We met on the golf course at the old El Toro Marine Corps Base only a few miles from my childhood home. Tom was 23, a 2nd Lieutenant with dazzling blue eyes and a knee-weakening smile. Courtesy of Liesel Kershul. Only a few months after we started dating, Tom was ordered to deploy to the Middle East as a combat engineer platoon commander attached to 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines.
A few weeks before he left, I watched him decorate a t-shirt in his sparsely furnished living room near the beach in San Clemente. Not about his own safety, like I was; he was painfully aware of how many Marines he was responsible for, and he was determined to bring them home safely.
What I read made me worry, but I tried to convince myself that he was well-trained and focused and fit and capable. At the time, I was convinced nothing bad could happen to someone so young and full of life. I wrote to him too. Every day. I mostly just told him about my school work and my job and my friends. I left out the bits about how I spent hours in front of the television, hoping to catch a glimpse of him or his unit on CNN, until my eyes turned red and it hurt to blink.
I was obsessed, and somehow in my twisted logic, I thought that if I just cared hard enough, I could will him to come home safely. He returned the following year mostly unscathed, but almost immediately volunteered to be one of the first U. He was hungry for more, and figured that this was what he had signed up for; why not volunteer to go? There was no easy way to get mail to him on that deployment, but I wrote letters anyway and sent them to an address in Kabul.
Award-Winning Journalism in Your Inbox. That was a rocky time for us, I felt abandoned and insignificant. We broke up and then got back together through a series of missed calls and nearly indecipherable phone messages. Most of the time, I had no idea what was happening to him or whether or not he was safe.
