Page 12 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • June 1, 2011 cially ancient when I was in my twenties. One of my uncles took a dose of gas in the Argonne Forest and was a semiinvalid for the rest of his life. I was in awe of these guys. As a young newsman, I interviewed two pilots who had won their wings in France with the Lafayette Escadrille or the Army Air Service of the American Expeditionary Force. One was Pap Dolan of Ridgewood, who also flew in World War II as an intelligence officer. They didn’t hate “the enemy,” but they gloried in their own courage – and they were right. Men with that kind of courage and dedication are almost an endangered species. In terms of our ability to honor them in person, they are truly a Lost Generation now. How do we mark the passing of soldiers who fought so bravely and well for what they believed in? We keep the battlefields intact and unblemished by commercialism. This isn’t always easy. Earlier this year, Walmart was faced down by James McPherson, David McCullough, and Robert Duvall to convince the chain not to build a superstore in the terrain that saw the battle of the Wilderness, some of the bloodiest fighting in the endgame of the Civil War. In 2009, the Orange County (Virginia) Board of Supervisors approved a permit to construct the Walmart Supercenter and associated commercial development in the Wilderness Battlefield, where 185,000 Americans fought and 30,000 were killed or grievously wounded. The superstore plan was no doubt conceived with the idea of providing jobs for people so desperate for work that they would submit to the 21st century version of chattel slavery. (We’ll tell you whom you can date, and you can forget about collective bargaining for decent wages.) Maybe nobody in the commercial sector wants us to remember a genuine battle for freedom and human rights, either. About 250 historians weighed in to point out that this plan was an obscene desecration of a battlefield where Americans were killed in such awful numbers. No matter what your take on the Civil War, it was the turning point of American history, and killed more Americans than all the somewhat dubious foreign adventures foisted off on us by bankers and foreign interests. Smacking a superstore in the middle of the battlefield is such an awful idea that anybody who can’t understand why it’s bad has to be some kind of corporate zombie who hasn’t worn a uniform since he was a Cub Scout, and maybe not then. This wasn’t the Little League or Pop Warner. These were brave young men in their teens or early twenties who hadn’t had a life yet and didn’t want to die. They deserve a better monument than a cash register. McPherson, McCullough, and Duvall turned out to remind us of what America should be all about: We should honor men who died for what they believed in above dollars and cents. The Walmart project tanked – and that’s good. The Wilderness, and Gettysburg, and Antietam aren’t just part of the American heritage – they’re part of the heritage of humanity. They deserve better than to be turned into superstores with labor policies based on peonage selling products made in China because the Japanese and South Koreans are more broke than we are. America’s definitive battle for those who live elsewhere is Custer’s Last Stand, the battle of the Little Bighorn. We’ve got troubles out there, too. The museum, which was built in the battle zone, has serious issues both with size and with structure. It’s too small and too compromised to house the superb collection of materials that commemorate America’s most famous battle. The issues here are clear-cut. We have to save the items in the museum, get the museum off the battlefield, and set up a really attractive visitor center so tourists who come from around the world can learn what really happened and scholars can continue to access photographs and maps that haven’t been ruined by water damage. Plans exist to build a museum that can do the job, and restore the battle zone to a semblance of its original condition. All it takes is money. Anybody who cares about America should support these plans. We need to get a visitor center at this most epochal of America’s battlefields worthy of the importance of this battle. Face it: The Little Bighorn, even more than Gettysburg, is THE American battle as far as Europeans and Asians are concerned. Mention any other Civil War general in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, or Tokyo and people’s eyes glaze over. Mention Custer, and they spring back to life. This is the battle that had it all: America’s epic clash between the original inhabitants and the newcomers who carried the future in their saddlebags. Here we have brave men on both sides bashing it out to save their families. I think we’re all into that today. What other American battle can you name where one key player (Isaiah Dorman) was African-American, and where another key player (Frank Grouard) was a mixedblood Hawaiian? Except for the sickly Nevin, Custer’s whole male family – three brothers, a nephew, and a brother-in-law – died on the battlefield. The Little Bighorn Museum never let me down when I needed it. This museum is a critical tourist attraction. Let’s slide off our high horse and admit the importance. Kim Il Sung choreographed the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25: the anniversary of Custer’s Last Stand. Numerology is an obsession in Asia, among friend and foe alike. This battlefield needs to be saved. Saving America’s great battlefields could be the best way to honor those who fought there and, ultimately, to honor America and the soldiers who fought for America. We should all think about this, not just on Memorial Day, but every day of the year. This Memorial Day, there was a special note of nostalgia and sadness as America celebrated the solemn holiday without a single World War I veteran to salute. Frank Buckles, the last American veteran of World War I, died on Feb. 27 at 110 years of age. Buckles died just a few months before Claude Choules, the last Anglo-Saxon combat veteran of World War I, died in Australia. Buckles never saw combat up close, but, as a motorcycle courier, he rushed messages to the Western Front. As an ambulance driver, he evacuated wounded soldiers and dead soldiers from the front. He also shared his food with French children who were near starvation. He was a real soldier, and Americans honored his service at the time and continued to bestow awards on him as the other veterans dwindled in numbers until Buckles – who also survived three years as a civilian prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines – was the only American World War I veteran left. It goes without saying that there will never been another man like him, and perhaps there will never be another generation like his. “Every last one of us Yanks believed we’d wrap this thing up in a month or two and head back home before harvest,” Buckles said “We were the typical cocky Americans no one wants around, until they need help winning a war.” Buckles grew up around farming, like a great many soldiers of the World War I generation, and the rights and wrongs of the situation were pretty clear to him. Nobody ever told him that the Pope tried to broker an armistice in 1916 that the Germans accepted and the Allies rejected because the Allies expected American help. Nobody told him, either, that American bank loans to Britain were one percent of American bank loans to Germany. Liberals and conservatives alike later viewed World War I with revulsion, but those who fought, or supported the fighters, had fewer doubts. “If your country needs you, you should be right there, that is the way I felt when I was young, and that’s the way I feel today,” Buckles said. He later worked in the merchant marine and learned German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and a bit of Japanese, but his patriotism – wholesome, home-grown, and not exposed to a deep study of international diplomacy – never wavered. Men with his kind of courage will always be a national asset. We can remember them with pride – but how do we remember them when they’re no longer around? Time is relentless. Charles Windolph, the last white man to fight at Custer’s Last Stand with the seven surviving companies on Reno Hill, lasted until I was five years old. I was a kid in middle school when the last Union Civil War veteran, Albert Woolson, died. I remember we kids were all into the Civil War, and once marched from the schoolhouse to a nearby woodland park singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with a flag fluttering over us, as if we were ready for battle instead of the sixth grade picnic. The last veterans of the later Indian Wars and the Spanish-American War were still alive when I was in my teens. I remember World War I veterans as men who weren’t espe- Honoring the veterans of previous generations Twenty-four teachers and staff members from Hawes School in Ridgewood recently participated in the New Jersey Half Marathon in Long Branch, NJ. The staff raised $4,800 for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Front row: Jaclynn Sepede, Kasey Burde, Susan Enright, Ellen Raupp, Jill Rota, Julie Berry, Patty Polise, Jessica Cassidy. Front Center: Debbie Bonaguaro. Middle row: Erika Kulhanjian, Silvia Acosta, Jamie Koller, Debbie Fink, GeorgeAnn Starace, and Joe Staunton. Back row: Dr. Semendinger, Debbie Caruso, Shirley Kolkebeck, Pat Polise, John Otterstedt, Karen Coates, Chuck Nebbia, and Kathy DeAngelo. Running for a cause