This fall Col. Darel Maxfield once again commands his social studies classroom at Ferris High School, not a U.S. Army unit in Iraq.

He’s back from the war, with some timeless wisdom, several lingering wounds and a few bones to pick. Though we’ve never agreed on that war, our conversations, both in person and by e-mail during his time in Diyala Province, have been illuminating.

On a recent sunny September Friday, I visited his last class of the day. Freshman honors students filled the room to view Maxfield’s slide presentation on the cultural differences he encountered while serving in the Army Reserve in the Mideast. A tall, gregarious man with a shaved head and a wide grin, he commanded the classroom with poignant memories, a rat-a-tat of facts and a seasoned comic’s timing.

The slides zipped past: Sandy, the mongrel who befriended Maxfield in the desert. (After she drove out a batch of snakes from under the laundry facility to give birth to her pups there, Maxfield dubbed her “tougher than vipers.”) The teenage faces of the Iraqi soldiers just a few years older than the students sitting before him in their jeans and bright red Saxon T-shirts. A shot of Maxfield and his fellow soldiers holding up the colonel’s large American flag.

He paused.

“I’m going to sound like a redneck here,” he said. As Maxfield described the mix of homesickness and pride his flag evoked, his voice broke.

“It was the symbol of home,” he said.

After the students left, Maxfield slid into a student desk to talk about his return from Iraq.

Terrifying though his tour of duty was, and weary as he is now in his 50s, he’d “go back in a heartbeat” to help his Iraqi counterpart, Col. Abbass. Maxfield said he considers the colonel his “Iraqi brother.”

In April, Maxfield returned home with several wounds: an unhealed infection in his knee, beat-up shoulders and a bad back. Packing around body armor and a helmet takes a toll on a middle-age body. He also lost his hearing in his right ear. He wears hearing aids now.

As he watched himself startling easily at loud noises, scanning the streets of Spokane for the dangers of Iraq, struggling to sleep, he surprised himself by turning to the Spokane Veterans Affairs Medical Center for treatment for post-traumatic stress. “I’m the last guy on earth to think I need that sort of help,” he said.

His moods have calmed since last spring, but Maxfield remains angry at the political advisers he believes bungled the Iraq war so badly. He reserves his disdain not for President Bush but for Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who began the war with lean troop counts and a deluded notion that Americans would be greeted as liberators, not assaulted by insurgents.

“If I ever run into Paul Wolfowitz on the street, I will run him over and back up and run him over again,” Maxfield said with a rueful grin.

He’s lost his taste for American politics.

When people ask him who he’ll vote for, he usually says cheerfully, “I hate ’em all.”

But Sen. John McCain, a fellow war veteran, will probably get his vote.

I told Maxfield I’m concerned about McCain’s temper. I don’t relish the idea of a hot-headed president with his finger near the button.

Later Maxfield pointed out that Harry Truman had quite a temper, too. And besides, he e-mailed, it’s not a button. “It’s a little book and a really cool phone.” But I then recalled Hiroshima, and I wasn’t reassured.

As we walked out of the school, Maxfield paused on the steps for a moment. Serving in war, especially during midlife, helped remind him of one essential truth: He has today’s moments to savor. There are no guarantees about tomorrow.

That evening, I made a beeline home to watch the presidential debate. American politics still fascinate me.

Not Maxfield. He headed out into the sunshine for a burger. Afterward, he was off to watch his Ferris High School Saxons play some football.