By TARA HETTINGER
In total silence, the entire student body walked out of Scribner Middle School with a flag in their hands and lined up shoulder to shoulder, circling the entire track.
They listened as a group of eighth-grade students and Assistant Principal Paul Raake spoke over the loudspeaker, talking about what Veterans Day is about and why it’s important.
McKenzie Moore read from an actual letter secretly written by 2nd Lt. Richard Wellbrock, in 1944, when he was held in a German prisoner-of-war camp after his aircraft was shot down.
“Things here are critical, with over half the men down with GI’s flu. The fleas are in every bed. Have been lying in my bunk dreaming about us. It’s my favorite pastime, although it hurts like the devil at times,” Moore read from the letter written on Christmas Eve. “‘Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men’ is hard for me to visualize. I only hope this bitterness will fade, but I’ve seen too many sights and too many men’s souls to ever be quite the same. I still wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares. Some of the men who have been down two years wake up screaming.”
Wellbrock did return home, after eight months in the POW camp, Raake said into the microphone.
He told each student that the flags they held in their hands represented the struggles the United States had to go through to gain the freedoms its citizens have as well as the challenges that will be faced in the future to protect those freedoms.
Raake said students were lined up in an oval, so that each student is an equal part of a whole, with no beginning or end. He asked each student to place his flag in the grass on the edge of the track to make another oval, one that represents the work the veterans have done to allow the nation to exist, with no ending.
Once done, the students filed back into the building in silence.
Raake said the school did the same program three years ago.
“This is just to help the kids understand the importance of Veterans Day and the important role veterans play and to recognize the sacrifices that have been done before them by veterans and individuals,” he said. “We have the greatest nation on Earth and I pray it stays that way.”
“I think it opens students’ eyes more, because most of them blow it off as another holiday,” said 14-year-old Emily Longnecker, who was one of the students who read aloud during the program. “I learned how important veterans really are to us and how much they do for us. If we didn’t have them, there’d be no way to have any of the freedoms or rights we have now.”
Students who went to the event said it should become more of a regular occurrence at the school.
“It was cool. I think we should do that more often, because we should give more respect to those people, probably like four times a year, because those people died for us,” 12-year-old Emma Reas said.
“[I learned] that you have to be really respectful to them, because they risked their life for you,” Taylor Stover, 11, said. “It’s really nice to do stuff for them.”
