by Justin Nobel

With the recent death of Jack Babcock, Frank Woodruff Buckles is the last living World War One veteran in North America. He is 109 and lives on a farm in West Virginia.

Jack Babcock joined the Canadian Army at age 15 and in 1916 shipped to England to fight in the Great War. Because he was underage Babcock was forced to train with a group of teens that had also lied about their age called the Boys Battalion. The war ended before he saw action but more than 60,000 Canadian soldiers were killed, just under ten percent of the 650,000 that served. Babcock, who passed away last month at the age of 109, was the last one to die.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there were approximately 9,750,103 military deaths in World War One and more than 65 million personal participated in the war. With Babcock gone, there are just three verified World War One vets still alive; Claude Stanley Choules, who served in the British Royal Navy, Florence Beatrice Green who served as a waitress in the Women’s Royal Air Force and is the last surviving female vet and Frank Woodruff Buckles, who was a driver during the war and now lives on a farm in West Virginia. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Wadi al-Salam, in Najaf, Iraq is one of the largest cemeteries on earth. Its bloody history has spawned a slew of interesting news reports and also a video game, produced by a company that specializes in turning “real war news” into “real war games”.

In the summer of 2004, the Mahdi Army battled U.S. troops in Wadi al-Salam, one of the largest cemeteries on earth.

“We ambush their patrols and the Americans cannot get into the area, because it’s full of winding lanes and underground mausoleums,” a gunman named Abdul Zahra Hadi told a Reuters news reporter at the time. “We can hit and run and hide inside the many tombs.”

The cemetery, which holds the remains of millions and stretches for six miles, is said to contain the tomb of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, who founded the Shi’a branch of Islam and died in 661. To be buried near Ali, Shiites claim, is an act on par with 700 years of worship and will ensure bodies a hasty journey to heaven. Seeking such bliss, Shi’i Muslims have been sending their bodies to Wadi al-Salam, by hook or by crook, for many war torn centuries.

The traffic continued through the 20th century but in recent decades has been halted continuously by war. Saddam Hussein shut off the flow of corpses from Iran after the Iran-Iraq war started, in 1980. The war lasted 8 years. In 1991, Iraqi Shi’a’s rose against Hussein but the dictator crushed the rebellion. Rebels fled to the cemetery where they were tracked down and massacred. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Professor Marla Toyne’s class about death at the University of Western Ontario is one of a surprisingly few college courses on the topic. “In North America, we have had a sterilization of death,” says Toyne. (Photo by Justin Nobel)

Writing an obituary was their first assignment and next month Professor Marla Toyne’s students will visit a cemetery.

You can take a course on virtually anything in college: University of Iowa offers a class entitled, “The American Vacation”, students at Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky, can formally study the “Art of Walking” and at Georgetown, discussions revolve around time travel and the possibility of sentient robots in “Philosophy and Star Trek”. But, despite college student’s notoriously death-defying lifestyles, there are virtually no college courses on death. Toyne, an anthropologist at the University of Western Ontario who studies human sacrifice in the ancient tribes of Peru, believes that’s a problem, so she started a course on the topic.

Young adults may think they are immortal but they need to know about death, said Toyne. “As an adult you have to think about the future, and one thing that happens in the future is that death will come.”

The different ways it can come is the focus of her research. She studies the Incas, as well as the Chimu and Lambayeque tribes, who inhabited the deserts along the coast of Peru from the 12th to the 15th centuries. By looking at skeletons, Toyne can determine if people died naturally or violently, and amongst the indigenous cultures of Peru, violent deaths were common. “You have children who have frozen to death,” she said. “Some show evidence of vomiting, maybe they were forced an alcohol beverage. Some were buried alive. In other cases, throats were cut and a great deal of blood was spilled.” Read the rest of this entry »