PARIS — More than 100 people turned out for the annual Veterans Day observance at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School on Thursday morning to remember and thank past and present military personnel.

“This has been one of the most moving ceremonies I have ever been to in my life,” the Rev. Norman Jackson of the Norway Baptist Church said as he gave the benediction.

Recalling the war wound that a family member who served in the Spanish-American War showed him when he was young, he said, “I vowed there would not be a day go by that I would not lift up our boys and girls as they continue to wage in warfare.”

The hour-long program included music, a video slide show and speeches, including one by Capt. Don LaChapelle, commander of the 251st Engineer Company, who has been deployed twice to the Middle East.

LaChapelle said his mind is always on the families left behind when men and women go off to war.

Robert Sessions, a member of VFW Post 9787 in Paris, said after the ceremony that he originally trained to be a “fly boy” with the Air Force but was stationed in an office in Honolulu in 1943 and 1944 before being deployed to Europe on  New Year’s Day 1945. He served in the infantry until the end of the war.

“I saw a little of the best and worst of war,” he said, sitting on a wooden bench in the lobby of the school after the program.

While he found an Oxford soldier had been in his unit shortly before he arrived in Europe in 1945, the young man was not who he specifically replaced, he said.

“There were many thousands of replacements at that time,” he said referring to casualties. “You might say I was a replacement for all of them.”

Sessions said the message he wants to most get out is that everyone should remember what soldiers have done.

“People do, I think,” he said. “People do.”

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