To this day I still remember my last night in Kansas. We all went to a coworkers new apartment to watch Monday Night Football (the Chiefs were playing) and then I said my goodbyes and left to get my mom from the airport. We were set to start a road trip early the next morning to San Diego, where I would spend a couple weeks with Jeremy before heading up to Fort Irwin to get settled into a new apartment and a new life. While I was in San Diego, Jeremy and I went up to Barstow so we could find an apartment, our first apartment, which I moved into in early November, 2004. Within a couple weeks Jeremy joined me and though things weren’t perfect, we were at least together and finally living like a real married couple.

Fort Irwin was totally different from what I was used to at Leavenworth. It was a bigger installation and for the first time since job school, I was working with only military coworkers. It was also smack dab in the middle of the desert. I was lucky to arrive before winter, so the climate wasn’t a total shock. By the time summer came, I would be able to slowly to adjust to the temperature hitting 110 in the shade.

Life was near perfect at this point. I was sleeping next to my husband every night. Waking up next to him every morning. Coming home to him after work every evening. We ate dinner and curled up on the couch afterwards and just settled into being newlyweds. For Christmas, we decided to stay in California and have a quiet holiday together. We got a three-foot high real Christmas tree, decorated it and put presents under the tree. He had gotten promoted right before he moved. I continued working my tail off to get promoted. Life was peachy. Unfortunately things wouldn’t stay so great.

After eight months of living together, while on a family vacation in Vegas with my parents and sister, Jeremy got the phone call saying he would have to deploy. Less than a month later he was gone. I was back to being a married woman with no husband in sight. I threw myself back into work. Again, to fill my free time, I went back to school and spent some time with friends. I got into chatting online via a message board and started going on trips to visit family and friends. Anything to fill up the time and keep from being lonely.

About halfway through his deployment, I received an email from higher-ups at Department of the Army headquarters that I would be deploying myself, just a month after Jeremy came home. This threw me into a mad rush to get this deferred so I’d have more time with Jeremy when he got back, though all the panic was for nothing when my orders were canceled a few months later. But all the stress took it’s toll on Jeremy and I as our relationship became strained from all the stress his deployment was putting on us. He was stressed and doing the best he could to keep things together. I was equally stressed and not handling it well. Or more accurately not handling it at all and instead spent my weekends drunk off my ass and fighting with him when we actually got chances to talk.

The only place I was having any real success was at work. I finally got promoted to sergeant, though I was one of the last in my office to be promoted so I still didn’t have any soldiers under me. Through some networking I had been doing in Los Angeles, I was able to bring a producer up to Fort Irwin to do a story on the National Training Center, which got me some time out of the office and into the desert enjoying the media relations aspect of my job. I assisted on a redesign of our newspaper and even got to try my hand as an editor for a few weeks. Our office was in it’s golden age, with an amazing and knowledgeable staff of writers and broadcasters all focused on telling the Army’s and Fort Irwin’s story to the world. It was the perfect time to work there.

But as usual, when it rains it pours and just as my personal life was crashing at my feet, my professional life decided to as well.