The Last of the Doughboys by Richard Rubin

This is a book that my husband, Andy, bought and left sitting around.  Richard Rubin did a considerable amount of work chasing down the last living American veterans of WWI, all centenarians, and as he relates in the NPR story below, it was a race against time.

The result is The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War, and it is a terrific read.  This is war, up-front and personal; no drones; no watching from the comfort of a living room with the camera directing your eye.  The stories are both uplifting and heartbreaking, all the more so because all these gentlemen have subsequently died during the the time Rubin took to compile the interviews and write the manuscript.  I'm very grateful he had the chance to do this work before time silenced them.

The part that is interesting from a policy perspective concerns just why and how WWI and these men became largely 'forgotten.'  I get the sense from my students that they see WWII and the Civil War as wars with valid causes, but that the origins of the First World War are so badly explained that casual observers only remember a few points from their high school western civ class--something to do with a bunch of ill-advised treaties and an unfortunately assassinated Archduke. It's sad because you can draw a line between  the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and WWII via the uncomfortable formation of  European and colonial nation-states, and thus learn a lot about how the national boundaries we have came to be.

Mr. Rubin appeared in NPR to talk about his book.