Students at Towamensing Elementary School spent Wednesday morning with the veterans in their own families, having breakfast, introducing them one by one at a gymnasium assembly and then marching them through the hallways on parade.

Towamensing Elementary School invited students to bring a family member who had served in the armed forces.

Following breakfast in the cafeteria, children stood beside their guests, said who they were and named the branch in which they had served. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and National Guard were all represented in the rows of folding chairs.

The younger grades brought tributes of their own. Kindergartners sang “You’re a Grand Old Flag” in the cafeteria, first graders read a Veterans Day poem, and second graders handed each veteran a poppy craft they had made. Students and staff filled the building in red, white and blue.

David S. Rhein Jr., now Towamensing’s school security officer through KRE, traced a family line of service that he said reaches back to the Civil War. His grandfather spent 25 years in the Marine Corps and his father 27. He served 20 years himself — 12½ in the Marine Corps and eight in the Army.

His earliest memory of the military, he said, is being woken at 2 a.m. to help his father into his uniform for a 6 a.m. formation at the shipyard where he served as a Marine military policeman after returning from Vietnam.

Rhein enlisted in 1981 and served in field artillery with India Battery, 3rd Battalion, 14th Marines, later transferring to active duty as a military policeman. He returned to the unit in 1990 and deployed to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He transferred to the Army in 1993 and served with field artillery battalions at Fort Carson, Colorado, firing towed and later mechanized guns.

His daughter was born in 2002, seriously ill, and he filed for a compassionate discharge. The Army counted his combined reserve and active-duty time and let him retire. He said he left “with a very heavy heart,” and went into law enforcement after the family moved back to Pennsylvania.

“The boots that I thought I left empty by separating my service are actually filled by my daughter,” Rhein told the students. “She is now a technical sergeant in the Air Force security forces and has been accepted to investigator school. My son is a Marine with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and deployed about a week and a half ago. They are the fifth generation of the family to serve.”

His closing advice to the students was simple: Talk to veterans, shake their hands, sit down to dinner with them and listen.

“That’s how I got my start,” he said. “Listen to my father talk. My father got his start listening to his father talk.”

Josh Nenscel, the elementary dean of students, served 25 years — 10 in the Army and 15 in the Air Force — and retired as a chief master sergeant, the Air Force’s highest enlisted rank. A 1998 Palmerton Area graduate, he spent about 14 months in Iraq and finished his career at Dover Air Force Base. He had spoken to the high school earlier that morning. What he carries from the 25 years, he said, is the brotherhood: people he met along the way whom he can call three years later and pick up as though no time had passed.

He asked the students to stop driving past the veterans’ banners that hang on poles around the area — each one carrying a name, a branch of service and a photograph — and actually look at them.

“Look at the name. Look at the branch of service,” he said, and think about that person’s journey. “We thank veterans today, but we should be thanking veterans every day.”

The morning ended with the veterans walking a parade route through the school’s hallways, lined with students and staff waving flags.