Our Hometown
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Twenty-year-old Reid McIlwain probably didn't anticipate the number of questions inquisitive Newark Middle School sixth graders would ask him when he visited their classroom recently. The sixth graders are taught by Elaine Erb, Stacey Quimby, Laurie Ellis and Michele Hoffman. The youths asked McIlwain questions for an entire class period. The soldier is the nephew of school secretary Marlene McIlwain and her husband, Gary. The young Army paratrooper came to Erb and Quimby's combined classroom because their students had written to him as pen pals. Home on a two-week leave before having to return to Iraq, McIlwain, who attended Clyde schools and who now calls South Carolina home, was in the area to visit relatives for the Thanksgiving holiday. But he also wanted to take time to visit the students at NMS while he was here because they had written to him. In his job as soldier, he jumps out of planes, and escorts fuel trucks in an Army Humvee on roads between Talil and Baghdad, Iraq. Intrigued that they had a real soldier in their midst, students' hands continually shot up into the air, as McIlwain did his best to answer one question after another. They ranged from what life is like in Iraq and how enemies dress, to what kind of gun he carries and if he had ever been in the middle of gunfire. The questions he is allowed to answer, he did so graciously. And the students seemed genuinely interested and moved. At the end of the Q&A session, they swarmed McIlwain, asking for his autograph. And the young kept giving autographs, until every last student had one. Copyright
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