More than two million American men went to war in France during World War I.  Would you like to know how many of them are alive today?

Meet Frank Buckles–The lone surviving American veteran of World War I. (free registration required)

It’s an excellent essay. Here’s the final paragraph:

It’s hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It’s not that World War I will then become history; it’s been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can’t quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We can’t stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.

Yes we should. Read the article.