When Tad Brown saw Cody Kittelson emerge from behind bushes in downtown Coeur d'Alene, Brown felt compelled to ask the stranger a simple question. "I asked him if he had slept there last night," Brown said of the encounter in 2010. Wearing Army fatigues and flip-flops, Kittelson softly confirmed what Brown had suspected. When Brown asked Kittelson if he had anything to eat, Kittelson said he had a Pop Tart. That's when Brown, a Post Falls resident who was working on a downtown surveying job at the time, sent Kittelson to a restaurant with money for breakfast and rallied local veteran groups and the Idaho National Guard to help Kittelson with other needs. "He was in a really dark place, traveling around the country on his thumb," Brown said of Kittelson, who served in the Army in Iraq from 2007 to 2010. ... Little did Brown, also a veteran who served in the Navy in the late ’70s and early ’80s, know that he met a friend for life with his simple gesture/Brian Walker, Coeur d'Alene Press. More here.

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