Soldier Bequeaths Hope to Star Student

FORT MYERS, Fla. â€”  March 4 was to be one of the best days of Jennifer Massing’s life.

She made All-Conference in soccer, her high school teammates voted her most valuable player, and she won a trophy for having the highest GPA on the squad, a figure boosted by honors classes to 4.93.

Jennifer, 18, couldn’t wait to e-mail the news to Marc Anderson. He was more than just her former math teacher--he was her coach, her mentor, her biggest fan, her friend.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, Marc’s going to be so proud of me because I won these--because I’m able to excel in soccer and in school,’ ” she said.

She never got the chance.

While Jennifer was reveling in her achievements, 30-year-old Spc. Anderson was lying dead halfway across the world on an Afghan mountain. The teacher-turned-Army Ranger, who had left the safety of the classroom to pay off his college loans, was killed trying to rescue a Navy SEAL who had fallen out of a helicopter under fire.

The son of a Ranger who served four tours in Vietnam, Anderson was committed to the creed that no man be left behind.

As awful as the news was, Jennifer could handle it. But she also had to deal with the disquieting fact that his death brought her some good fortune. Anderson’s military life insurance policy would help put her through college.

“I definitely did not want the money,” Jennifer said, sniffing back tears. “I wanted him instead.”

The way friends saw it, Marc Anderson brought to teaching a kind of civilian version of the Ranger code: Leave no student behind.

Anderson signed on at Fort Myers Middle School in 1995. From the beginning, it was clear he was going to do more than just sit behind his desk from bell to bell.

Anderson was in his classroom long before school started and a couple of hours after it ended to tutor kids who needed help, whether they were his students or not. He always brought juice, bagels or doughnuts for his sunrise scholars.

He was a common sight at weekend baseball and soccer games, and would often go to children’s homes to tutor them. Parents jokingly accused the bachelor teacher of being in it for the free meals, but the kids knew better.

“The middle school years are rough,” says Meredith Hoek, 18, who met Anderson in a SAT review course. “You could go to him and he related well, sometimes better than your parents, because he was younger.

“He just really became kind of a peer and a mentor to all of us. Jen especially.”

Anderson and Jennifer met in 1995 under less-than-auspicious circumstances, during a faculty/student basketball game. He broke her finger fighting her for a loose ball.

Colleague David Childress says Anderson saw a lot of himself in the feisty sixth-grader. “Had Jennifer been a boy, she would have been Marc reincarnate,” he says.

For starters, they were always looking out for others.

When he was a student in high school, Anderson would adopt a freshman every year and protect him from bullies. Jennifer’s Fort Myers High School soccer teammates jokingly call her “Coach Mass.”

Childress says Anderson admired her aggressiveness on the field. He had been an All-American offensive guard in football at Case Western Reserve and won Florida State University’s 1995 Golden Torch award for being the student-athlete with the highest GPA.

Anderson went to one of Jennifer’s soccer games and noticed she was running on her heels, not her toes. For weeks afterward, he met her after school and watched her sprint until she improved her speed.

“He was kind of forcing me to do it, in a way, to help me improve. But at the same time he was like asking my permission to do it,” she says. “In school, it was teacher to student. After school, it was just a friend helping out a friend.”

When Jennifer moved to seventh grade, Anderson was her math teacher. Math wasn’t her best subject, but he always pushed her to improve--and liked the way she met the challenge.

One day, Anderson asked Jennifer what she’d like to do with her life. She said that she’d like to be an architect, but that as a woman, it probably wasn’t practical.

Her lack of confidence hit him like a hammer in the chest.

“His face just went sullen--it just went dull,” she says. “He didn’t yell at me. He just made it firm that I can achieve whatever I want to do. . . . I idolized him for doing that for me and making me become aware of that.”

As Jennifer moved on to high school, and he to the Army, the two stayed close. Somewhere along the line, Anderson decided he was going to make sure Jennifer lived up to her potential.

Anderson’s family convinced him to go to college instead of the military. His oldest brother, John, was making the Marines a career, and middle brother Stephen had done eight years in the Army and reserves, so they figured the baby shouldn’t have to go.

But after five years of college, Anderson was nearly $45,000 in debt. He decided the quickest way to pay it off was to join the military.

Friends wanted him to go into officer’s candidate school. But that wouldn’t pay all of his debts in one four-year stint.

So at 27, Anderson was back where he was born, at Ft. Benning, Ga. He must have been a sight, a 6-foot-3, 225-pound hulk out-sprinting pimply-faced recruits nine years his junior.

“I mean, nobody could beat him,” says Russell Zayas, Anderson’s 18-year-old roommate in the Ranger indoctrination program. “He was a powerhouse.”

Throughout Ranger training, Anderson would talk about the young friend he was trying to shepherd. Zayas would be on the computer after midnight when Jennifer would message Anderson with a math problem or a request for counsel.

Zayas says Anderson was devoted to the girl.

“She was truly, to him, like a daughter,” he says. “That’s exactly how he treated her, in every way.”

Before Anderson was shipped overseas in December, he went to Tampa to visit his brother Stephen, who had been diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. Naturally, they talked about death.

“His biggest worry was me not being here when he came back,” Stephen Anderson says.

Stephen Anderson, a management consultant, had been handling his brother’s finances. Marc told his brother he had made some changes to his life insurance policy, but didn’t elaborate.

“He said, ‘Steve, if something should happen to me, things are going to be spelled out kind of differently. And I know you’ll understand.’ ”

Anderson’s tour was nearing its end and he was planning his return to civilian life. In fact, he was seeking early release so he could get back into the classroom this fall; Stephen had assembled an envelope with applications for teaching jobs across southwest Florida.

He never got to send it.

In early March, U.S. troops were tightening a noose around Taliban and Al Qaeda holdouts in a mission code-named Operation Anaconda. During one sortie, a Navy SEAL fell out of a helicopter as it came under enemy ground fire.

Anderson was considered the best in his battalion with a heavy machine gun, earning him a spot on the rescue chopper. Sometime after he jumped out to provide cover fire, he took a bullet.

The young Ranger and six other soldiers died in the nine-hour firefight. The SEAL they were seeking to rescue had been shot to death.

The morning after her academic and athletic triumph, Jennifer was called out of class to the guidance counselor’s office. She figured they were going to talk about colleges--until she saw the grim face of one of Anderson’s former colleagues.

She told her mother to put away her trophies.

“They’re pointless,” she said. “Who cares?”

After Anderson’s death, his family learned he had left Jennifer about $12,000 from his insurance policy. Most of them knew next to nothing of Jennifer, but none was surprised at the gesture.

Because of Anderson’s affection for her, they have taken her into their hearts.

Stephen Anderson received the balance of his brother’s benefits. Aware that $12,000 would cover only about a year’s tuition and expenses, he knew that wasn’t the kind of security his brother had wanted for Jennifer.

So he contacted the Bailey Family Foundation, which helps worthy students attend college. The foundation agreed to pay the rest of Jennifer’s tuition, relieving some of the burden on her middle-class parents.

To Stephen, seeing Jennifer succeed is a way of keeping his brother alive.

“This is a girl he cared about, a student that he thought had a lot of potential,” the brother says.

Shortly after Anderson’s death, Jennifer learned she’d been accepted to the University of Florida, a school she chose for its architecture program.

Sitting outside her old middle school near a live oak planted in his honor, Jennifer says Marc Anderson’s dying gift has lightened one burden but given her another that is perhaps harder to carry--the task of living up to his faith in her.

“Now, I feel like Marc is with me everywhere,” she says, her voice trembling. “And so he’s watching every move.”