POCATELLO — Teresa Vialpando was 17 years old and had just graduated from Pocatello High School when she saw a TV advertisement that inspired her to join the Army.

The self-described "girly girl" and "social butterfly" had never lived outside Pocatello or beyond her small circle of friends before enlisting.

"Suddenly, you have people yelling at you and you're pushing your body to limits," Vialpando said. "You're doing things you never, ever would have dreamed of, knowing that your life had switched in such a dramatic way. But it made you feel physically, emotionally and mentally stronger as a person — as a human. It was a really awesome experience."

Her training and work in the Army gave her a sense of accomplishment and pride. That 17-year-old girl would learn to fire a weapon she had never held and would do things she never thought she was capable of doing.

What was intended to be "one weekend a month, two weeks a year" ended up being four years of active duty. Vialpando served as a U.S. Army motor transport operator, or "88 Mike," operating and supervising wheeled vehicles used to transport troops, cargo and equipment. Training for this position required classroom and hands-on experience with the vehicles, which took Vialpando to Fort Lewis in Washington state.

There, Vialpando worked missions with the local ranger battalion, participating in convoys, setting up perimeters, digging foxholes and living in tents and cots out of the back of her five-ton truck.

Years later, Vialpando discovered that her grandfather had been stationed at Fort Lewis in the early 1960s, where he met her grandmother. The pair married in a small white church on the base.

For Vialpando, the time she spent in the Army forged lasting friendships that she still maintains more than 20 years later.

"There's just the sense of pride and accomplishment of who you are and what you've been able to accomplish," Vialpando said. "What you've put yourself through and being able to come out on the other side. I've still been friends with a lot of these people, and I think a lot of that was — you get thrown in with people from all walks of life, from all different personalities, from different places. Somehow everybody seems to form that bond (despite) never having met before and never being in somebody else's shoes."

During her time in Washington state, Vialpando met her husband, and the pair moved back to Pocatello around 2018.

"When we moved back here to Pocatello, I ran the veterans shelter over at SEICAA, and the lady before me that I was replacing would take the veterans over to the morning coffee shop a couple times a week," Vialpando said. "That's where my first entrance into the Veterans Memorial Building came. The more I hung out around there, the more I talked to other veterans there, I grew to love the fact that there was this big, giant building that was built for veterans, and I became more involved."

Vialpando was inspired by the story of how the Veterans Memorial Building came to be and the war mothers in the city who connected the community.

"Everybody pulled together in such a way because they had such a passion about getting it built," Vialpando said. "Here we are, 100 years later, and she's still standing for veterans. I'm trying to keep the passion of this community from 100 years ago going. It's what pushes me every day."

Vialpando now serves as president of the association that owns and maintains the Veterans Memorial Building, managing approximately 13 veterans service organizations. From meetings to managing the recent flooding that damaged the building in late 2024, Vialpando has become the face of the organization and the community it represents.

"I just want to make it a place that it was meant to be," Vialpando said. "A home for veterans, for everybody to communicate, to be able to come together, to find that camaraderie again. For the last 100 years this community has felt so strongly about veterans, and we've managed to keep this building and the organizations in it alive, so that they have somewhere to go."

With Veterans Day approaching, Vialpando feels a mixture of emotions as she reflects on her service and that of other soldiers.

"Part of me feels grateful for the fact that I was one of those few people in the world that signed on the dotted line for the U.S. military," Vialpando said. "You get that day of recognition. But a bigger part of me feels that it's not that big of a deal. We don't need to be recognized for it. We did what we did because that's what we wanted to do."