On this Armistice Day

[Bill in Oregon]

I think of my Great Uncle Earl Traylor, with Company A of the 342nd Machine Gun Battalion, 89th Division, AEF, who was wounded by German artillery fire while unloading equipment for the Marines on the Meuse River. It was at 9:30 p.m. on November 10th, just hours before the Armistice, that his company came under fire. The company lost two men killed and seven wounded, including Uncle Earl. Here he is with mustard gas blisters in August of 1918. God bless your soul.

[samsi]

Good stuff, thanks for sharing Bill. One of my grandfathers and a buddy - both underaged, enlisted for the " great adventure" of WW1. Luckily for both of them hostilities ended and they were mustered out without shipping to Europe.

Surprisingly there was a book of interviews with WW1 vets published about 12 years ago titled The Last of the Doughboys. Everyone interviewed for the project was over 100 years old at the time and I believe all had passed by the time it was published. It's an interesting read, and the first I ever learned that we had troops fighting in Russia and Siberia 1918-20.

[JimT]

When I was a kid (pre-teen years) there were still quite a lot of WWI vets around. My grandpa Taylor ... some great-uncles ... and other men in the community. One that all us young boys were afraid of because he looked and acted strange, I found out later that he had been gassed during the Great War and was pretty disabled. In those days either you were stuck in a sanitarium (more like jail) or family took care of you or you tried to make it on your own. He chose the latter. As kids we did not understand what all it meant when our folks told us that he had been gassed during the war.

[gamekeeper]

My mom lost her brother who was in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in March 1918.
My dad had a brother in the Worstershire regiment that was gassed in the trenches but he lived into his seventies.

Lest we forget.

[marlinman93]

One thing that always makes me smile at Veteran's Day is something my dad told me long ago. He was born in 1904, so too young for WWI and too old for WWII. It was something he said he was always sad to have not served his country at war. But he added that it made him proud that all three of us boys served! He died before my youngest brother finished his 20 years of military service, but lived long enough to know he'd chosen to make it his career for not just 20 yrs. military, but another 20 as civilian military too.
So on Veteran's Day I think of my father.