Roger Figueroa remembers being terrified to tell his mother that he had joined. He remembers college friends asking him why he wanted to be a ''baby killer,'' and his ROTC instructor ordering that no trainee be in uniform on the University of Miami campus.

''Military service was not highly thought of in that period after Vietnam,'' the 43-year-old U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel from Hialeah said, looking at the uniformed Davie teenager standing beside him.

Robert Lenzen, 17, was dressed in a light-blue uniform. He is a member of the Civil Air Patrol, an auxiliary military organization for students fascinated by aviation.

Lenzen, who attends Archbishop McCarthy High School in Southwest Ranches, and about a dozen other teenagers spent their Memorial Day weekend at Nova Southeastern University in Davie contributing to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project.

The massive, 6-year-old database has preserved stories from men and woman who served in World War I to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, organized Sunday's interviews, hoping the event will occur annually on the weekend of Memorial Day, a holiday started just after the Civil War to remember those who died in the nation's service.

After a quick timeline, (Lenzen was born in 1989, the year Figueroa became a commander of a B-52 bomber), the two discussed Iraq, a topic broached in nearly every interview.

Lenzen likened Saddam Hussein's Baath Party to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party. He took the view that Iraq is better off now than when the war began.

''We are rebuilding after a repressive regime,'' he said.

''I'm impressed by his generation. They see the big picture in a smaller conflict,'' said Figueroa. ``I couldn't speak like that when I was his age. My world was a lot smaller. They seem insightful, optimistic and assured. They look beyond the daily news, the short-term setbacks.''

Not far away, Michael Hacker, a student at Davie's Nova High School, sat across a table from Marvin Simon, who enlisted as an Army air cadet in 1942, leaving his mother and their tiny cold-water flat in Brooklyn behind. ''We were poor. My mother was unhappy because she didn't want me to leave,'' the 82-year-old Fort Lauderdale World War II veteran said, squeezing his dark blue service cap.

He talked about listening to a football game on the radio and hearing that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. And, silencing everyone in the room, he wept recalling several training buddies who died when their plane went down crossing into Europe.

Hacker asked if he liked his life after the military, which he spent taking more flying lessons.

''They are two different things,'' Simon answered. ``I liked the camaraderie. It really gets you going. You've seen the movies. They portray it pretty good.''

But Simon wanted to get across that it is not always the officers who see combat or the ones with elaborate tales of bullets and bravery who have something to say. A veteran is someone who did their part, he said, no matter what it was, a person with pride and discipline and focus who was part of a whole that changed history.

For some of the teenagers, it was humbling to hear and also was a lesson they will never get from a book.

''I got nervous asking a question,'' said Hacker. ``But seeing a connection that might reach across three or four generations, it's worth it.''