Download The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War AudioBook Free
In 2003, eighty-five years following the armistice, it had taken Richard Rubin weeks to find just one single living American veteran of World Battle I. But then, he found another. And another. Eventually, he found dozens, aged 101 to 113, and interviewed them. All are gone now. A decade-long odyssey to recuperate the story of a forgotten era and their warfare led Rubin over the USA and France, through archives, private choices, battlefields, books, propaganda, and even music. But at the center of it all were the previous of the previous, the women and men he fulfilled: a new immigrant, drafted and sent to France, whose life was kept by a equine; a Connecticut Yankee who volunteered and fought in every major American battle; a Cajun artilleryman nearly killed by a German airplane; an eighteen-year-old Bronx young lady "drafted" to work with the War Department; a machine gunner from Montana; a marine wounded at Belleau Real wood; the sixteen-year-old who became America's previous World Battle I veteran; and many more. They were the final survivors of the thousands who composed the American Expeditionary Causes, nineteenth-century women and men living in the twenty-first century. Self-reliant, humble, and stoic, they placed their tales to themselves for life, then distributed them at the previous possible moment in order that they, and the warfare they won - the injury that created our modern world - might finally be remembered. You will never forget them. The Last of the Doughboys is more than simply a war tale; it is a moving meditation on character, grace, aging, and storage area.
