Photos by SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times

Area school children visit The Moving Wall on Friday, a half-sized model of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. It will be in Franklin County until Monday.

Visitors to The Moving Wall can get a rubbing of the names of friends or family members lost in the Vietnam War, just as they can at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall.

Seventh-graders from Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Rocky Mount marvel Friday at the number of names listed on The Moving Wall, a mobile replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.

SONTAG -- The traveling version of The Moving Wall is in Franklin County, making its only stop in Virginia this year.

And its impact was immediate.

The county's tourism manager said a solitary veteran visited the wall -- in the county recreational park -- in the middle of the night Thursday, just hours after it was assembled.

On Friday morning, just for fun, teams of students in jeans and T-shirts marched in time, pretending to be in boot camp for a minute or two before they boarded buses to go back to school after visiting the wall. Several veterans, standing feet away, watched them.

The wall, a half-sized replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., will be in Franklin County until Monday at 2:30 p.m., allowing two school days for more than 2,000 students from Franklin County, Martinsville and Meadows of Dan schools to visit on field trips.

"I'm hoping that perhaps going to see the wall and that many names, maybe that'll sort of shock them," said Tracy Whittaker, a seventh-grade history teacher who had brought his classes from Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Franklin County. "Most of them have lived through 9/11, and it takes a lot to shock them. They're more desensitized to war."

The 553 seventh-graders visiting the wall haven't studied the Vietnam War yet this school year. That is planned for January, Whittaker said. This trip fulfills a Standards of Learning requirement for learning about the events and social aspects of the Vietnam War, he added.

On Friday morning, about 200 students at a time congregated around the wall, careful to use their "church voices" out of respect for the 58,226 names of fallen or missing soldiers yards away. Many looked for names they recognized or those of their family members.

Of the names on the wall, more than 1,300 are Virginians. Three hundred of those are from Southwest and southern Virginia.

"It'd mean more to me if we were older," said Chelzie Reeves, a Bassett High School junior. Friday was her 17th birthday, making her only slightly younger than the youngest men drafted to go to Vietnam.

About 50 veterans -- identifiable by the VFW caps they wore -- wove through the crowd to pay their respects and talk with the students.

Students asked Malon Shelton, 62, of Callands about the Purple Heart he was awarded after mortar shrapnel hit him in the hip in September 1967, a little more than a month into his tour of duty in Vietnam.

He had displayed his medal on a table across the road from the memorial, and he wore his green "jungle trousers," the pant-and-shirt uniform he hadn't donned since he returned from Vietnam in 1968.

They also wanted to know what types of guns he had carried. An M-16, he told the students.

"They probably studied this in history, but talking to somebody helps them understand what went on," said Shelton, who served as a Marine.

He sat in a lawn chair next to Ronnie Haskins, 64, of Penhook. The men were childhood friends and now belong to the same chapter of VFW post 10840 in Rocky Mount. The two spent the morning talking and catching up with other veterans, occasionally offering their thoughts to the children browsing the table where the Purple Heart was laid. He said the students that morning had been very respectful.

"This is good right here," Haskins said, gesturing to the hundreds of students surrounding the wall, "but if you could see how it really was."

"The way of living now is different than when we went in," said Haskins, who served a year in the Army in Vietnam beginning in May 1966.

To prepare for the event, American Legion Post 6, along with other veterans, collected donations worth $11,000 to bring the wall to the park and for lumber, lighting, security, landscaping and meals for volunteers.

More than 40 motorcyclists escorted the pieces of the wall to the park Thursday morning.

Veteran Herman Chaney, 62, had seen The Moving Wall last year in Franklin County, Ind., his hometown, and wanted to bring it to Franklin County, where he lives now in Boones Mill.

He said he has never seen the original in Washington.