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Preface
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ix I stood in front of the assistant superintendent’s living quarters at the MeuseArgonne American Cemetery one unseasonably warm late March afternoon in 2002 and gazed in utter amazement at the sea of crosses and Stars of David on the slopes below me. It was the end of two weeks of battlefield trekking, the first week having been spent covering World War II sites and the second stomping the shell-pocked fields of the First World War. The warm, sunny day lifted my spirits; after nearly fourteen days of studying war and now standing in the midst of the largest U.S. cemetery in Europe, I was somewhat depressed. So many dead, so many tears back home. Lorna Rahanian, wife of Craig Rahanian , the cemetery’s assistant superintendent and my gracious host, sensed that I was in a funk. She brought me a glass of wine and tried to cheer me up. She asked me about my family, and like any proud dad, I told her more than she probably wanted to know about my two sons. At that time my oldest was nineteen and the other a few years younger. Then I thought about the thousands of young men buried in this vast cemetery, some of whom were the same ages as my sons, and my eyes began to well with tears. I asked Lorna why she and Craig did not have children. I cannot recall the reasons she gave me, but I will never forget how she concluded the conversation. She pointed to the graves and told me, “They are all my sons out there.” Even those who we call unknown soldiers now had a virtual mother to look over them. As long as Lorna was there, they would not be forgotten. Her proximity to the mortal remains of so many young Americans made their memory her own. Preface x / Preface A few months later, I told a colleague about the trip and my experience in the cemetery. He informed me that he had a great uncle who had been killed during World War I, and he was certain that the young soldier was buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. He wished he had known ahead of time that I was going to France, for he would have liked to have had a photograph of his relative’s grave. A few days later the same colleague brought a large, oval, colorized photograph to my office; in it, a proud young man in his olive-drab uniform, surrounded by flags and patriotic icons, smiled at me from 1918. Enclosed in convex glass, the image is mounted in an ornately carved frame with a brass plaque inscribed: Corp. Paul L. Peppard Co. G 307 Infantry Died October 5, 1918 Knowing that the American Battle Monuments Commission, the executive agency responsible for overseas U.S. military cemeteries, maintained an online database of burials, I decided to look him up on the commission’s Web site. In an instant, I could tell Corporal Peppard’s great nephew where his mother’s uncle was buried. But he was not laid to rest in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, at least not in an identified grave. Instead, he was listed on the Tablets of the Missing next to the cemetery’s chapel. Corporal Peppard indeed was killed on October, 5, 1918, and since the commission database indicated he was a member of the 77th Division—the same command of which the famous “Lost Battalion” was a part—he probably perished in an operation intended to rescue the remnants of that beleaguered, isolated force. My colleague was astonished. I had just told him more about his “Uncle Paul” than anyone in his family had ever known. I had helped close a chapter in a tragic episode of his family’s history. What is so sad is that the lives of most of the American dead of World War I, whether identified or not, are unknown to recent generations. These men are the inspiration for this anthology. This book is not a history of World War I, nor is it a history of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Western Front. Rather, it is a collection of essays that examines how that wartime generation and those that followed have remembered or commemorated individuals, groups, and military organizations that comprised the AEF. The essays are divided into three sections: “Remembering the AEF,” “Soldiers and Their Units in Battle and Beyond,” and “The AEF in...