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The following teaching after-life experience would certainly have made it into the “Moments & Memories” section of my book had it happened before my book was published. However, it happened three months afterwards. Nonetheless, it happened. Only yesterday. Moreover, it made me proud.

Out of the blue, I received an email that read in part, as follows: “I was one of your students at Northern Granville Middle School. I recently went by the school, but they told me you were no longer teaching. I always looked up to you as a father figure, and remember telling you I wanted to be a soldier when I grew up. Here is my phone number. I hope you call. I look forward to hearing from you.”

Throughout my teaching career, usually following student-instigated classroom discussions about my experiences in Vietnam, it was not uncommon for students—mostly boys, but occasionally girls—to tell me they wanted to go into the military when they got out of school. (I always encouraged them to follow that dream.) Unfortunately, so many years having passed, and so many students having passed through my classroom, I had difficulty recalling this particular encounter.

When I placed a call to the phone number provided in the email, I got an outgoing voicemail recording saying, in a mature sounding adult male voice: “This is Private West. I am not available to take your call. Please leave a message.” However, indirectly, the tone and content of that brief message told me a couple of things: He had indeed become a soldier, and was proud of it.

Soon after, Private West returned my call, and immediately set about explaining how he had gone to the school to locate me, how someone at the school had referred him to the local newspaper for which I occasionally write, and how someone at the newspaper office had provided him with my email address. I was both proud of and flattered by his persistence.

“After I told you I wanted to become a soldier, you gave me a U.S. Army t-shirt. I still have it.” he went on. The moment he said that, I remembered the exact day of that exact experience, and Private West was resurrected in my mind as an 11- or 12-year old sixth grader; another of my proudest post-teaching moments, and memories.