Looking down at the black folder awarding her a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration, she edged it open and began reading.

And then she started to cry.

"It's perfect," she said a few moments later, wiping away tears.

On a beautiful parchment sheet, in neat print, her husband had sent a message of congratulations through the HPU staff all the way from Bagram, Afghani-stan, where he's a Chinook helicopter pilot for Company B, 214th Aviation Regiment.

His regiment left Wheeler Army Airfield in March last year and hopes to be back home again this March.

HPU had kept the secret, had worked it so that his letter of encouragement, congratulations and love would be carefully slipped inside the right diploma, to be opened and read at just the perfect moment.

With tears streaming down her face, Robinson read the words, blurry at first from her tears.

"... I am with you always. ..." her husband wrote.

"This is a very special day, so enjoy it. ...

"I remember the frustration ... I remember the sacrifices that were made. ...

"This degree is something that you gave to yourself ...

"It is something that no one can take from you. ..."

In Bagram, Chief Warrant Officer 2 John R. Robinson, 33, had been thinking of this day, too. Thinking of all that it meant to his wife. To the woman he has watched study and learn and take exams and struggle to go to school though she had to work part-time or full-time to pay for it, and sometimes take just one course a semester. To the girl he first met when they were growing up in Shreveport, La.

Jessica Robinson, 27, is the first person in her family to earn a college degree.

"Hopefully," he wrote, "this series of experiences has better prepared you to make even better choices in the future. ... Some of us figure out that anything is possible and achievable. We merely have to dream and create it.

"I know this about you ...

"I hope you are that much closer to knowing it about yourself ...

"Never quit. ..."

Robinson reached her seat in another blur. The tears, the words, the faces of her friends and fellow students around her, and the hubbub of activity, from the colorful stage with its flags from all the nations from which HPU students hail, to the elaborate robes of the academic faculty to the air horns going off in the background and the soap bubbles floating over her head.

"This was a really special day," she said, more tears trickling down her face.

"I wished he was here. ... He hated that he couldn't be here."

She wouldn't have kept going, she said, if not for her husband and her mother. Both kept the encouragement up, kept telling her how important it was to get her degree.

"My mom told me because I'm the only one who has gone to college that I better not quit."

Even her employer, KMH-LLP Accounting, has been encouraging. And on Jan. 1, with her degree ensured, they did one of the best things of all. They gave her a promotion to staff accountant.

Last night, as she read her husband's words one more time, she said she was going to frame them along with her diploma.

But first she was going to sleep with them under her pillow.