Nothing spiritual here, but just strange...
Once upon a time back in the early 80's, my brother and I were both in the service at the same time. As it happened that year (82 or 83, I can't recall) we were both going to be able to take leave and come home over Christmas holidays.
Anyway, our Mother got this idea in her head that she wanted us to bring our dress uniforms home and go have our pictures taken with her. Now for most of you ex-servicemen, you will probably identify with the sentiment that neither one of us wanted to bring home our @#$&! dress uniforms, much less put them on and wear them about, while we were home on leave, and actually trying to relax and enjoy our time off. All our attempts to talk her out of it failed, so long story short, there we are, standing in the lobby area of this photography studio waiting to get our turn done so we can get out of there.
Then I hear this guy speak up in the lobby, he stammers out, "Commander 'X' ?(the X being my last name, which while isn't impossible to pronounce correctly on the first go, it usually gets mispronounced on the first attempt, which I'm quite used to and it's no big deal). Anyway, this guy says "Commander X"? in a questioning tone, but he nails the pronunciation perfectly. I turn around and I'm surprised to see that he's speaking to me. I say something like "Excuse me?" He stammers out something about he served under me years ago on some duty station. I say that he must have me confused with someone else, and he very confidently (now) says that no, he's quite sure he served under me as his commanding officer. This guy is standing probably 2 to 3 feet in front of me, staring directly into my face, and he's POSITIVE that I'm the guy. Same name, same face, he's certain. Dead certain that I'm him. My first several attempts to tell him I'm not the guy he's looking for are brushed aside, because this guy is that positive. Even telling me that he worked directly under me for years, and he can't believe I don't remember him (and he's a little hurt by this).
I finally get him to tell me what years these were, which he does, and I tell him I was still in high school then. I even showed him my military ID, with date of birth and everything. The only way he started to believe me was when he saw my date of birth (I looked older than I was back then-probably still do today).
So we were all kind of blown away that there's some other poor sod out there with the same name, both first and last (not that common a last name), and this poor guy looks like me too.
Doppelganger?
In the rest of my time in active duty, I never ran into anyone else that "recognized" me as the other person, and I never ran into my doppelganger.
But it sure was weird to have some stranger tell you they were certain you were someone else.
