right. That is the kind of person that they have nothing nice to say about or about what they do. Usually I find that that person has no idea what todays soldier does, the importance of our presence, the freedom we bring to people who have never had freedom. Yet the soldier will not react inturn, will not speak badly of those who voice such opinions. That is the integrety that I admire so. The highest honor that I could have in my nursing career was to be a trauma nurse and care for the worlds heroes, our soldiers go every where to defend all, not just Americans. They risk they vary lives, do you, do those people who hate thier own country, risk thier lives for others, or do anything to make things better, or do they just complain? The soldier never complains. Now it’s what can my country do for me. I’m proud to have served with the few that ask what they can do for thier country instead. and get vary little in return. The others, well it’s never enough. And everyone hates America until they need help winning a war/food/flood/ect. but never the thanks deserved always complaints about not enough, not soon enough and on and on. Thank you Mr. Frank Buckles you are truely an inspiration and I will tell my children of you and those like you as I already do when I get home from work. God bless. Cpt Shawn Keeley Army Nurse Corps.
Rest in Peace my friend. GOD BLESS YOU!