Donning his favorite Marine uniform - the formal "dress blues" - Sgt. Jerrett Peake surveyed the dozens of small faces staring up at him yesterday morning at Manchester Elementary School in Carroll County.
After a brief introduction and greeting, several small hands shot in the air with questions for the 22-year-old soldier who left Iraq last month.
"Do you ever get homesick?" (Sometimes. But letters help with that.)
"Do you use night-vision goggles?" (Yes, and he also gets to fix them.)
"Who's winning the war?" (We are.)
Second-grader Madison Collins finally asked the burning question.
"Did you like the letters we sent you?" she said.
"You guys wrote the best letters," said Peake, who was deployed about eight months ago and stationed at Al Asad Air Base in Iraq. "And the pictures were great."
Yesterday, first-, second- and third-graders at Manchester met and questioned the Marine to whom they had sent about 120 letters and drawings months ago. They used their short time with Peake to satisfy their considerable curiosity about the faraway land where he had served, as well as a host of other subjects.
"They write; they never really get to see who they're writing to," said Kim Clinedinst, the school's nurse, who organized the letter campaign. She has known Peake, a close friend of her son, for years. "This makes this so much more real for them."
And as the students fired off query after query, they discovered they had a few things in common with the Marine.
"What do you do in your spare time?" one girl asked.
"I still play video games," Peake said smiling. Cheers erupted at this news.
His favorite video game? Halo. And, for the even more curious: He has an Xbox 360. And a PSP.
Students also were interested in whether Peake rides horses (no), his favorite song (the Marine Corps hymn) and favorite movie (The Patriot).
But they also posed deeper questions, some of which seemed to surprise Peake.
"What's it feel like, being in the war?" third-grader Justin Collins asked.
"I'm really proud to be over there," said Peake, whose duties include servicing weapons systems. "But at the same time, everybody's a little scared. You never know what's going to happen ... . Even a Marine gets scared."
Another child wondered when Peake thought the war would end.
"Pretty soon," he said, after pausing to consider his response. "In a couple of years."
