http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/05/world_war_i_veteran_the_last_of_the_great_war_s_soldiers_speak.html

This is an excerpt from Richard Rubin’s The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War, the story of a decadelong odyssey to recover the stories of the forgotten world war. Rubin interviewed dozens of American World War I veterans for the book, including William J. Lake, a private in the U.S. Army’s 91^st (“Wild West”) Division who was drafted in 1917 and served with a machine gun crew in France. At the time of the interview, in October 2003, Lake was 107; he died in June 2004. This excerpt was first published in 2013 and is reprinted below: