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GREENSBORO - It all began with a letter from a little girl with braids.

Breanna Washington was a third-grader when she wrote a letter last year to "any U.S. soldier" in Iraq. She thanked them, slipped in a packet of Kool-Aid and mailed it halfway around the world, with 350 other letters from her school.

That's where Maj. David Miller found it on a table in an Army headquarters in Baghdad. But he had a little help.

"Hey, Dave!'' someone yelled. "Aren't you from Greensboro?''

He was. So, he picked up the letter and read a little girl's wish for him to remain safe and secure. Right then, at a place called Camp Victory, he vowed to do something for that little girl and her school in his new hometown.

He did Monday.

Miller, at home for Thanksgiving, visited Breanna and walked into the gym in his combat fatigues where he saw hundreds of students cheering, waving flags and handing him mounds of handmade cards.

To these students, a warrior had come home.

"Holy smokes, look at all this stuff!'' said Miller, holding an armful of cards. "This is Christmas coming early!''

Miller hit spots close to his heart Monday: Canterbury School, where his two stepdaughters attend; and Southeast Guilford Middle, where he taught eighth-grade social studies for three years in Room 110.

And of course, Gillespie Park Elementary. That's where Breanna goes, the little girl with braids.

"I got your letter all the way in Iraq," said Miller, leaning his 6-feet-4, 260-pound frame over to talk to Breanna. "Your letter started everything."

"That makes me really happy," said Breanna, now 9.

Miller came Monday with no big plans. He delivered a framed certificate and a flag that once flew over Al Faw Palace, the Army headquarters in Baghdad where he works for the Multi-National Corps.

Yet, he turned Canterbury's chapel and Gillespie Park's cavernous gym into a big classroom, telling students to remember three words: "Freedom isn't free."

He says that often. Miller grew up in small-town Iowa, the oldest son of a truck driver, and he believed in that idea of service he first heard from John F. Kennedy long ago.

At age 20, he joined the Army and found a career and something bigger than himself. He stayed for 20 years and became a Russian expert who counted nuclear warheads and watched them being destroyed in the former Soviet Union.

He saw firsthand the first draft of history.

As the military downsized, Miller retired in 1994. He got divorced, drove a long-distance truck and became a new husband, a new teacher and a new widower when his second wife, a Greensboro native, died of diabetes complications two years ago.

Now, he's remarried. But like any soldier, he longed to go where the war was. In his 20 years, he had never been in combat. Until last May.

Miller is 57, and next week, he'll go back to Iraq for another five months. He'll slip on a Kevlar helmet, wear 40 pounds of body armor, slide a 9 mm pistol under his left arm and help the Army oversee the private security companies protecting contractors rebuilding Iraq.

He'll live in a war zone - "down range" he calls it - and he'll do the same thing every day: breathe in dust, wish for a cheeseburger, call his wife three times a day and wade through a sea of soldiers wherever he goes.

Even to the latrine.

But on Monday, he was a lone soldier who saw two drastically different sides of his new hometown: a private Episcopal school where students pay nearly $12,000 a year in tuition, and a public school where nearly every student can't afford lunch.

Yet, in both places, the response was the same: a standing ovation in a chapel, and a spontaneous flag-waving celebration inside a gymnasium where a school secretary sang an incredibly moving rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."

And nearby was Miller, in his combat fatigues and size-12 boots. He had stepped into what he called a "little kid world" - as far away from any combat as you can get - and talked to students no older than his only grandson about freedom, sacrifice and duty.

All thanks to a letter. From a little girl with braids.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com.