You never know when an action from your past may catch up to you and remind you of what you once did in your previous life.

Take for instance my attendance last week at a Veterans Ceremony in Plymouth Township which borders my home town of Conshohocken, PA. They honored veterans who served in the municipality by placing their names in a brochure while a full-fledged US Navy Captain spoke at a memorial.

I approached the officer who was Captain John S Han and told him of my visit to Korea where he and his family had emigrated from in the early 1970s. Someone snapped the above picture and he then looked a little closer at me and asked “Don’t I know you?”

“I don’t know,” I said reminding him that I was Airborne in the Army and never served in the Navy, but had grown up and once worked in Philadelphia.

That’s when he shocked me by telling me he served as a prosecutor in Philadelphia and was my opponent in court when I tried my one and only jury trial “in absentia.” That means the defendant had flown the coop, so to speak, and the judge – one of my favorite jurists named James Lineberger – kind of declared my client AWOL (Away With Out Leave). That judge – another veteran – had once received a battle-field commission while serving in the Korean War. I felt like I was kinda back in the so-called trenches while suffering through that trial only to lose a case that we public defender attorneys called a “dead-dog loser.”

Captain Han reminded me that the defendant eventually got a 15-year sentence from Judge Anthony DeFino for a vicious crime considered to be a home invasion of a South Philadelphia man’s home where he beat a senior citizen. I told Han that I believed he should have gotten a stiffer sentence.

But what a coincidence. Getting credit for time served some 20 years earlier by a fellow veteran and a battle-hardened courtroom attorney. What a happy Veterans Day recall.

(Shortly after writing this, I learned that Captain Han was appointed to the transition team of the new mayor of Philadelphia!)