Zebulon — For years, Lawrence Fischer couldn’t bear to talk about the days when he descended with a .45, bayonet and a flashlight into the intricate tunnel system of Vietnam.

Fisher was what was known as a tunnel rat. And his assignment was to kill the Vietcong, traveling in system of tunnels that wove their way across the country -- the war under the war.

Wracked with nightmares and other post traumatic stress symptoms from the experience years later,

Fischer couldn’t even tell his wife of his days as a U.S. soldier.

He only opened up with time and after meeting World War II veteran Jack Clark, a member of the fourth infantry division that landed on the banks of Normandy on D-Day.

Last week, Fisher, Clark, the four Percy brothers, veterans all, and three other veterans opened up on Veterans Day to the students gathered in the Zebulon Middle School auditorium with the stories of serving their country in times of war and peace.

Elton Percy, like Clark, saw the Normandy beaches, but was a machine gunner in the famed landing craft that carried soldiers from the U.S.S. Dorthea Dix and deposited them on the beachhead.

Percy helped shuttle the injured back to the ship for treatment after delivering men to battle. Men, like

Clark who had seven jeeps shot out from under him. The acrid smoke burned your nostrils, and blinded you it was so thick. Men fell all around.

Clark said war changes you.

“I step back and let things go,” he said. “It’s a miracle I’m even here.” Percy, too, had a close call.

In southern France, a shell exploded, nearly hitting his craft.

“Another 10 feet, I would have been doomed,” he said.

His brother Wilton was a world away on the U.S.S. Crux, taking supplies to the islands in the South Pacific from Brisbane, Australia.

Percy Price served during peacetime, and carried with him the tales of world travels and news from home. He was an army mail clerk in Japan from 1950 to 1953, and again in Korea in 1957.

Their brother Joe served in the navy during World War II.

Clark, who met Fischer when he joined his VFW Post 4147, understood where he was coming from.

Clark never spoke a word about World War II until he met his second wife, who insisted it would be good for him to get his story out. He did, and she wrote a book about it called “Cross Cannon.”

Fischer said returning from war was hard too. “I was spit on, they threw garbage at me, they called me child killer,” he said.

But the hardest thing was losing friends.

“I lost a lot of friends over there,” he said. “Pretty soon it got where when the new guys came you wouldn’t get to be friends because you didn’t want to lose another.”