The last of nearly 5 million U.S. veterans of a dimly remembered war Frank Woodruff Buckles 
lived to be 110 a generation now laid to rest.
By Paul Duggan
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON D.C. A lowly corporal of long ago was buried Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery ushered to his grave with all the Armys Old Guard solemn pomp.
In a late-day chill after hundreds of strangers had paid their respects in public viewings since the weekend soldiers carried the former doughboys flag-draped coffin partway up a knoll and set it on polished rails above his plot a stones toss from the grave of his old supreme commander Gen. John J. Blackjack" Pershing.
A chaplain commended his soul to God; rifle volleys cracked; a bugler sounded taps below the gentle rise. With flags at half-staff throughout the U.S. military and government it was a fine send-off for the countrys last known veteran of World War I who died peacefully Feb. 27 in his West Virginia farmhouse.
Yet the hallowed ritual at grave No. 34-581 was not a farewell to one man alone. A reverent crowd of the powerful and the ordinary President Obama and Vice President Biden laborers and store clerks heads bowed came to salute Buckless deceased generation the vanished millions of soldiers and sailors he came to symbolize in the end.
Who were they? Not the troops of the Greatest Generation" so celebrated these days but the unheralded ones of 1917 and 1918 who came home to pats on the back and little else in an era before the country embraced and rewarded its veterans. Their 20th-century narrative poignant and meaningful is seldom recalled.
I know my father would want me to be here" said Mike Oliver 73 a retiree from Alexandria leaning on a cane near the cemeterys amphitheater hours before the burial. Inside a hushed procession of visitors filed past Buckless closed coffin in the chapel.
Im here for Mr. Buckles and Im here for what he represents" Oliver said. On his left lapel he wore a tiny gold pin the insignia of his long-dead fathers infantry division in World War I the Armys 80th. Im here to say goodbye to my dad" he said.
Buckles who fibbed his way into the Army at 16 was a rear-echelon ambulance driver in war-ravaged France miles behind the battlefront. More than 116000 Americans died about half in the fighting most of the rest from illnesses in the nations 19-month engagement in a conflict that scorched Europe for four years.
Now the veterans who survived are gone. Whats left is remembrance the collective story of 4.7 million lives an obituary for a generation.
A financial struggle
Arriving stateside in 1918 and 1919 many of them scarred in mind and limb they were met by a postwar recession and joblessness.
A lot of veterans thought that they were owed a boost that they ought to be compensated for the good civilian wages they had missed. But lawmakers year after year said no.
Oh the YMCA did give me a one-month free membership" Buckles recalled when he was a very old fellow. Except for the $60 that most veterans got from the government when they mustered out the YMCA gift was the only consideration I ever saw given to a soldier after the war" the last doughboy said.
What he and other veterans finally received in 1924 were bonus certificates redeemable for cash in 1945. And Congress had to override a veto to secure even that.
With the 1920s roaring by then the young veterans tucked away their certificates and went about their lives. Buckles became a purser on merchant ships traveling the globe.
Then the Depression hit and their generations legacy took on another aspect one of activism that helped propel a reshaping of the nations social landscape.
Thousands of ruined veterans were left with nothing of value but the promise of eventual bonuses. In 1932 while Buckles was at sea a ragtag army of ex-servicemen descended on Washington with their wives and kids to lobby for early redemption of the certificates and a disaster ensued that would long reverberate.
Living for weeks in a sprawling shantytown on mud flats in Anacostia and in tents and hovels near the U.S. Capitol the dirt-poor Bonus Army" numbering more than 20000 defied orders to disperse. So the White House unleashed the military.
Infantrymen saber-wielding cavalry troops and a half-dozen tanks swept along the avenues below the Capitol routing the veterans and their families in a melee of blood and tear gas. Then soldiers cleared out the Anacostia shacks and set them ablaze.
Two veterans died and hundreds were injured. Four years later after a Florida hurricane killed 259 destitute veterans at a makeshift federal work camp political support tipped for the bonuses and the generation that fought World War I finally got a substantial benefit.
I think mine was $800" Buckles said of his bonus equal to $12000 today. He said he gave it to his father an Oklahoma Dust Bowl farmer barely hanging on.
The Bonus Army debacle weighed on Congress and the Roosevelt administration during World War II. With 16 million Americans in uniform more than three times the World War I total policymakers feared massive unrest if the new veterans got the same shabby treatment that Buckless generation had received.
The result in 1944 was the GI Bill widely viewed as the most far-reaching social program in U.S. history. It made college and homeownership possible for the great wave of returning World War II veterans when such opportunities were considered luxuries and spurred a vast decades-long expansion of Americas middle class.
