Posted by Rich Estes USMA 1967 on August 4, 2022:

It's late July 2022, and I just learned that COL Peterson passed in 2013. I regret I had conveyed this to him while he was still alive. I hope this reaches his family and friends, and possibly even him. Sometimes it's the smallest, seemingly insignificant thing a person does that has an enormous, unforeseeable consequence. This is about one such thing. I am a graduate of the West Point Class of 1967. During my senior year there, then LTC Peterson was my instructor for an advanced structural engineering class. On the day of the evening our class would be selecting our Army Branch assignments, as I was leaving LTC Peterson's class, he asked me what branch I was planning to choose. I told him, Armor. I think my answer surprised him. He asked me why I wasn't going Engineers. I told him that based on the "straw polls" done to predict branch selections, my overall class Order of Merit wasn't high enough to qualify for Engineers. (As I recall, our class had been allotted about 60 Engineer slots, and the straw polls predicted that they all would be gone 20 or so people before my turn to choose.) Then he asked me, "If you could go Engineers, would you?" I thought about it and answered, "Yes, but I won't have the chance." That evening at the Branch Selection, the straw poll turned out to be wrong; at the point it was predicted that all the Engineer slot would be gone, there were still two slots available. As predicted, there were 20 or so more names to be called before mine. I figured there was no way those two slots wouldn't be taken long before my turn; but to my surprise, they were not. They were still available when my name was called, so I chose Engineers. When I graduated, I became a 2LT in the Corps of Engineers. I served for 20 years, and along the way became a Registered Professional Engineer and earned a Master of Science degree in Civil Engineering. After retiring from the Army, for the next 25 years I was a Construction Manager in the private sector. Thinking back on that night of Branch Selection, I think the reason those two slots made it all the way down to me was that none of my classmates ahead of me were willing to make such a major decision to change their branch choice on such short notice. If LTC Peterson hadn't caused me to consider that possibility earlier that day, I doubt I would have had the courage to abandon Armor, the branch I had been focused on for more than a year, to become an Army Engineer. His question, which I believe was evidence of his caring and concern for me as his student, was that one, small thing, changed the entire course of my life; and I am forever grateful. This is my much belated thank you.

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