This article will argue that Isaac Fadoyebo’s memoir A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck deserves recognition as a work of life-writing and a unique literary account of an African soldier’s military service in Nigeria, Sierra Lone, India, and Burma. While previous discussions of Fadoyebo’s memoir have approached it either as historical source material or as a documentary proof of an otherwise lost history, this article will demonstrate that Fadoyebo’s text must also be understood, in its own right, as a complex narrative. Critically, it will show how privileging historical experience in Fadoyebo’s text can marginalize its other qualities. In particular, it will draw attention to the spiritual, mystical, and philosophical dimensions of the memoir, and the discursive subjectivity associated with it. It will argue that this more abstract material is pivotal to our understanding of historical experience in the memoir. In doing so, it will demonstrate that Fadoyebo’s memoir actively situates and archives experience by writing, both helping the reader to interpret this experience, and by allowing the reader to invest affectively in it.