Sean Williams wanted to get to know Cpl. Joseph Bier a little better.

Bier, a Marine who was killed in action in Iraq in December 2005, is buried at nearby Tahoma National Cemetery.

Williams is a ninth grader at Tahoma Junior High. He’s been working on a biography of Bier since October as part of an integrated curriculum project at school.

“I’ve been e-mailing my veteran’s dad and getting information from him,” Williams said. “First, I just wanted to get to know him before I asked any questions about his son.”

Williams asked Bier’s father what the young Marine was like growing up and what compelled him to join the military.

He found out early on Bier was “a big outdoorsman” and he liked to hunt and fish.

When Bier decided to join the military, Williams said, it was a life-long dream to become a Marine.

“He wouldn’t even talk to any of the other recruiters because he knew he wanted to be a Marine,” Williams said.

Williams asked all of the questions provided by his teachers but “I’m trying to go through those and then throw some extra questions in there.”

Cary Collins, who teaches Pacific Northwest history as well as health, said that part of the project is to teach the kids how to be detectives, to use the Internet to get information and find people.

But there’s something even greater Collins hopes students get out of the effort to write biographies about veterans buried at the cemetery.

“One thing we’ve always tried to do at the school here is to connect the students to the larger world and to get the students to do something that is bigger than themselves,” Collins said. “This cemetery project is symbolic of this integrated approach where it goes beyond the content areas.”

Collins explained that the project has evolved during the past decade.

“We started taking kids out to the cemetery right after it opened,” he said. “We went from having tours to the flag project, Operation Veteran’s Remembrance, about 6 or 7 years ago. We started putting flags on the graves at Memorial Day. We raised the money to buy the flags, which I think was about $10,000 or $15,000. There were about 10,000 veterans buried there at the time and now there’s about 25,000.”

A few years ago toward the end of the school year, Collins said staff started talking about expanding their involvement with the cemetery.

“We were thinking about doing something more and we came up with the idea of doing a book and a DVD,” he said. “One thing for me personally is the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. We definitely wanted to make sure we had a biography from every veteran killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

But they want to be sure to represent all the various conflicts veterans buried at Tahoma National cemetery fought in over the decades.

Steve Kent, who teaches science, said his class is working on the more technical aspect of the project.

“We’ve got the kids interviewing parents and loved ones, but for the DVD we’d love to get some of these interviews on tape,” Kent said. “To get the media that we want we’ll have to have people willing to share pictures of when they were in high school, when they were a child and so forth.”

Jordan Walley has collected photos of Phillip R. Anderson, who served in the Army and was killed in action in Iraq, as well as gotten plenty of information from Anderson’s sister.

Collins directed Walley toward Anderson and connected her with the soldier’s sister, Beth.

“I e-mailed her,” Walley said. “She was very open to sharing anything I wanted to know. I asked her about 10 questions and I ended up getting four pages of information and about 15 pictures.”

She discovered that Anderson wasn’t a fan of school and loved serving his country and was a decorated combat veteran.

Walley also learned that Anderson loved spending time with his young son, Warner, who was about a year old when his dad left for his last tour in Iraq.

While doing this project Walley said she’s learned how important it is to be sensitive to the loved ones of a veteran killed in action because “you want to try not to hurt them.”

“I’ve learned … don’t take your freedom and what you get every day for granted,” she said. “You could know more than one person in Iraq who is putting their life on the line just so we can have our freedom and get our education.”

Sometimes it takes a little more time and patience to get the job done, something Tommy Dodd learned when he first started working on his biography of Chris Vanderhorn, who served in the Army and was killed in Iraq.

“I really don’t have a lot of information on him yet but I know that he was killed by a roadside bomb in 2003,” Dodd said. “Mr. Collins is helping me e-mail his mom.”

Dodd wanted to find out more about Vanderhorn like how he did in high school and what exactly motivated him to go into the military as well as what kind of goals he had or if he had any family members in the military.

“I’ve learned after finding out about his family that it is just as real as if one of us went to war,” Dodd said. “They have family members at home that care as much about them as ours would about us.”

While working on this project, Dodd said, he has realized it is important to respect military personnel and their service.

“It also teaches us a lot about what they’ve gone through and the responsibility they’ve had and that it’s a pretty big deal,” Dodd said.

Other students found veterans who had served in previous conflicts.

Jacob Metcalf was drawn to Steve Chappius, who served during World War II, because he served in the Air Force like his stepfather does now.

“I learned that he was a jumper,” Metcalf said. “He would go into enemy territories and jump off airplanes and save people. He did that in Normandy.”

Metcalf tracked Chappius’ daughter down by going through obituaries and using Yahoo People Search. He contacted her to learn more about Chappius.

Last year Metcalf did an essay with the help of his grandfather who had served in the military.

“This gave me a new perspective as far as other people’s jobs and their purpose for being in the military,” he said. “At first I just kind of thought the he went there just to be there and now I can see how involved it is and how much responsibility he had.”

Metcalf said he has learned during the process that it is important to never give up.

“Stay committed to what you’re doing and never have doubts about what you’re doing,” he said. “It’s important because they were sacrificing themselves to keep us free and I think it’s just a form of honoring them for what they’ve done for us and just to give back.”

Williams said that he got a significant lesson through his efforts to get to know Bier for his biography.

“Lots of people give their lives just so that we could live ours and have freedom or rights,” he said. “Sometimes to defend that you have to give the ultimate sacrifice; which is your life.”