Today is Armistice Day. That's what it was originally called. Ninety years ago today on the eleventh hour of the day the 'war to end all wars' ended.

I cannot help but to think of Ed Nedemier, a corn-fed and raised farm boy from Iowa, who, in 1917 was shipped off to France to fight the boche. Upon seeing the Statue of Liberty as he left the harbor in New York, he told me he "feared I would never return." He did. He raised children. Worked as a farmer, a factory worker and a newspaper printing press foreman until he retired. He watched his children have children of their own, and then he watched his children's children have children. Then he watched his children die, one in a war in which the one he waged was supposed to prevent.

In our nearly two hour long interview (it was in 1993 and it was for an undergraduate history project) Ed marveled me with stories of the Western Front, the stench of the trenches, the sounds of the German artillery and the whistles that officers used to signify an advance. Ed was well into his nineties by then. He had lied about his age and enlisted a year younger than was allowed at the time. His hands were wrinkled and worn from years of work, but still they were soft and gentle. He was a tall man. At one point in his life he was 6'1". But age had run its course and he stood before me stooped, gray, bespectacled but still his mind was sharp as ever. At one point he brought out a 1917 Mauser. "I bought it from a German for one dollar," he told me. The gun was in mint condition and he said he had always wondered how many men it had killed.

Ed had one goal at that late point in his life: to be the last American WWI veteran. To that end he sent out a monthly newsletter to all the remaining WWI veterans living in America. "It keeps my mind busy and that keeps me alive," he told me. He always sent me a copy (and I have them in storage even now.) We also maintained a correspondence for a few years, even while I was living in Korea. But at some point the letters stop coming and I knew why. Fate is ever cruel and did not grant him his last wish.

But I remember Ed. I can see his smile even today as I traipse around another of our twentieth century battlefields, trying to discover the life and death of my uncle. I remember Ed's beaming pride in a younger, kinder America and I miss him even now.

Today, we remember Ed, and millions of others in France, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Germany and Russia who fell on the battlefield or lived long lives afterwards. And today I remember Ed, for his warmth, simple pride and his memories.