James G. Dunton Major, United States Army

For World War I Vet, Roll Call Once More

By John P. Martin
Washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 10, 1998

James G. Dunton apologizes, more than once, for a memory that doesn’t always cooperate. It's like his eyes, his ears, his lungs, his muscles. They're still with him, just not as reliable as they once were. Besides, 99 years of memories is a lot to categorize. The mind doesn’t have search engines.

Some recollections haven’t escaped: waiting for his orders in a pup-tent outside the barracks in Columbus, Ohio, training at an ambulance camp in Allentown, Pa., shipping out from New York. The ride across the Atlantic was also unforgettable, being stuffed in hammocks stacked three high in a cramped cabin above the engine room, the roar, the fumes, the stormy weather that sent boys lurching to the railings, repaying the sea that made them sick.

Finally, they landed and Dunton, 18 and anxious, found himself where he had longed to go. He was in France, an American solider, doing his part to end The Great War.

From the outset, it was not the adventure the boy from Circleville, Ohio, had envisioned, nor one he fondly recounts. Dunton never saw combat, but saw its results, death taking young men, some after weeks of battle, some the same night they arrived.

Peace came a day past his 19th birthday and Dunton brought home a bum knee that would never leave him. But he also collected experiences that shaped him. He later wrote books for and about soldiers, combat and life, and served his country again in World War II.

Dunton insists he doesn’t recall too much of France, but the French remember him. On Wednesday, they will award the Falls Church man and 26 fellow U.S. veterans from World War I the Legion of Honor, that nation’s highest award.

They will do it because the day marks the 80th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the war. And because the soldiers like Dunton who brought that peace are nearly extinct.

Veterans organizations estimate close to 3,200 U.S. veterans of World War I are still living, but the numbers are quickly dropping. Six years ago, the U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home in Washington counted 29 such vets among its residents. The last three died in December.

"People don’t realize, it’s only a few more years, and we’re going to see the last World War I vets die," said Kerri Childress, a spokeswoman for the home.

She has urged the home’s administrators to accept any World War I serviceman who applies for residence there – and not just for military posterity. Time has turned their lives into the stories of the century.

They often begin in small towns from a long-faded era, towns like Circleville, 18 miles south of Columbus, where Dunton’s father was a doctor who made house calls in a horse-drawn buggy and teens lied about their age to don a uniform for battle an ocean away. His friends began enlisting after the United States joined the Allies in 1917; Dunton naturally wanted to follow.

But his father doubled as the Pickaway County coroner. The man had seen enough gunshot deaths to want to keep his son from war.

Their compromise was the Army’s Evacuation Ambulance Corps, which Dunton thought would carry him close to the action and his father hoped would drive Dunton toward a career in medicine.

Neither happened.

In the spring of 1918, the transport ship delivered Dunton and several hundred troops to Brest, a French coastal town. They marched four miles in a rainstorm, then pitched tents on the camp parade grounds because the barracks were full.

The ambulances they brought were shoddy, four old Chevrolets that spent as much time being repaired as they did bouncing on the uneven roads between the hospitals and the forward troops.

His commander discovered Dunton could type and appointed him the company clerk. The boy who longed for adventure found himself lugging a field desk with a fold-out typewriter and pounding out the morning report each day.

He watched transport ships bring hundreds of new soldiers, many carrying strains of the lethal Spanish influenza sweeping the United States. Some died the night they arrived.

"It was a horrible, horrible thing," Dunton said. "It wasn’t combat, but it sure was just as bad in a way."

One morning he overheard an Army inspector general complaining that he needed someone to prepare his reports as he traveled throughout France. Dunton volunteered.

The path carried them along the Western edge of France and to places like Le Mans and Tours but not much closer to the fighting that claimed of thousands American soldiers. Ultimately, about 116,000 Americans died in France during the war.

Dunton was just outside of Paris on Nov. 11, 1918, when news of the Armistice burned through the countryside like a lit fuse. "It’s amazing how fast word can spread person to person," he said, drifting back for a minute.

He had turned 19 the day before. The Armistice was a greater reason to celebrate. He remembers being in the streets and earning his hangover.

After the treaty, Dunton spent three months in Aberdeen, Scotland, waiting to be shipped home. There, a largely ignored knee injury he suffered in a minor car crash in France ballooned into a medical nightmare. By the time he arrived home in a hospital ship, a cast covered most of his right leg. Eight decades of knee pain lay ahead.

In the ensuing years, he collected two degrees from Harvard University and became a teacher and writer. His first novel, Wild Asses, spun the coincidental tale of veterans who returned from the war to attend Harvard and their conflicts with the prep school boys who had stayed home.

Another book, A Maid and A Million Men, was a Mulan-like story about a young girl who poses as her twin brother and ships out as an American solider to fight in France. The U.S. Army reprinted the book for its soldiers in World War II.

Dunton served then, too. At 42, he was among the oldest draftees, and became a public relations officer in the U.S. occupation forces in Japan as the war there was ending. With him came his new wife, Dorothy, a Circleville girl whose family his father once treated.

He rose to major and worked as a public affairs officer in the Defense Department until 1961. He returned to France twice in the 1950s, but then only to Paris.

Fifty-four years after they married, the Duntons sat last week in the living room of the Falls Church home they bought for $1,000 down in 1950.

Its walls hold an autographed photo from Gen. George C. Marshall, one of his bosses; a plaque marking his 1961 retirement; others noting his service to veterans organizations and as a longtime patron of the National Cherry Blossom Festival. Copies of his novels rest in a bookcase.

His biggest battle now is to reach 100. Dunton endured chest surgery less than a month ago and can’t shake his bronchitis. He uses an oxygen machine a few times a day. His walking stick is never out of reach and a black cap keeps the chill off his hairless dome.

A good day means getting up and completing one task in the morning. If his eyes feel up to it, he’ll take a stab at reading the newspaper or a magazine under a magnifying lamp. He spent the last two Memorial Days in hospitals. They stopped going to Veterans Day festivities about five years ago, but will make an exception on Wednesday.

"I’m just trying to stick around long enough to get there," Dunton cracked.

He’s one of 27 veterans nationwide who will receive the Legion of Honor medal and one of two mobile enough to attend the ceremony at the French embassy. The other is Frank Buckles of West Virginia, two years Dunton’s junior. A handful of Americans are chosen for different versions of the honor each year.

Past recipients include President Ronald Reagan, Ret. U.S. Gen. Colin Powell, governors and artists. French officials are still sorting through nearly 300 applications from other U.S. veterans who might qualify for the award.

"Time is of the essence," said Jean Raphael-Peytregnet, an embassy spokesman. "We are working days and nights for that because we know that they are old."

One friend watching Dunton from afar is Ret. Maj. Fred J. Meyer. The two were stationed together in Yokohama, Japan, after World War II and have regularly traded letters in the years since. As often as not these days, their correspondence includes a list of who has died.

Meyer, 82, last saw Dunton in April 1997. They met in Arizona, with a third member of their company who has since passed. Dunton was armed with a fifth of whiskey, which he used to hoist eloquent toasts to their brothers, fallen and forgotten.

Meyer returned home to Coulee Dam, Wash., and bought his own whiskey bottle. It sits unsealed on a shelf, waiting for the day he and Dunton meet again, he said.

Or if it becomes clear they won’t meet again.

"If he should pass on before I do, I’m gonna open that bottle and have three or four hefty toasts," Meyer said. "What a great fella."

John P. Martin can be reached at martinj@washingtonpost.com or by phone at 703-469-3179.

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