It was a rare gathering involving American service members from a bygone era, exemplifying a sense of “pride” as many of their military colleagues have long since passed.
About a dozen World War II veterans, all older than age 100, gathered Sunday at the Texas Military Forces Museum at Camp Mabry in Austin, Texas, drawing hundreds of visitors who came to hear firsthand accounts before all the war’s survivors are gone.
The event, called the Gathering of WWII Heroes, was organized by The War Remembered, an oral history project hosted by the museum on Austin Museum Day as part of an annual event that draws crowds to the city’s museums.
Patrick Reed, who founded the project, told Military.com he timed the gathering to that day to give the veterans the largest possible audience.
The scarcity of those veterans is what made the day notable. Fewer than 0.2% of the 16.4 million Americans who served in World War II are still living as of 2026, with the youngest in their 90s, according to the National WWII Museum.
Just under 2,000 WWII veterans live in Texas.
A Rifleman Stands
One moment captured what the gathering meant to the men it honored.
Chester “Buck” Sloan carried a Browning Automatic Rifle with the 2nd Infantry Division from Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge, where he was wounded. He uses a wheelchair and has difficulty standing.
When a member of the museum’s living-history detachment, Beckett Pogue, offered to let him hold a BAR, Sloan managed to stand and take the weapon in his hands.
“The moment he did that, Buck was solid as a rock, and you could see the pride in his eyes,” the museum’s director, Jeff Hunt, told Military.com. “He wasn’t over 100 years old any longer. He was in his 20s again and still a soldier.”
Hunt said Sloan told Pogue it meant a great deal to hold a BAR one more time.
The Stories They Told
The veterans recounted combat, captivity, and the lives they built after the war.
Joe Cucinotta, who served with the 143rd Infantry Regiment of the 36th Infantry Division, was captured after the Rapido River crossing in Italy and spent 15 months as a prisoner of war, according to the Texas Standard.
Bernard Snyder, who served in the Pacific, spoke about the antisemitism he and his brother had known and a promise the two made overseas to return home and fight it.
“There was a lot of discrimination,” Snyder said. “And we said, ‘When we get back to Austin, we’re going to change that.'”
Jose Mendez, who served with the 1st Infantry Division, described the discrimination Latinos faced afterward.
Karl Schmitt did not soften what he had lived through. “War is a dirty, nasty thing,” Schmitt said at the event, according to Reed. “He trained to kill me, and I trained to kill him. That’s awful.”
A Fate Learned Finally
The most striking moment came the day after the gathering, when Cucinotta returned to tour the museum.
In its gallery devoted to the 36th Infantry Division, a Texas Army National Guard unit, an interactive exhibit lets visitors look up men who served in the division.
Cucinotta asked the museum’s curator, Jeremy LeCrone, to search for his old tent mate named Emory T. Butts, whom he remembered as a big West Virginian who had worked on the railroad before the war.
The record showed that Butts had been killed during the Rapido River fighting.
Cucinotta had not known his friend’s fate for 82 years, Hunt said, and learned it at the museum.
Gathering a Dozen Centenarians
Assembling the veterans took months of work.
Reed said he extended roughly 65 to 70 invitations to World War II veterans across Texas, by telephone and letter, reaching out to men and women he had met through his oral-history interviews, to local nursing homes, and to veterans he found in news articles.
Some he could not reach, and some who responded were physically unable to attend.
The War Remembered covered travel and lodging for those coming from out of town, Reed said. Much of the effort went into coordinating with the families most veterans depend on, keeping the centenarians safe and comfortable.
The Texas National Guard took part in honoring them. Brig. Gen. Tanya Trout, director of the Joint Staff of the Texas Military Department, and Col. Kenneth “Ross” Walker, acting commander of the 36th Infantry Division, greeted the veterans, Hunt said.
A living history honor guard in period uniforms let the men handle weapons like the ones they carried 80 years ago. Volunteer John Klier gave some of them rides in his restored World War II jeep.
Why It Matters Now
Both organizers said the value of the day was the direct connection between the veterans and the public.
“The overwhelming majority of those individual stories are already lost to history,” Hunt said. “Events like the one just hosted at the Texas Military Forces Museum will soon become impossible because the veterans will be gone.
“We have to capture the last few remaining stories while we still can.”
Reed said the in-person encounters reached people in a way that books cannot, pointing to a woman from France who wanted her children to meet the men who liberated her country.
A fifth grader who reads everything he can about the war was also present, as was a veteran who had believed he was one of the last of his generation still living—until he met the others in the room.
Reed said The War Remembered hopes to hold more gatherings and wants to reach families whose relatives served, so their accounts can be recorded for posterity. Hunt said they had already begun discussing another event, possibly around Veterans Day.
Families can contact the project through its website, thewarremembered.org.
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