It wasn't the appropriate way to address an officer who outranked him, as U.S. Army 1st Lt. Matthew David well knew. Even so, when he saw the Marine Corps captain with a group of her colleagues across the crowded base dining hall in Iraq, he walked up to her and said, "Melissa?"

And so began this unlikeliest of reunions half a world away, almost a decade after Matt David escorted Melissa Rains to the 1998 Bella Vista High School senior ball.

You don't expect to run into your prom date from Fair Oaks in a war zone.

"I should have called her ma'am," David, 28, says by long distance as he drives across Fort Bragg, N.C., where he is stationed. In July, he returned home from a 14-month deployment in Iraq's Anbar province.

"I was thinking, this is ridiculous. She's confused, like how come this Army first lieutenant is calling her by her first name? And all the other Marines around her are like, 'This is an interesting situation.'

"There usually wasn't a lot of talk on base between Marines and the Army guys. There's nothing to talk about. So it was a weird situation."

Al Asad Air Base is home to a number of Marine units, and during the surge, it also housed forces from David's Army division, the 82nd Airborne. Or as he puts it: "All of us paratroopers got sent to Marine world."

For the most part, his tour involved extended convoy missions outside the base. But when he was back at Al Asad, he says, he kept an eye out for Rains.

"That first day, I called home and said to my mother, 'I just saw Melissa Rains, isn't that crazy?' " says David.

They weren't high school sweethearts. Before we get all carried away with the tantalizing possibility of a perfect Hollywood ending here, let's be clear.

No.

At Bella Vista, Rains and David sat next to one another in government class their senior year and had paired up for a couple of class projects. Both were good students, though he says she was, in fact, awesome in school.

"She wasn't a social butterfly, and neither was I," David says.

So when senior ball rolled around, they commiserated about not having dates – and ended up being each other's date.

And then Rains left for the U.S. Naval Academy and a career as a Marine captain and logistics officer, one who as it turns out is married to a Navy pilot.

And David went to the University of California, San Diego, where he joined a fraternity and became slightly more social, and then the University of St. Andrew's in Scotland, where he earned his master's degree in international security studies and became extremely social.

"I got a lot cooler in college," he says. "St. Andrew's was big on high fashion, champagne and royalty. Prince William was there as an undergraduate when I was there. I said 'Hi' to him a few times. We went to a lot of the same parties."

In 2005, David attended officer candidate school. For better or worse, Iraq is history in the making, and he says he wanted to be part of it.

And of all people, there in Anbar was his prom date.

"She seemed more serious," David says. "She had a command presence. She's a military officer as opposed to a high school student."

So this is the Iraq reunion story he told fellow Bella Vista alums when he attended his 10th high school reunion earlier in September.

"His classmates were very surprised by the whole thing," says Matt's mother, Chris, who lives in Fair Oaks.

No doubt. An unexpected meeting a world away: It doesn't take a romantic ending to make it special.

Call The Bee's Anita Creamer, (916) 321-1136.