FAYETTEVILLE — In between final exams and the start of a two-week break from school, some students at Woodland Junior High School received a dose of reality Friday morning.

The students, mostly eighth-graders, are in Stephanie Hoops’ Read 180 class. They spent the morning hearing “war stories” from a group of veterans who volunteer their time at the VA Hospital in Fayetteville. In turn, the students read letters and poems thanking them for their service.

They also presented each of the 11 veterans with a fleece blanket that they made.

Read 180 is a special program to help students improve their reading skills. Several in the class also are English as a second language students from such countries as Yemen, Uganda, Latvia and the Marshall Islands, Hoops said.

The program, called “Warming the Hearts of Veterans,” has been around for three years. It is a part of a study unit on wars and the affect on the soldiers and their families. The unit includes segments on World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jose Martinez was wounded three times in Vietnam and is the state president of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. His message to students was to set goals for life and then follow the priorities they set for themselves.

The students have little knowledge of the time period before Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the U.S. in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, Hoops said.

“We’ve been in Afghanistan most of their lives. They don’t even know about 9-11,” Hoops said. Most of the students are 13, 14 or 15 years old and would have been infants or toddlers in 2001.

The overriding lesson learned for Michael Henson, 15, and the lone ninth-grader in the class, is “war is never a good thing. If you can avoid it, you should.”

He wanted to know how a soldier in combat shaved every day, or if he did.

One of the veterans, Ron Butler, who retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel, responded a soldier did the best he could when out in the field, shaving when he could and eating when he could. The hardest part for Butler was to lose a fellow soldier because you had a chance to get to know him.

Henson, whose father served in the military in Desert Storm in 1991, said he has thought about serving in the military since he was about 10 years old.

“It would be an honor to serve, but hopefully not in combat,” he said. To the veterans, he said, “Thank you for protecting me from them.”