Oldest Veterans

There are only a handful of Veterans left around the world from WWI. I heard on the news tonight that many countries lost their last remaining Veteran this year. The US still has one, who is 107 years old. The war itself will be 100 years old not that many years from now.

I read a lot of books written in the twenties and thirties, a time after WWI, when most of the men, at least in the British books, served in that war to end all wars. There is talk of shell shock and otherwise never being the same after the war. There is a naivety about it all since they could not know what was to come: Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, the holocaust.

As Ferris Bueller noted, life goes by pretty fast, and thus it is easy to lose perspective. To think of WWI as being so very very long ago. My grandparents were of the wrong age to be involved in WWI, although they were all alive then. My father’s father was around 13 when the war ended. My mother’s father was likely nearly 40 (I should really figure out when he was born, since I am sort-of named after him).

I was a little disturbed recently to realize that I was born only 22 years after the end of WWII. That seems much closer than I ever imagined when I was younger. WWI had been over 48 years when I was born, so most of its Veterans were already in passed retirement age. Time does move quickly. And I wish we did a little more to take time out on days like today to make sure we don’t miss it.