Getting a job as a journalist in the Army isn’t easy. It’s considered one of the “smart MOSs” because you have to do well on the military entrance exam to get it. Beyond that, often the career counselors at the processing station and recruiters often don’t mention it mainly because they don’t know about it. In all his years as a career recruiter, my recruiter had never put in a journalist until me. Of course, I have to be different, so I refused to sign until they gave me the job. Not once did I do this, but twice. I figured I might as well do something with all those English and writing classes I had been taking at FLCC.

The school for journalists is at Fort Meade, Maryland. It’s the Defense Information School and is where all military public affairs people go to learn about telling the military’s story. And that would be my home for 13 weeks as I worked with people in all branches of the military to learn my craft. Arriving there was pretty uneventful. We got there late in the day, got smoked a little bit, filled out paperwork and settled into our rooms. On the first day of school, we marched the eighth of a mile or so to the school house and joined our fellow students. There were 48 of us, most straight out of basic training or boot camp. Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. One of the first things they said to us was that not all of us would pass because the class was going to be hard and we were going to have to work hard to make it through. They then split us up into 4 sections. We would take classes as a large group, but for the more intensive parts of the class, we would work in smaller groups of 12. Each day, at the end of the day, we would march back to the company area and be released for the day.

It was one day in the second week, as we were coming back from lunch for a class with everyone, that I sat next to this cute Marine. We spent every break, and even some of the lesson time, chatting and joking back and forth. As we were walking out of the schoolhouse, he asked me when I was going to dinner. I told him after formation and asked if he wanted to join me. From then on, Jeremy and I were nearly inseparable. We ate lunch and dinner together everyday, since that was all I could really do at the time. When soldiers first get to job school, we are under nearly the same rules as in basic training. No civilian clothes, no going off post and strict curfews. At 4 weeks, all of these restrictions are taken away except that we could only leave post on the weekends and could even spend one night a weekend off post. So for two weeks, we could only spend meals together and even then I was always in some sort of uniform.

Once I finally had the freedom to actually leave post, every weekend Jeremy and I would get away. Most weekends were spent in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, where most of the students at DINFOS would go to escape. The longer weekends we would go to Washington DC. The days we couldn’t get away we would spend at the mall or hanging out on post enjoying each other’s company. Some weekends, when we were still on post, we would wake in the mornings and run around the golf course and many evenings were spent sitting under the tree by his barracks talking until I had to go in. DINFOS romances were a standard joke among the cadre and students who were in the longer courses. Romantic relationships built among students because most of us were fresh out of training and young and horny. There were couples who even got married before their classes would end, which became a running joke between the two of us. Our relationship was just fun and it was understood we would part at the end of the class, which made our jokes even funnier to us.

Even after we had professed our love for each other, we still made the jokes. Mid-way though the cycle, we were given our new duty assignments, mine sending me to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and his sending him to Camp Pendleton, California. But the jokes had become half serious and the thought of breaking up started to sound awful to us. One evening, while sitting at the Hard Rock Cafe in the Inner Harbor, the jokes went from half serious to completely serious and we got engaged. Within two days he had given me the most beautiful ring I had ever owned and soon after we told our parents and made plans to finally meet each other’s parents, mine at graduation and his after.

In early August, we finally graduated. Graduation from job school is an exciting time for soldiers. The Army is the most strict of all the branches of service when it comes to troops in training. It’s not until we finally graduate from job training that we are finally officially soldiers. It’s both wonderful and scary. Wonderful, because we all finally get a break. This is when we finally get to take leave and visit family. This is also when we can finally be soldiers and not have to be under the constant watchful eye of a cadre of drill sergeants. But scary in that we now have to be a part of the real Army. We are now at risk for deployment. And we now have to go out there and actually do the job we were trained to do. And we have to do it all with people we have never met before in a place we’ve never been before. Exciting and scary.