"They're neat," said seventh-grader Kurt Burr, of the local veterans' presentations. "We actually get to meet people that served our country."

Burr added that some of the speakers had brought their uniforms and weapons, and explained how they were used.

Gilliland and Arky Reyez both defended President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Gilliland was in a division of Marines who were first to arrive in Japan after the bombing of Nagasaki, he said. Reyez said he and his crew were in Manila, the Philippines, when the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Why was the A-bomb dropped? a boy asked Gilliland.

Because military authorities figured there would be fewer casualties if the bomb were dropped compared to a planned invasion, he said.

"There were probably a couple of hundred-thousand Marines and half were scheduled to land in the lower islands," Gilliland said. "They figured our casualty rate would be 60 percent or so, and we were to expected to kill 10 of them to every one of us.

"This bombing operation saved thousands."

Reyez told the other class that though a lot of people say the bombing was a mistake, "if you would have been over there you would've called it a blessing" because it resulted in lives saved.

"It was a blessing to the United States, to Japan and to the world," he said.

Walter Lawrence earned a Purple Heart in World War II for wounds suffered when his plane was shot down by the Nazis, he told the sixth-graders. He was flying a mission for the army-air force out of England over Germany.

Only three of the nine people in the aircraft survived the crash, he said. Those three, including himself, were put in a POW camp.

He spent 10 months as a prisoner-of-war, he said.

"How much were you fed?" a student asked.

"Very little. We did get Red Cross parcels very occasionally."

Being shot down was his worst experience, he told another student. It occurred during the last part of the war, in June 1944, during the Normandy invasion and push to Berlin.

"I saw it from the air," Lawrence said of the invasion. "It looked like you could walk from England over to France."

Lawrence said another grueling experience was a 52-day forced march from the camp when Russian invaders threatened the Germans. Prisoners and their guards marched about 600 miles, he said.

Boone Givens told students he was a frogman during the war. He swam to the beaches of various islands in the Pacific to check for enemy troops. His mission was to ensure safe landing for Allied troops.

"In one hour, I counted 16 kamikazes shot down as they were going for big battleships," Givens said. "They didn't go for the little on I was on."

Another speaker, Clyde Hatcher, said he had several lucky experiences during the war, perhaps because he was born on Friday the 13th.

Hatcher took his military physical in Leavenworth and was the only one in line who got to pick which branch of the service he wanted to join. He picked the Navy.

Hatcher was assigned to a destroyer and sent to Seattle. He made two trips across the Pacific in the ship.

"Out of the three years, I was home for Christmas two years," Hatcher said. "I wouldn't take anything for my experience in the Navy."

In the other classroom, Lawrence was asked what message he would like to give the kids about World War II.

Lawrence responded that years after the war he saw a letter to the editor in the paper about that day his plane was shot down, June 29, 1944.

"The man wrote that we were right in the line of fire of German anti-aircraft," he said. "That man had been a 16-year-old man from Germany when the air raid sirens went off, and we were bombing an aircraft factory near where he was."

Lawrence said that through the newspaper he wrote the man back, and he got a return letter from him.

"He said, 'Let us do what we can to keep this from happening again,'" the man wrote.

Middle school teacher Ann Headrick told visitors who mingled with the speakers before their presentations that she had been moved by the students' reaction the past few days to the local veterans' stories.

"They were like rock stars the way the kids react," Headrick said. "The kids seemed to be in awe and they should be for the service you did."

Below: WWII veteran Clyde Hatcher speaks to students Tuesday at the Arkansas City Middle School for a three-day program about the war. Hatcher displays the destroyer he was assigned to in the Navy while WWII veterans Arky Reyez and Boone Givens, who also took part, listen.
PHOTO BY ALEX GAMBILL