each person's life journey is punctuated by intersections with the paths of other people's lives. Some of these intersections barely matter. Others resonate within us for years, impacting our lives in ways we recognize and ways we may not even realize. For me, a minor intersection I never forgot was meeting George Mest. He was a Marine stationed at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. military base in Cuba. I was a fifth grade kid living there because my Naval officer father was also based at Gitmo, as Guantanamo is familiarly known. Since Dad was an officer, we lived in what seemed to me like fairly palatial officers' housing on Marina Point, overlooking an inlet from which I could fish on the pier behind our house. Living in Gitmo was terrific for a boy my age. by military base standards, Gitmo was enormous, with miles of dry but thickly bushy hills to explore, snakes (non-venomous rock pythons, mostly) and lizards galore, lots of fishing to be done and even, at least from the perspective of a 10-year-old boy, adventures to be experienced. On the occasional Friday, the base Marines engaged in a war-games exercise called NEGDEF in the hills, during which "dependents" -- families and such -- were instructed to stay in their housing areas. naturally, the morning following any NEGDEF, being a non-school day, my friends and I would head up into the hills in search of anything the Marines might have left behind or lost during NEGDEF. This was usually a fruitless search, but once a buddy actually came upon a bayonet, clearly the coolest thing any boy could ever find. Me, the only thing I ever found was a C-ration tin of ham, which I took home and announced to my parents that's what I would be having for dinner.

As a military lifer, my dad had eaten more C-rations than he wanted to remember. So my insistence on eating that for dinner, especially in light of the fact that my mom had made roast beef, almost certainly confirmed to Dad that his son was an idiot.

But I digress. Let's get to George Mest. Less than a half-mile from our house, nestled between Marina point and the next peninsula over, was something my friends had always referred to as "the Marine sailboat locker." I had never checked it out, so one day I did so, making my way through the mangroves to this little marina at which, a handful of Marines maintained what few officers' sailboats were moored there. Across a small parking lot from the marina was a quonset hut that housed the Marines stationed there. I saw no one as I explored the area, which was fine with me, especially when I came upon a machete that I decided should belong to me. I knew anybody seeing me carry it off might not agree with my decision, so I shoved it up one leg of my blue jeans, anchoring the blade in my tennis shoe. the machete being at least up my knee, this made walking awkwardly peg-legged, and that's how I was walking, making my escape with my newfound treasure, when the Marine I would later learn was George Mest came out of the quonset hut and saw me.

He didn't say anything, so I figured I was in the clear. Once out of sight, I removed the machete from my pants leg and tennis shoe so I could carry my prize home less awkwardly.

By that night, I was already feeling guilty, knowing in my heart that my taking that machete had been stealing it, and that stealing was wrong. So the next morning I took it back to the marine sailboat locker and knocked on the door of the quonset hut.

the same young Marine who had seen me the day before came to the door. I showed him the machete and said, "I took this yesterday."

"I know," he said.

I asked why he hadn't stopped me.

His answer: "I knew you'd bring it back."

That struck me like a thunderbolt. Being the son of a career military man, I knew our men in uniforms were heroes making the rest of us safe. Now here was one of those heroes telling me he knew I had within me the kind of goodness and decency within me that meant I wouldn't steal something and keep it, something I hadn't known myself. Whoa. In retrospect, I know this wasn't a case of this young Marine having any cosmic insight into my soul, but I was profoundly moved by what he had said. In reality, the day before he had probably thought I don't want to get into some FUBAR situation by accusing some officer's punk kid of stealing a lousy machete. But that little moment at the door of that quonset hut began an unlikely friendship between a machete-stealing punk kid of a Naval officer from Texas and a U.S. Marine from a blue-collar family in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Over the next several weeks, I became a sort of tagalong at the Marine Sailboat Locker, following George Mest around like a puppy trailing his human. When I told him one of the older kids on Marina Point had actually reeled in and got onto the dock a six-and-a-half-foot barracuda, as if that must have been the biggest barracuda in the world, he told me, "kid, we got a mess of eight-footers just off the marina." He proved it to me, too, tossing a cup of chum into the water so I could see the scrum of huge barracudas that ensued. George, who was probably only 19 or 20 at the time, remained unerringly patient with this punk kid who kep coming around. Once he took me out on one of the little sailboats from the marina, and we briefly got hung up on a sand bar, which was exciting for me while probably being exasperating for George.

I'll always remember George Mest, the hero who knew I was a decent person before I knew it myself.

A half-century later, I wrote a column about that whole Gitmo experience in the Yakima Herald-Republic and a co-worker, Mark Morey, took the time to try to locate George Mest in Allentown, PA. Mark found George's widow. George had died of lung cancer at a fairly young age, and I have often wondered whether the smoking he took up in the Marines was partly at fault. Since World War II, the American military had been supplying cigarettes to enlisted men with their rations, a practice that turned countless young men into lifelong smokers and was finally halted in 1975, when someone in authority decided, Hey, maybe we should stop plying our young men in uniform with something as unhealthy as cigarettes. If our enemies don't kill them, the cigarettes just might. I say men only because for decades our military was an all-male enterprise.