In the foreground from left are Marine Corps veteran Sal Gonzales and singer and U.S. Navy veteran Jason Michael Carroll. Both of them performed a song for an assembly of the eighth-grade class at Wilmington Middle School. The veterans shared wisdom with the young students, including a comment that “everybody here will have trauma in this life.”
A student asked Marine Corps veteran and singer Sal Gonzalez about his prosthetic leg, and he did his own version of show-and-tell. He lost his leg while serving in the second war involving Iraq.
Wilmington Middle School students previously wrote and sent letters to the Operation Cherrybend participants, and on Friday after the assembly Kaleb Weakley, left foreground, passed out letters he wrote in response to Kailyn Cordy and Charlotte Housh, right foreground from left.
Recording artist and U.S. Navy veteran Jared Ashley, standing and holding a microphone, speaks during a Wilmington Middle School assembly that featured Operation Cherrybend participants. Operation Cherrybend was founded in 2015 by Ashley and the Ellis Family, owners of Cherrybend Pheasant Farm. The not-for-profit Operation Cherrybend seeks to educate the general public about the ongoing challenges of veterans, and also seeks to foster healing and compassionate communities for wounded veterans.
Some students raise a hand during an interactive part of an assembly at the Rodger O. Borror Middle School in Wilmington.
Marine Corps veteran Sal Gonzalez tells an attentive WMS audience he decided to join the military following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
