When I'm old and gray, and have kids who I can force to listen to my stories, I'll tell them about how I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with Frank Buckles.

Buckles, of course, was the last known living World War I veteran. He died late Sunday at his home in Charles Town, W.V. His story has been told countless times by journalists like me who made the two-hour drive from Washington to his picturesque 330-acre farm. And I bet he told every one of those journalists, that his own story wasn't such a big deal.

At 16, Buckles was turned away from a U.S. Marines recruiting station because he was too young to enlist. He later went back to that same recruiting office and told them he was 21, but was rejected a second time because he wasn't heavy enough [In accounts to other reporters, Buckles said he was rejected on his second try for being flatfooted]. Eventually, he found an Army recruiter willing to take him.

He volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver, because he heard it was the quickest way to the front--and he wanted to be where the action was. He spent time in England and later France, but said he didn't come within 40 miles of the fighting. After the war's end in 1918, he was assigned to a prisoner-of-war escort company that was returning POWs to Germany.

Buckles recalled that when he arrived in Germany with the soldiers, a local German organization greeted the men with coffee. As he stood in line to get a cup himself, he told the elderly man serving him -- in a bit of German he'd picked up -- that the coffee was good.

The German, pleased that Buckles spoke his language, gave him a slice of potato bread. Buckles again thanked him in German, and the old man presented him with a slice of bologna.

"After that I was always encouraged to learn foreign languages," Buckles told me in an interview for the Chicago Tribune nearly four years ago. Even at 106, his bookshelves were filled with German, French, Italian and Spanish language books.

After a short stint working at the post office in Oklahoma after returning home from the war, Buckles spent much of the next three decades seeing the world and working in the shipping business.

Ironically, while he managed to come out of World War I as a soldier unscathed, he wasn't so lucky as a civilian during World War II. While he was in Manila on business in 1941, the Japanese invaded the Philippines and Buckles was taken prisoner.

He would spend more than three years as a prisoner of war. He lost more than 50 pounds during the time of his capture, and near the end of his internment, a Japanese guard caught an American as he tried to slip back into camp after heading out to forage for food.

"The Japanese guard told him to wait where he had stopped him," Buckles told me. "He came back with his gun and shot him right there." Buckles was among those rescued in a famous parachute mission by the 11th Airborne Division in February 1945.

Buckles took his role as the last veteran of the "War That Was to End all Wars" seriously, but he wasn't a braggart.

Over the years, Buckles probably retold his story to hundreds of journalists and historians. And in December 2009, at a spry 108, Buckles testified before Congress in support of a proposal to turn a Washington, D.C., monument honoring local residents who fought in World War I into a memorial honoring all Americans who served in the war.

When I visited him just before Memorial Day 2007, his daughter, Susannah Flanagan, was worried about wearing him out--and asked me and my colleague Pete Souza (now the White House photographer) to keep our interview to an hour. But Buckles kept telling us stories. Asking our opinion of what was going on in Iraq, and sharing his own concerns about the war.

After about two hours of chatting, Flanagan peaked in and offered a subtle cue for me to wrap it up. I thanked Buckles for sharing his remarkable story and service, but Buckles wouldn't have any of it

The way he saw it, he just happened to serve during a remarkable period of American history and lived longest to tell the world about it.