When Frank Vanderslice was serving in Vietnam he thought about his parents often.

“My three years there I reflected less on myself and more on other people,” Vanderslice told fellow Greenville Elks Lodge members and a few special guests Sunday.

He spoke two days before Veterans Day as the Elks presented medals of valor and flags to the families of three of the soldiers killed while fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“When you first saw them they were so many inches and so many pounds and ounces,” Vanderslice told the families of Staff Sgt. James D. Mowris, Sgt. Michael A. Marzano and Staff Sgt. David M. Veverka.

For more than 18 years they cared for and loved them, “never expecting to outlive” them.

“Remember these men not just as military men who died for us,” Vanderslice said, but as people.

He asked the families to remember the first time their sons went away to school for that “six hours that seemed like an eternity.”

“And then they came home, oh what a relief!” Vanderslice said.

Then he asked them to remember their sons’ first “wounds in life”: scraped knees, broken legs. As they grew up there was a time when “you weren’t always there,” Vanderslice said.

“But with your guidance they came out OK,” he said.

Then they came home one day and said “Mom, Dad, I want to join the service,” and they did, he said.

They served in a war different than World War I or II, he said.

“It wasn’t a war necessarily to protect our freedom,” Vanderslice said. “Since Korea, wars aren’t battle fronts anymore, they’re everywhere.”

And for Mowris, Marzano and Veverka the battle proved to be fatal.

Staff Sgt. Mowris, 37, of Aurora, Mo., died Jan. 24, 2004, west of Ghazni, Afghanistan. He was a Pennsylvania native.