Being a teacher already comes with some struggle. The planning, the extra hours, the emotional aspect of it all. But how much harder can that demanding job get when you’re balancing it with another career in the Army National Guard?
“I’m still pretty busy, a lot of weekends, a lot of travel,” said history teacher Dennis Mora, who is also the head of the history department.
He has spent 30 years in the military as a Command Sergeant Major in the Army National Guard. For 21 of those years Mora has also worked as a teacher.
He spent the first year of his educational career at East Middle School, working with sixth graders, then moving and spending the next 20 years at CMR in his current position. Mora’s military career, however, started much earlier.
He said he joined the military his junior year at the age of 17, after three years of high school at CMR, completing his basic training through his senior year.
“My plan was to go active duty after I got done with basic and infantry,” he said, “ But I decided I wanted to stick around Montana.”
Mora’s first deployment was in 2002 to Bosnia for nine months. He had not started his teaching career yet, but after his first deployment he returned to school for one year at Carroll College and then another year at the University of Providence, earning his degrees in history and secondary education.
He taught middle school his first year, and then after his second year as a teacher at CMR he was deployed again to Iraq for 18 months from 2004-2005.
Mora said his deployments to Iraq really changed his perspective on how he perceived the world.
“It’s good in the aspect that I have some real world experience,” he said. “I’ve experienced other cultures, other places. It gives me a different perspective.”
He was deployed to Iraq twice, two and a half years combined. He said those deployments changed how he lived his life and treated situations. Watching the people in countries like Iraq struggle with their day-to-day lives in such a harsh environment, he said it taught him to be more grateful for the life he has at home.
“Most of the people in the United States have no idea how good they have it,” he said.
Mora’s impact on his students has been great for more than two decades, and he remains an inspiration for those who want to join the military or need a new perspective on their life.
“If I could give something to any of my classes, I would take them to a country like Afghanistan or Iraq, and be like, ‘This is how most of the world lives. So when you complain about not having the internet, that’s like the least of the world’s problems.’ ”
