I always thought that I would be married, have kids, and be well on my way to having a family of my own by this point of my life (as of the time of this writing, I am 44 years old). Well, it certainly wasn’t due to a lack of trying! I first got serious about finding a person to start a family with when I got back from my first Iraq deployment in April, 2007.

KS I had been seeing a young woman, KS (can’t call her K because that’s for my first ex) from a fe months before I deployed, up through the deployment, and finally ended it when I returned stateside. If you’re asking why, here’s the deal: we had had a bit of a rocky relationship through the deployment – primarily because she didn’t believe in the idea of military service – and when we landed at Fort Bragg, it came to a head.
She had graduated high school the summer that I was deployed and did nothing afterwards. No job, no school, nothing! Well, except for fixate on how I was deployed. Constant freaking out emails and other crap to the point that I flat out stopped responding to her for a while – being in an environment where people actively want to kill you is stressful enough without having to contend with a clingy girlfriend with the anxiety level of a Chihuahua on adderal.
Well, when we landed in North Carolina, we ended up getting stuck there for almost a month due to a lazy filing clerk who decided to go on leave and not update anyone.
No, really. Congressmen and Senators were called – the dude ended up losing his job over it. While we were stuck there, lots of people had their families come down and visit – it was great! And I hadn’t decided to break up with her yet. Until… I suggested that she come down and visit me. I was willing to front for the hotel (since she didn’t have a job), but no. she refused to come down because, if she did, then she would have had to come down in a car with my parents – she also didn’t drive – and that would have been “entirely intolerable” for her. Can’t ride in a car for a few hours with someone that you dislike in order to see your boyfriend who has been away at war for a year? Yeah… fuck you.

MD I met MD on Facebook. It was fine – basic chatting, nothing too serious, and then… She lived in Ohio, another state over, and was attending Ohio State-Urbana for nursing. One day she messaged me, upset, because there was a semi-formal dance being held and she didn’t have a date. The only school dance that I had ever been to was Homecoming, once, so I did what I thought was the nice thing and offered to go to the dance with her. I am now 94.89103854% convinced that it was a setup because… two days after I had agreed to come out to meet her, “oh no, the dance has been canceled! Will you still come?” And I did. Took the Greyhound out to meet her. Figured that we would meet and hang out with some of her friends and the like.
Nope. All that we did was have sex. A lot of it. Over the course of the weekend. In her dormitory. I visited her several more times, met her family –her mother really liked me, as did her twin two-year old nephews – she came and visited me, met my family, and I took her to my cousin’s wedding. A key thing that I need to point out at this juncture is that I did my best to make sure that my visits did NOT disrupt her studies. Unfortunately… She ended up being put on “academic probation.” Messaged me, freaking out about what to do – a similar thing happened to me at Westminster College, so I tried my best to calm her down. I couldn’t move out there to be with her due to my obligation with the Reserves, but she could have moved out to Pittsburgh to be with me. Could get a job and attend the local community college. I was running through all of the possibilities in my head when I got the email from her. “I joined the Army as an army nurse! Shipping off to basic training tomorrow! I love you!” I wish that I could say that I was supportive of her choice, but I was pissed off. Less about the fact that she had enlisted and more about the fact that she hadn’t thought to tell me that it was something that she was considering. We WERE in a serious, committed relationship, and you don’t make major life decisions like that without at least giving your partner a warning first. I received a few letters from her during BCT that I did my best to respond enthusiastically and encouraging to, until I got the “Dear John” letter from her about how she couldn’t continue a relationship with me because she was going to be stationed in Korea. Understandable. I wished her good luck in her career and moved on, thinking that was going to be the last that I ever heard from her. About six months later I received a series of frantic facebook messages from her. Apparently, she had ‘fallen in love’ with her (married) team leader, slept with him a bunch of times, and he had gotten her pregnant.
She received an article-15 (reduction in rank and half pay forfeited for two months plus extra duty) and was told to stay away from him. She didn’t, got caught, and was in the process of being chaptered out of the Army with a bad conduct discharge. (This was in 2008 and you had to ROYALLY fuck up in order to get a bad conduct discharge.) This is another instance in which, in hindsight, I wish that I had been a nicer, or at least less blunt, person at the time. I was neither nice nor comforting.