What we think about fate…
This is my real-life experience to share from my recent tour in Iraq…
We were beginning our last, very long convoy across Iraq. It had been a very active, sleepless deployment. On the evening of our departure, at about 1230 AM we were speeding down a two lane highway north of Baghdad, when our driver had to swerve off the road to avoid barbwire and lost control. Totaling our massive truck left me knocked out, waking up to my teammate inside holding onto my legs and yelling to see if I was ok (in turn he successfully secured his spot as the best man in my wedding)… Unable to breathe, my next memory was waking up in a blackhawk as I was being flown to a hospital in Baghdad.
Maggie, a Sergeant in the US Army, was a nurse stationed at that hospital and working on the same floor that I was admitted to after the accident, this is her story…
After we first glanced and each other, we just couldn’t stop smiling! We still joke all the time about how much our faces hurt from too much time laughing together. We immediately began talking every day, and that elementary school “crush” feeling was obvious. This lasted for about another week or so, before we had to say our goodbyes, not knowing what the future held…
About a week later I was finally completing my tour, and Maggie was given nearly 3 weeks of leave back in the United States before having to go back to Iraq to finish the last few months of hers. Knowing our time was short. Maggie and I got to spend only 1 weekend together when she flew out to California just days before heading back to Baghdad. Still, that was all the time we needed to start officially dating. We knew this was it all along, so I popped the question at the beach in Ventura, CA on February 16th.
At that moment we knew the next year of our lives together would be incomparable to the hardships we faced over the previous. We used to joke about Iraq being the, “beach with no water.” So we thought, a destination wedding at a tropical beach might just be what we need to restore the meaning of beauty in our lives. What more beautiful place in the world than the “beaches with water” like those in the Bahamas? We think the Islands of the Bahamas should bail us out so we can experience a wedding that we couldn’t have even fathomed from where we were in our lives just a short year ago. Celebrating a reception with some bongo drums and local foods would make us never want to leave…
Everything in the Bahamas will be surreal to us! We couldn’t be more excited about finding each other, proving that even 10,000 miles from home, that 1 special person is out there...
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