My favorite and I think most comical Valentine’s Day was shortly after my now-husband returned from a 15-month deployment to Iraq. We had met shortly before we returned from Iraq and had spent every spare moment, which isn’t many when deployed, together. He received orders right before we returned that had him going to Germany in five months.
We had gone home to Kansas on leave and in the middle of the time visited his family in Tennessee for a week. After we got back from Tennessee, he took me to my favorite restaurant where he proposed. That was the fifth of February, exactly one month after redeploying. We had a few more days home before we headed back to Fort Hood. Our last day of leave happened to fall on Valentine’s Day, so we spent the majority of the day on the road.
During the eight hour drive back we talked about when we were going to get married, since we needed to do it quick if I was going to be able to go to Germany with him. We finally decided that we were going to get married the next day after we got off work. Well, we didn’t end up getting off work in time to make it to the court house, so we ended up getting married five days later. We had two of our friends stand for each of us at the courthouse and then we went to a pizza place afterwards. We had planned on having our big wedding later that year. We are getting ready to celebrate our fourth anniversary and that wedding still hasn’t happened yet. In the big scheme of things it doesn’t matter though, we have made it through two deployments and more training that we were separated for than I can count and now we have added a beautiful baby boy and one crazy boxer puppy.
Even through everything, I still look back on that Valentine’s Day and laugh, because we were just two young soldiers with a partial plan and one long trip to get it all figured out, somehow we did it and that Valentine’s Day will probably always be one of my favorites.