The Last Doughboy

RAPID FIRE

By Fred Brown

As the sole surviving American veteran of World War I, Frank Woodruff Buckles, 107, of Charles Town, W.Va., is the nation’s last “doughboy,” the only remaining soldier of 4 million men called by President Woodrow Wilson to fight against Germany in 1917.

Although he is slowed and bent by age, Buckles does 50 push-ups in bed “to keep in shape,” before preparing to meet the many visitors he receives almost daily in his home.

“I have always exercised,” he says from a cushioned chair. Wooden handrails about waist-high around the walls help him walk on his own. Here, Buckles fills his days, greeting visitors and reading the many books filling the room’s shelves. Buckles, who has been a member of American Legion Merchant Marine Post 945 in Jefferson Valley, N.Y., since 1931, speaks German, Spanish, French and Portuguese, and reads voraciously. He is also quick to quiz visitors about their own reading habits.

Born in 1901 on his father’s Bethany, Mo., farm, Buckles recalls stories about his ancestors’ roles in both the Revolutionary and Civil wars. In fact, some Civil War battles were fought on the historic 330-acre farm he purchased in 1954, where he lives today. He drove a tractor on the farm up to his 104th birthday.

Buckles was a rosy-cheeked 16-year-old when he volunteered for service, enlisting in the U.S. Regular Army on Aug. 1, 1917, after being turned down twice - once by the Marine Corps and another time by the Navy. The Marines said he was too young, and the Navy said he had flat feet. But the Army took him, youth, flat feet and all.

Buckles was sent to Fort Riley, Kan., to train with the First Fort Riley Casual Detachment and shipped out to England in December 1917 with his unit and 102 other soldiers on board the HMS Carpathia, the famous vessel that rescued survivors of the White Star Line’s Titanic sinking on April 15, 1912. While on board, Buckles gathered firsthand stories of the Titanic’s rescue from members of the Carpathia crew who had helped in the recovery.

In England, at Camp Hospital No. 35, Cpl. Buckles drove a Ford ambulance, and New Douglas and Excelsior sidecar motorcycles, as an escort for his commanding officers. He eventually got to France by escorting an officer who had been accidentally left behind by his unit. Buckles did not see combat, but he witnessed its results - scenes he hasn’t forgotten and doesn’t discuss.

After the war, Buckles landed a job with White Star Line Steamship Co. and, in 1940, was posted in Manila while employed by American President Steamship Lines. In December 1941, after Japan invaded the Philippines, Buckles and about 2,000 other civilians became non-military victims of the war. He spent the next three and a half years in Japanese POW camps, first at Manila’s University of Santo Tomas and then at Los Banos, a town on the island of Luzon some 40 miles southeast of Manila. He was liberated by the 11th Airborne Division on Feb. 23, 1945, in the famous raid on Los Banos, and returned to the United States, where he married Audrey Mayo of Pleasanton, Calif., in 1946.

In 1954, the couple moved to Gap View Farm in West Virginia’s panhandle on land settled by his ancestors. His wife died in 1999, the same year in which Buckles was awarded the French Legion of Honor by then-President Jacques Chirac. This past March, President George W. Bush honored Buckles at the White House.

A proud veteran, Buckles still displays his World War I uniform with all of his insignia, and his dog tags. His memory is as crisp as the mornings on his cattle farm. Meeting visitors and reading are his pastimes today. He doesn’t watch television. He doesn’t even own one. He feels his age, he says, only “when I try to walk.”

Until a few years ago, he met regularly with a group of veterans and was still farming. His only child, Susannah Flanagan, 52, says he refuses to put “retired” on his income tax form.

Buckles says he is honored to bear the title of America’s last doughboy. And though he has been afforded the tribute of being buried at Arlington, he says he wants to put that off for a while.

Fred Brown is a retired senior writer for the Knoxville News Sentinel and a freelance journalist living in Knoxville, Tenn.

On Guard

When grieving families of fallen U.S. servicemembers came under attack by the Westboro Baptist Church, American Legion Riders responded by forming the Patriot Guard.

By Steve Brooks

Their image has become almost synonymous with military burials in Kansas: men and women, dressed in leather vests and bandanas, straddling Harley Davidsons and riding into small towns across the state. Their mission is simple: stand guard against a religious group that protests not only the war on terror, but the Americans fighting it and families who have lost loved ones in the conflict.

The riders form an impenetrable line around the funeral and reverently rev their engines to drown out the sounds of protesters. The Kansas Patriot Guard has stood watch at more than 60 funerals during the past three years. Moreover, the Guard has made an impact on those families it has supported.

“God bless each of you for sacrificing your time for such a noble cause,” reads one thank-you note to the Guard. “The funeral of my son and the graveside service were all very memorable, due in large part to your efforts. I really don’t have words to convey the thankfulness in my heart for all you have done.”

Another: “It is nice to know that there are people out there willing to sacrifice their time to ensure that the sanctity of memorials and funerals is protected from people who spew a message of hate.” In fact, the Kansas Patriot Guard’s efforts earned members the mantle of 2006 Kansans of the Year, awarded by the Topeka Capital-Journal.

“We don’t do this because we want recognition,” says Legionnaire Terry “Darkhorse” Houck, one of the Patriot Guard’s founding members. “This is something that we, as veterans, need to do. These men and women paid the ultimate price in the service of their country. They deserve a ceremony befitting of a hero, and so do their families.”

Houck says the Patriot Guard wants to make sure that nothing gets in the way of a burial with military honors. “That’s our mission, and we’re resolved to carry it out as long as necessary,” he says. “It’s easy to stand up for the fallen.”The Beginning. In July 2005, Terry’s wife, Carol, read an article in the newspaper that deeply disturbed her. Members of the Westboro, Kan., Baptist Church had disrupted the funeral of Army Spc. Jared Hartley in Newkirk, Okla., by showing up to demonstrate against what they consider to be a depraved United States.

After watching the group’s protest on TV, Carol spoke with Terry about the possibility of showing up themselves at military funerals to pay their respects to fallen soldiers and their families. Terry took the idea to other American Legion Riders at Post 136 in Mulvane, Kan., and the seed for the Kansas Patriot Guard was planted.

Riders appointed a committee that included Houck, Cregg “Bronco6″ Hansen, Steve “McDaddy” McDonald and Bill “Wild Bill” Logan to establish the group’s mission, procedures and guidelines. Dennis “Tatonka” Scuffham, Greg “Ebay” Hansen, Richard “Stretch” Strothman and Doug “Grey Eagle” Lehman joined in.

The Kansas Patriot Guard’s first mission was in Chelsea, Okla., at the funeral of Sgt. John Doles. Westboro Baptist members had planned a protest, and the Guard wanted to keep the church from interfering, but there was the matter of getting permission from the family.

“I dialed the number, all except the last number - I couldn’t dial it,” Terry recalls. “I thought, ‘What do you say?’ What do you say when you call somebody and try to explain this to them? One night, I finally got up enough nerve to call and talk to the mom and the dad. Naturally, they’re making arrangements for their son’s funeral.

“Someone in the family answered the phone, a woman, and she asked, ‘Who are you with, now?’ I said I was with the Kansas American Legion Riders, and that we had heard about Sgt. Dole being killed and would like to attend the funeral, if possible.”

“She asked, ‘Why do you want to do that?’ I told her I didn’t know how this was going to sound, but there were going to be some church groups coming to the funeral to picket. She said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’”

Terry ended up talking to Dole’s father and received an invitation to the funeral. Then a call went out to the Chelsea chief of police.

“He told me not to come,” Terry says. “‘We don’t want your kind here.’”

“They wouldn’t let us in town for 30 minutes,” Cregg Hansen adds.

Houck talked with the police chief and explained the Riders’ mission. After some debate, the chief gave the group permission to attend.

“They had, like, 45 (law-enforcement officials) there,” Terry said. “They even had a sniper. We’re down there, and (the chief) took my name and my Social Security number, my address. I’d given them Cregg Hansen’s name and number. (The chief) told me, ‘I want you to know that if something goes bad here, you and Cregg Hansen are going to be the first ones arrested.’”

Nothing went bad.

Practice Makes Perfect. After more than 60 missions, the Kansas Patriot Guard has its role down to a science, though protecting funerals is by no means simple. In addition to making and maintaining contact with family members of a fallen servicemember, Houck and/or the ride captain reach out to the military casualty assistance officer and local law-enforcement officials in advance.

The Riders then scout the church and cemetery to choose and secure a staging area.

The ride captain works with local law enforcement to come up with a safe procession route and, if requested, will arrange and provide escort for the fallen servicemember from the airport to the funeral home.

The captain then creates a ride itinerary, posts it on the Guard’s Web site, and e-mails it to members. On the day of the funeral, the Guard arrives 90 minutes early. Usually the funeral procession is led by law-enforcement officials. Since that first mission, the relationship between the Guard and local police has improved. “They respect what we do,” Houck said. “We’ve had state troopers volunteer to get us there. They’re doing it on their own.”

From meeting with casualty assistance officers to scouting the funeral site, a mission often requires 20 to 30 hours from Guard members. In addition, driving motorcycles on the highway is fraught with risk.

“It’s a very dangerous mission,” Houck said. “We’ve had a couple of people get hurt. But we stress safety. Any mission we’re involved with - either 100 percent or just a little - we tend to kind of take over, because we’ve got our name out there. We have people who will remove you from the mission if you don’t follow orders.”

Neither time nor weather prevents the Kansas Patriot Guard from showing up at a military funeral.

“We’ve left as early as 4 in the morning when it’s been 12 degrees,” Terry said.

Other Patriot Guards are springing up around the country. Hansen used his Legion Riders contacts to spread the word about the program, saying it got a good start because original Patriot Guard members were also Legionnaires. “Having The American Legion name there, behind what we were doing at the beginning, helped a lot,” he said.

And it keeps growing. “We’ve had people want to start a Legion Rider chapter because they want to be a part of the Patriot Guard,” Cregg said.

Safeguarding the sanctity of military funerals remains the Guard’s priority, even if Westboro Baptist Church ceases its protests.

“There’s going to be a Patriot Guard when they’re all gone,” Cregg said. “As long as this war’s going on, we’ll be there.”

Steve Brooks is senior editor of The American Legion Magazine.

Rocky Mountain Runaround

Colorado veterans are frustrated their high-priority VA hospital is still in limbo.

By Ken Olsen

Nick Orchowski is what doctors call a walking quadriplegic. He was paralyzed from the neck down for months after being blown from the gunner’s hatch of an armored Humvee when his convoy was ambushed between Baghdad and Sadr City. Three vertebrae were broken and a fourth was obliterated. Now, his spine is held together by two titanium plates, a bone graft and surgically fused vertebrae.

Orchowski is grateful he’s able to walk after surgery relieved the pressure on his spinal cord. His physical therapists and his family - particularly his father - have dedicated themselves to helping him rebuild muscle, regain balance and learn to move his legs again. His right arm no longer works, and hot weather quickly exhausts him. Orchowski and his wife have a 3-year-old daughter and are expecting a son. It’s easy to understand why he hates traveling long distances for medical care.

But if the 24-year-old Iraq war veteran and Denver-area resident needs treatment for his pinched spinal cord and mangled back, he has to go to Michigan, Florida, California or wherever else VA sends him. Instead of breaking ground on a desperately needed new hospital and spinal-cord injury treatment center this spring, VA again broke a promise to replace an aged and dilapidated medical center in Denver. Dr. James B. Peake is the third straight VA secretary to discard plans for new health-care facilities in the city.

Many Colorado veterans are enraged. They say they were shut out of the decision-making process and were repeatedly burned by VA, which in 2004 identified Denver as a city of urgent need for a new medical center. The urgency is compounded today, as thousands of young men and women come home from Iraq and Afghanistan with broken bones, missing limbs, traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. In addition to that new wave of demand, more than 400,000 World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War and Gulf War-era veterans live in the region.

“I don’t understand why it’s not done yet,” says Orchowski, who was a military policeman when he was injured in May 2004. “Guys and gals went over, fought for our country, lost lives for our country, and now we’re back here fighting the mighty dollar to figure out why we’re not building a new hospital. VA is falling back on their commitment to support us.”

VA has talked about replacing its 1950s-era hospital for more than 20 years. Millions of federal dollars have been spent deliberating and drawing blueprints, without ever turning a shovelful of dirt. VA has twice walked away from less expensive propositions, including a 2000 offer of free land at the former Fitzsimons Army Medical Center and a joint venture with the University of Colorado Hospital (UCH). They would have shared in the building of a new inpatient treatment center at the Aurora site near Denver. UCH and VA were to share imaging equipment, operating rooms, laboratories and other costly equipment and services. VA would have had a separate outpatient clinic and other specialized-care areas exclusively for veterans. Buckley Air Force Base planned to use the new joint medical care center as well, saving taxpayers an estimated $1.2 billion over 20 years. The American Legion and other veterans groups endorsed the proposal.

But in 2002, then-VA Secretary Anthony Principi rejected the plan, saying the $288.6 million pricetag was too high, and the shared hospital would make it difficult to maintain VA’s identity. Principi insisted that VA needed a completely separate inpatient hospital. Two years later, the Capital Asset Realignment for Enhanced Services (CARES) Commission ranked the Denver VA Medical Center as one of three such hospitals in the nation most in need of replacement, and urged swift action. VA soon proposed a stand-alone hospital and outpatient care center at Fitzsimons, including a new spinal-cord injury center with as many as 50 beds.

When Jim Nicholson took over as secretary, VA began looking over the available Fitzsimons land, which by then was rapidly disappearing. The Denver Children’s Hospital and other medical groups rushed to join an emerging new health-care community. Congress balked at rising costs, by this time close to $621 million. The American Legion and veterans groups again rallied behind the plan to build at Fitzsimons, and Congress finally agreed to put up the funds. Colorado veterans believed their long-overdue health-care facility was in sight.

That changed after Peake took over as VA secretary last December. In January, designers presented him with detailed plans for the new Denver VA Medical Center and estimated it would then cost $1.1 billion. Peake not only kept the finalized master plan quiet, he set aside proposals that would have reduced the cost and, essentially, ditched the idea in favor of a new and different partnership with the University of Colorado, the Denver VA’s academic affiliate. Colorado veterans were not advised of the change when VA began cutting a deal to lease floors from an inpatient tower that is still on the UCH’s drawing board. Veterans found out their hospital plan had been scuttled by reading the morning newspapers in late April.

“We’re trucking along, thinking we’ve got something, and we’ve got nothing,” says Ralph Bozella, American Legion Department of Colorado past commander. “VA is like Lucy and we’re like Charlie Brown, and they keep inviting us to run and kick the football.”

Maintenance and upgrades to keep the current Denver VA Medical Center operating have soaked up about $52 million just since 2004, with an estimated $23 million in additional work yet to be completed. Meanwhile, VA has spent $56 million acquiring property at Fitzsimons and another $5.4 million on site studies, road design, utility design and other paperwork. VA still needs some $568 million for its latest construction plan, plus another $140 million to lease hospital space from UCH for 20 years, according to its own estimates. All of this does not include the cost of developing the other two hospital proposals.

Bottom line: VA easily could have built a world-class hospital, outpatient clinic and spinal-cord injury center for far less money if it had taken the free land and gone to work nearly a decade ago.Vietnam War Veteran Artie Guerrero has long predicted that VA wouldn’t make good on its promise to build a new Denver medical center. So he is not surprised by the latest setback. “When I came back to Fitzsimons from Vietnam, they put 70 of us in a 20?bed ward,” Guerrero says. “It started from there. This country can afford to fix a toilet 400 miles up in space. But we can’t take care of our veterans.”

Sen. Ken Salazar, D?Colo., and Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D?Colo., are furious with Peake’s decision to cancel plans for the stand-alone hospital. In a July 14 letter, they questioned whether or not VA purposely withheld key information and demanded an end to negotiations to simply lease space from UCH. They also questioned VA’s failure to disclose that it had already spent $4 million designing the stand?alone hospital and spinal?cord center that CARES recommended.

VA appears to be pressing ahead with the new plan anyway. But Peake is sensitive to the backlash. He dispatched Deputy VA Secretary Gordon Mansfield to Denver in July to try to smooth things out, and his staff has actively courted key congressional aides. Peake also wrote a detailed letter to Salazar and Perlmutter, explaining his decision.

Among other things, Peake says he will use some of the money saved by not building a new VA hospital to construct more community-based outpatient clinics around Colorado. “You can do so much more now in an ambulatory-care environment,” Peake told The American Legion Magazine in late August. “The demographics are changing. When you build something now - if you look traditionally - it’s going to be there for 50 years. (A new inpatient hospital) is not what we are going to need in 50 years.”

That does not mean, however, that VA is averse to building new medical centers in veteran-growth areas around the country. “We are building a place in Las Vegas because veterans are still going there,” Peake said. “The population is growing. Orlando - veterans are going there. Denver - they’re not. The population is going to come down; it’s not going to be there in 20 or 30 years. So, we won’t need that many beds. Denver itself is going to grow but not with veterans, unless something really changes.”

Part of Peake’s plan called for reducing the 50?bed spinal-cord injury center to no more than 30 beds - 12 in the leased hospital space and 18 in a nursing home-style building VA calls a restorative care center. “The number of truly severely injured veterans (from Iraq and Afghanistan) is very small,” says Glen Gripper, VISN 19 director. “We have the inpatient facilities to take care of them.”

Matt Keil, a quadriplegic who was shot in the neck by a sniper during his second tour in Iraq, is outraged by VA’s argument to expand outpatient services at the expense of a hospital VA itself described as a critical need in 2004. “Do we want one really great place for medical care here in Denver or marginal improvement across the state?” Keil asks. “Why is that OK? Do they get to say, ‘I’m sorry we took what you deserve off the table, and now you get this’?”

Keil’s wife, Tracy, is a veterans advocate and deeply involved in her husband’s care; she shares her husband’s frustration. “There is no polytrauma center in the middle of the country,” she says. “We need a polytrauma center around Denver.” She says such a center should be modeled after Craig Hospital, a private rehabilitation center in Englewood, Colo., where Keil was treated after he began seeking care outside VA.

Peake argues that technological advances in outpatient care and specialty medical centers make a new inpatient hospital unnecessary. That same mantra was often recited in the mainstream health-care industry in the 1990s but was abandoned after hospitals realized that aging baby boomers were creating unprecedented inpatient demand.

“Every hospital in the metro area is growing, not shrinking,” says American Legion Past National Commander Thomas L. Bock of Aurora, Colo. “So how is it that VA thinks its patient population is going to shrink? Are they assuming there aren’t going to be any more wars and, magically, kids won’t need health care?”

A “hospital within a hospital” is a term Peake uses to describe leasing floors in the future UCH inpatient tower. “This is going to be the most beautiful VA footprint you’ve ever seen,” Peake said in August. “It’s right on the light rail. It will be a tremendous ambulatory environment. We want to build the parking into it, so that we have adequate parking for the first time. We want to be on the campus there (with) our academic partners.”

Colorado veterans say the proposal fails to recognize that veterans have different health-care needs from others, says Luan Jones, who struggles to help a 30-year-old family friend get treatment for the severe PTSD he acquired in Iraq. The friend greatly fears crowded hallways and intense downtown traffic. It’s nearly impossible to get him to seek care in the aging Denver VA Medical Center.

“If you lease a couple of floors in a new hospital, it’s doing the same thing to veterans they are doing at the downtown hospital,” Jones says. “Should we really let them run these guys with PTSD through a gantlet of people every time they go for treatment? This sort of stress greatly exacerbates their medical condition.”

Adding yet another level of uncertainty: a new VA secretary will take office in January. Today’s plan could be scrapped or revised, further delaying action. Colorado Legionnaires hope the new secretary will revive plans for a new Denver VA Medical Center.

Veterans say they are more than willing to help VA find ways to save construction costs. One idea they suggest is that VA build a new inpatient hospital and lease a couple of floors to UCH. Bock and other veterans say they will take their own shovels to Fitzsimons and start building a new hospital on their own, if something doesn’t happen immediately.

Meanwhile, veterans are left feeling ignored. “We’ve got all of the money to send them over there to fight,” Jones says. “But we’ve got nothing to take care of them once they return.”