TRAVERSE CITY -- America's last surviving World War I veteran is 108. World War II veterans are dying at the rate of more than 1,000 a day. And Vietnam War veterans now are collecting Social Security benefits.
If ever there was a need to keep their stories alive, it's now.
It's a fact that seems to be hitting home as groups everywhere step up their efforts to remember the American war experience. Last week the National World War II Museum opened its new complex featuring a reproduction canteen and a state-of-the-art theater -- home of a Tom Hanks-produced 4-D "cinematic experience" on the war. The Senate introduced a bill to rededicate and rename the District of Columbia War Memorial on the Washington Mall the "National and District of Columbia World War I Memorial." And Tributes.com, the online resource for local and national obituary news, announced the launch of a new section on its Web site dedicated to military tributes.
State and local efforts aren't far behind. In West Virginia, archives and history officials are working to develop online biographies for all 11,427 soldiers whose names are carved in the West Virginia Veterans Memorial. In Michigan, a documentary about the area's World War I soldiers known as the Polar Bears airs today on a Detroit PBS station and Nov. 16 on WCMU-TV.
"The memories of that war are rapidly fading," said Michael Rutledge, who tries to keep the stories alive through classes on military history and the first and second world wars at Traverse City College Preparatory Academy.
An Army careerist who served in the Persian Gulf War, Rutledge calls on novels, diaries and other first-person accounts to help tell the story of war. Besides well-known books like Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" and Ernst Junger's "Storm of Steel," he draws on a volume by the late local Holocaust survivor Harry Burger, whose daughter attends the school.
"He was a soldier in the war but he fought as a partisan. He was with other partisans who lived in the mountains in the Italian Alps for pretty much the whole war," Rutledge said. "It's honest and it's raw. That's the beauty of the primary source when you're studying something like this. You want it in the words of the person who went through it."
Rutledge said the classes are popular with students for whom "war" means the recent conflicts in the Middle East.
"It's something that they see a lot on television and I think they want to know more. Hopefully they want to find out what's really happening, not the fictional version," he said.
Senior Walter Hoover was born long after other wars ended, but has seen them in movies.
"In my opinion Hollywood really corrupts a lot of truth about what war is. They're trying to sell tickets," said Hoover, 17, a martial arts practitioner who took Rutledge's military history class to learn about the art and strategy of combat. "The veterans you talk to from World War II and Vietnam and earlier world wars have the truth about war and a deeper understanding of war and how horrific it is."
Learning about veterans' experiences first-hand allows younger generations to "put themselves in the soldiers' shoes," Hoover said. Yet many veterans are reluctant to revisit their war days unless pressed.
"Some of the World War II veterans never really talk about their experiences or what they've done," said John Korzek, who helps keep their stories alive by creating military displays for them and their families. "The displays, when we're working on them, actually get them talking to the families about their experiences."
A Vietnam veteran and retired Michigan State Police detective, Korzek began making law enforcement displays for retiring friends on the police force back in 1980. Now his Special Tributes, which he operates in a shop above his Old Mission Peninsula garage, is a retirement hobby and business that includes military, memorial, graduation and other displays.
Korzek said the displays are similar to shadow boxes and capture military service in words and objects like military medals, ribbons, patches, insignias, commendations, mission logbooks, photos, certificates and other memorabilia.
"Instead of all of that stuff sitting in a sock drawer, I put it in a display," he said, adding that he gets help from his wife, Sandy.
Retired police officer Keith Smith had a display made for his father, Donald Smith, who served under Gen. George S. Patton in World War II and landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. Then he ordered another for his mother- and father-in-law, Joseph and Belle Mullen, who met and married in uniform -- Belle was a nurse, Joe a hospital administrator -- while serving in the Army Air Force. When Joe died, the shadow box was displayed at his funeral.
Smith said the displays are not just tributes to those who served but catalysts for releasing their never-before-shared memories.
"I think it just brings good and bad memories back and I think this late in life veterans just want to tell their stories. It's turned families around," he said.
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