Vets of the Great War were the true tough guys

Kansas City Star: Vets of the Great War were the true tough guys

So I could have sworn I saw a headline last week announcing that Chuck Norris, that paragon of manly grit, had just turned 70.

But when I checked into it I discovered other stories announcing that he had turned 70 on the same date last year.

I was only briefly puzzled by the discrepancy before it hit me like a roundhouse kick to the jaw.

Chuck Norris doesn’t age. He endures.

OK, that’s my lame contribution to the canon of sayings about America’s premier hard guy.

But as tough as Chuck Norris is, or is supposed to be (Bruce Lee did jack him up pretty good in the movie “Return of the Dragon,”) I think even he would concede that the recently departed Jack LaLanne was a true example of American manhood.

I mean Churck Norris may have been a world champion karate fighter, but I don’t believe he ever swam underwater the length of the Golden Gate Bridge or towed 65 boats weighing thousands of pounds like LaLanne did.

Once he did 1,000 push-ups in just over 20 minutes.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t done 1,000 push-ups in the last 20 years.

As a kid I remember watching LaLanne’s TV show, although I can’t recall if I tried to exercise along with him. That show ran for decades and in recent years, LaLanne was known for hawking juicers and promoting healthy diet.

It worked for him. He lived to be 96.

But as fit and healthy and awe-inspiring as LaLanne was, I think he would have conceded that another recently departed American was more deserving of our respect and admiration.

When Frank Buckles died last month at the age of 110, he took the personal memories of a generation with him.

He was the last of the Doughboys, the young men of a bygone time who were hurled into the maelstrom of filth and gore that was the Western Front in World War I.

“Heroes” like Norris and LaLanne are one thing.

But we shouldn’t let the passage of time obscure the true heroism of men like Buckles. He may never have personally stepped into no-man’s land where young men fell in droves as machine guns scythed through their ranks, but through his longevity he came to represent them all.

It was a brutal, dehumanizing hell and Buckles was the last of millions who endured it.

I had just finished reading a book about the Doughboys when news came of Buckles’ death, so the vivid descriptions of that long-ago war were fresh in my mind.

I suspect, that even at 110, they were still fresh in Buckles’ mind, too. Those are the kinds of experiences that you wouldn’t forget.

And neither should we. They were the true tough guys among us.