Tracing the lives of those who served

ST. AUGUSTINE — Marie Oury came to the veterans' cemetery in this historic city Thursday, her first visit there, and looked down upon the gravestones of the two World War I veterans whose lives she had traced: Buster Williams and Jason Waitman.

She's a graduate history student at the University of Central Florida, working on a project with the Department of Veterans Affairs to tell the stories of veterans buried in national cemeteries, people such as Williams and Waitman.

They were black men, drafted into the Army, who left their Florida homes to join the battle in France, in a terrible war that ended 100 Novembers ago.

They left no memoirs or diaries, so she pieced their stories together from census information, military records, ship passenger lists and death records.

Williams, born in South Carolina in 1884, worked on a farm in Elkton. He likely lied about his age, shaving off four years so he would be thought young enough to join, perhaps motivated by better money in the Army.

He crossed the Atlantic on the USS Mount Vernon in August 1918, and worked at an Army depot in France until the next July.

Waitman, born in Columbia County in 1895, was a driver for the St. Augustine Ice Company. He took the USS Leviathan to France, landing a day before the war's end.

He stayed there until July as well, working with the 547th Engineers to provide wood for American troops, for construction projects and winter fires.

Oury is a native of France, and during the summer she did research in her home country for the project, which is called the Veterans Legacy Program.

She cried at the grave there of a soldier whose life she had studied, and at old battlefields she pondered the sacrifices made by many.

"I kept on thinking how Floridians came all the way to this unknown country, in this unknown territory, to fight in such a hell," she said. "I don't know how they made this sacrifice, this ultimate sacrifice, for a country they didn't know, a culture they didn't know, for that ultimate goal of freedom."

Oury was part of a group from UCF that gave a presentation Thursday on the school's collaboration with the Department of Veterans Affairs. They held it at the St. Augustine National Cemetery on Marine Street, where 2,823 people are buried, a picturesque spot just south of downtown.

Barbara Gannon, an associate professor of history at UCF, said there were two black Army divisions that fought in World War I, the 92nd and the 93rd. Most African-Americans, though, were consigned to service units or labor units.

That was a time in this country of much strong racism, and African-American troops continued to face that during the war, Gannon said: "Because of legalized segregation and disenfranchisement, they were in no way, shape or form seen as equals."

Oury found that both Waitman and Williams married after the war and lived and worked in St. Johns County.

Jason Waitman came back to America on the USS Floridian and went back to work in St. Augustine as an iceman. He died in December 1936 of lobar pneumonia.

After coming home on the USS Kroonland, Buster Williams was a laborer, in a cemetery and elsewhere, but saved enough money to buy a house by 1930. He and his wife had three children, though in 1938 their daughter Audrey died of malaria at 17.

Williams lived until December 1945, dying just months after the end of the next world war.

Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082