Disabled doughboy dies at 108.

Jan. 7, 2004 marked the end of an era and the final breath of the group of men responsible for the founding of the DAV. Alfred R. Pugh, the last living combat-wounded veteran of World War I, died at the Bay Pines VA Medical Center in Florida just 10 days short of his 109th birthday.

He was one of the brightest old men I've ever met," said Larry Christman, Bay Pines spokesman. "We're seeing the end of an era with Al's passing."

Pugh's Stories of service and subsequent challenges as a disabled veteran were chronicled in The Price of Their Blood: Profiles in Spirit, by the late Jesse Brown and author Daniel Paisner. The following are excerpts from the chapter on Pugh which provide a vivid portrait of our nation's last disabled doughboy.

A Living History

At 108 years old, Alfred Pugh is very likely the oldest living combat-wounded veteran in the United States, although he bristles at the distinction. It's not the age that gets his goat, or the fact that he's outlasted all but a hearty few of his contemporaries. He minds the attention being called to a disabling injury he's spent a lifetime regarding as no injury at all.

"I took a little mustard gas is all it was," he says. "Knocked me out for a little. There's a lot of guys suffered a lot more than that."

Perhaps, but those numbers dwindle when set against the 85 years Pugh has endured lingering respiratory damage and a chronic laryngitis from inhaling the toxin all those years ago. He was left speaking in a distinctive, horse whisper that sounds borrowed from an old gangster movie.

"The Lord ain't ready for me, and the devil won't have me," he teases, an easy one-liner he's adopted to explain and possibly justify his longevity.

These days, Pugh presides as something of a living leg end on the nursing home wing at the Bay Pines VA Medical Center in Madeira Beach, Florida, where he has lived since 1946, and where he regularly regales staff, visitors, and fellow veterans with the ear for detail he developed when he was blinded by macular degeneration in the early 1980s.

Pugh has stories to tell: the stories of a long, long lifetime, and there's hardly a detail lost to the years. It's almost like a parlor trick, the way Pugh has kept his memories close. He began working at it in earnest when he lost his sight; he thought it would be a good mental exercise to pass those first years in darkness by going over the particulars of his life.

Pugh recalls everything. He remembers the house in which he grew up in Portland. Maine, which was lovingly built by his part-time carpenter father to accommodate his sprawling family. He remembers the itinerant schedule of his father, who worked in a Pittsburgh steel mill half the year, commuting back to Maine when his schedule allowed. And, he remembers the French he learned as a small boy.

He was hardly alone in learning French as a child: about half the families in Pugh's hometown were of French-Canadian descent, and when he graduated from Westbrook High School in 1915, this was very much on the minds of his friends and neighbors. There was a real rooting interest in how France fared in the Great War.

With such a meticulous, conditioned memory, Pugh calls to mind incidents of the Great War like they happened yesterday. He remembers how France was a "sitting duck" against the powerful German army, how France and England had yet to form a true alliance, and how the valiant French troops went wild over the news that the "Yanks" would soon join their fight.

Best of all, Pugh remembers a particularly patriotic French-Canadian girl in his high school class who used to gather the students once a week to sing the French national anthem. "La Marseillaise." When the students had committed the song to memory (and to the young girl's satisfaction), it was sung at every Westbrook High School gathering, including graduation ceremonies, right alongside "The Star Spangled Banner."

Serendipitously, Pugh ran into the girl in France later on during the war. She was in a hospital near where he was stationed. She had become a nurse and wanted to work in the same part of the country where her father had been a physician, and their paths crossed in a makeshift hospital unit set up by the Red Cross.

Pugh weighs these memories and his lifelong collection of French friends against the prevailing anti-French mood of the country in the waive of the 2003 Iraqi War, and he struggles to understand the shift in the American perspective.

The rest of the world has never been far from Al Pugh's reach. He gets his news from a beat-up old radio that sits by his bed, an earpiece almost permanently fitted to his ear as an accommodation to his roommate, and Pugh doesn't like what he hears.

"We were told that my war would be the end of warfare," he told a reporter from the Washington Post, who visited Bay Pines in March, 2003, to gain a cross-section of veterans' perspectives on the looming war in Iraq. "And yet here I am, the oldest living veteran of World War One, and we ain't done yet."

He enlisted in 1917 and was immediately put through some rigorous paces with his fellow soldiers. The United States Army lead not fought in a war for generations, and the feeling was that the men needed time and training to be brought up to speed. For six months, Pugh's outfit slogged through mud and rain and snow and every imaginable condition, preparing for whatever they might face abroad, in France, they trained some more before joining the battle. Pugh was assigned to the 77th Infantry in France, and his face lights up when he recalls the grand welcome the American troops received when their ship came in. Thousands of French citizens lined the docks to welcome the troops, waved American flags, cheered, and sang, "Onward, Christian Soldier." Pugh remember feeling uplifted by all the attention, but, at the same time, he also felt like a rookie up against the hardened German enemy, soldiers who'd been fighting for two to three years by then. Arriving in Verdun, he says, was a revelation; he'd heard the reports of the devastation there, but it was quite another thing to take in that devastation firsthand. "Not a single thing was left standing," he says wistfully.

First, Pugh fought as part of an American-Canadian contingent of less than one hundred men. He rose quickly through the ranks as his unit moved through the French countryside. There were only five or six months of fighting before the armistice was signed. In that time, Pugh was promoted from private to sergeant--mostly, he thinks, on the back of his strong command of the language.

"When they figured out I could speak French, they started moving me around a lot," he says. "Different regiments. Different missions. They'd wake me up in the middle of the night if they needed something translated or if they were headed off in a new direction. They'd put me out at the head of our convoys because I could read the signs. I could ask questions."

In fact, Pugh believes that the reason he took such a direct hit by the mustard gas bombardment that left him with a lifetime of respiratory trouble was because he was out in front. The Germans only hit the front part of the column and most of the men were not seriously hurt. Indeed, the Canadians took the worst of it, aside from Pugh, Mustard gas, inhaled in significant doses, can sometimes prove fatal, and, in. Pugh's case, it very nearly did him in. It was the fall of 1918, and Pugh's company was positioned in the Argonne Forest. "We had no specific mission but to press forward," Pugh relates of his role in the Meusse-Argonne Offensive, one of the biggest and bloodiest battles of the war. "Our job was to push the Germans from their position, and next thing we knew they were on us with that gas." The Americans were not caught off guard completely because they knew the Germans would very likely use the gas to protect their position. The men had been issued a primitive style of gas mask as a precaution, but Pugh remembers the thing as so unwieldy and unworkable he didn't even bother with it. "It was a rubber mask," he says, "one size fits all, and on the inside, there was a little clamp, almost like a clothespin, which I guess you were supposed to fit onto your nose."

The gas left Pugh with no clear memory of the moments preceding the attack--the one stretch of time that's been lost in the long stretch of years--and knocked him unconscious for several days.

French and British medics later told him they feared for his life as they waited for him to recover. When he regained consciousness, he was itching to get back on the line. At first, doctors thought the laryngitis-like symptoms would go away over time, so Pugh wasn't too worried about his raspy voice. He wasn't too worried because the slight pain associated with deep breathing either, because he was told that his respiratory problems would dissipate as well. What worried him, really, was the fact that he wasn't making good use of his time, that the war was marching on without him, that he wasn't being allowed to make a meaningful difference. Pugh's injuries were serious enough to warrant medical attention, but he regarded diem as nothing much at all. He looked around at the men who had lost a limb, or an eye, or had suffered more apparent wounds, and he thought to himself, that's what it means to be injured. That's a ticket home. Me, that's ]fist a scratch, nothing to keep me from rejoining my regiment.

When he was finally cleared to resume work, Pugh's first assignment was to help sort an enormous backlog of mail from the United State. The mail was being administered by the French and delivered out to the American units, but whole bags of the stuff were being lost in translation, so it was thought that the fluent Pugh could convalesce while sorting through the mess of letters and redirect them to their proper units.

Soon, he had enough of that type of work and asked to be sent back to the field, although he never did return to a combat position. He was out in the French countryside, sleeping in tents, going through some of the same motions as the active-duty soldiers, but he never again took up arms in that war. The armistice was signed just six weeks after the attack at Argonne, so there wasn't much time for Pugh to return to active duty, anyway.

After the war, he took up with the railroad as if he'd never left. In 1923, he married his wife, Irene, a union that lasted until her death from Alzheimer's 53 years later. It was a loving, sustaining relationship, although it's been Pugh's abiding regret that they never lead any children of their own. But over the years, they adopted 16 nieces and nephews and provided them with a nurturing environment when their own parents were unable to do so.

"By Gad, I loved those kids," he says, and underneath the hoarse whisper, it's impossible to tell whether he's choking up at the memory or if it's just the mustard gas talking. The scar tissue in his throat was so damaged by the mustard gas attack at Argonne that Pugh constantly moistens his lips when he speaks, and the gesture usually suggests a man lost in thought. For Pugh, however, it Seems it's more than the gesture that gives him pause.

But those days have aided into memory, and Al Pugh knows it can be a sad and wearying thing to outlast the world and people you've known, However, he chooses to look on his longevity as a blessing instead of a tune. He's outlived his wife and his brothers and sisters and most of his nieces and his nephews. All of his friends from Westbrook. Maine, are long gone, as are his fellow soldiers from the Great War. In the darkness, he chooses to hear what he wants to hear, to remember what he wants to remember, to look ahead to the promise of a world more like the one he left behind than the one he now inhabits.