Taking notice

This Veteran's Day, an op-ed piece in the NYT remembers WW I veterans, including Frank Buckles: "Of the two million soldiers the United States sent to France in World War I, he is the only one left."

Like the author, Richard Rubin, the author of “Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South,” and currently at work on a book about America’s involvement in World War I, writes:

It’s hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It’s not that World War I will then become history; it’s been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can’t quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We can’t stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.