One of my favorite human beings is KCBX’s Tom Wilmer, the host of “Journeys of Discovery.” I did not know he belonged to the California National Guard like my friends Dan Sebby and Erik Brun. I knew Tom was working on restoring a World War I-era French 75mm cannon, but I did NOT know he’d finished it. It is amazing.

The 75 was also the field piece for the AEF, the American army fighting in France. We had no light artillery of our own. We also had no fighter planes, no tanks, no light machine gun, no heavy machine gun and, until we began mass-producing British knockoffs, no helmets.

We just had us, our Smokey Bear campaign hats and the Model 1903 Springfield. That was about it.

My friend Tom has always been an adventurer, an explorer. I am not. I prefer chairs and sofas and recliners. So that’s one reason he’s my hero. I hope it’s okay that I tell this story:

Tom was hiking along Highway 1 as a teen and became desperately sick with the flu. He trudged up a hill–a 1300-foot hill–to the Camaldolese Benedictine hermitage near Big Sur (great fruitcake, and I don’t even LIKE fruitcake) and they took him in, I think for a week, and took care of him until he was better. Good people taking care of a good person.

Those are French-manned 75’s, like the one Tom rebuilt, in action at the horrific 1916 Battle of Verdun, which claimed over 305,000 German and French lives (I despise jokes about French “cowardice.” Go to Verdun.) and wounded another 400,000.

“100,000 died” struggling for Fort Douaumont; those are our kids. When it was the Germans’ turn to occupy the fort, the Bavarians, because they are civilized, decided to brew coffee inside. There was no fuel to start a fire to brew the coffee. One of the Bavarians, suddenly inspired, emptied out a hand grenade’s charge and make a little mountain of the contents to start the fire.

When the explosion came, the Bavarians were blinded and burned black. Their comrades shot them down, thinking they were French colonials, Senegalese, who terrified the Germans.

There’s a French 75 just outside the main museum. The nearby ossuary contains the bones of thousands of soldiers from both sides who will never be known. You can see them in their stacks just beneath plexiglas panels in the floor.

All of them, of course, had been little boys once whose mothers applauded their first steps, whose fathers rousted them early for morning milking or who went to sleep at night with the dogs they loved tucked tight next to them.

The French cemetery, which of course is vast, features both Christian and Muslim gravestones, many for the Senegalese, the latter facing Mecca. All of them died for France.

I was touring the museum with my teaching partner Amber and our kids when a guide grabbed me gently by the elbow.

“Are these your students?”

My heart sank. We’d been yelled at in Paris by a policewoman who had a shot at becoming an NFL offensive guard.

I nodded.

“They are so RESPECTFUL!”

Might just be the greatest compliment of my life.

Those are some of our students atop Fort Douaumont at Verdun.

Thank you, Tom and Erik, my artillery guys.