BANGOR – Both the Rev. Bob Carlson and Sister Mary Norberta got a big hug from former President Bill Clinton last week at Bangor International Airport, but they’ll tell you that what they’ll remember most is seeing Clinton help greet the troops coming through BIA on their way back from Iraq.

“He gave them all their day in the sun,” Carlson recalled. “He would shake their hands, make eye contact with every single one of them, and say, ‘Thank you for your service.'”

The former president joined the Maine Troop Greeters, who are always on hand to welcome returning military personnel.

“The guys and girls were so excited to see him,” said Sister Norberta. “It was neat. I had seen the troops come in before, but not a whole flight. It was very rewarding. The troops were so young – they looked like high school kids.”

It was an evening of high spirits, but both community leaders managed to talk issues with the former president, whose plane was on its way back to New York from Paris.

Clinton acknowledged that there were a lot of questions about how the country got into the war with Iraq, Carlson recalled.

“But he said, ‘For us to pull out would be absolutely the wrong thing to do. Staying the course is the only thing to do,'” Carlson said.

Sister Norberta, as president of St. Joseph Healthcare, took the opportunity to bring up health care with Clinton.

“I told him that Hillary [Rodham Clinton, now in the U.S. Senate] was right on target” with her approach to the issue, she said, “and that we need everybody at the table.”

“I would hope the Bush Administration would use [Clinton’s] intelligence. He’s one of the brightest presidents we’ve had, and one of the best strategists,” she said. “I’d like to see him and Hillary head up some kind of health care commission for the country.”

Sister Norberta, who had previously met presidents Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush, found Clinton “very personable.”

When she got back to the Felician Sisters’ convent that evening, “the sisters couldn’t believe it,” she said. “They were all excited.”

Carlson had previously met presidents George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon at Fenway Park when he was vice president. But this was the first time he’d been able to have so much conversation with a president.

“He was most engaging,” Carlson said. “Who was expecting to arrive in Bangor, Maine, and be greeted by the former commander in chief? You should have seen the look on some of the troops’ faces.”

Clinton told everyone he liked being in Bangor again, and acknowledged he remembered his 1996 campaign trip to the city, when he invited the band from John Bapst Memorial High School to come to Washington during inaugural activities the next January – which the band did.

For Carlson, who is chaplain at Husson College and various police departments, the former president’s most memorable words of the night on Jan. 9 were these:

“The thing that I’m most grateful for is that the Lord is much more generous with mercy than He is with judgment.”