On November 11, 1999 The Washington Post reported: “Two weeks ago Captain Earl R Fox learned that he is the last world war II veteran still on active duty in the US armed forces.” The Post wrote that Fox described himself as “the last direct physical link between today’s military and the warriors of Midway, Normandy and Iwo Jima.”
On November 11, 2004 some thirteen thousand coalition troops were in Anbar province, Iraq, fighting the deadliest battle of the War in Iraq. Armistice Day, 2004, was war at its most horrible.