Havely (aka Aphrodite Mae) has asked me to write the story of how we met. Like so many of the other tales that are worth telling about our life together, it is both ridiculous and improbable, and yet it really happened. Most of the details in what follows were originally written in a journal that I kept at the time; but over the years, I've told this story so many times to so many people that I know it by heart.
In April 1986, my military unit was in the field, doing training in what was then West Germany. At one point, my platoon leader told me that I was going to spend three days on detached duty. Usually, "detached duty" was synonymous with "tedious and miserable", but as it turned out, this time was different: I was going to spend three days as a door gunner for a Blackhawk! I was transported to the Brigade HQ a few kilometers away, where I waited until the Blackhawk arrived. It seemed to be in a hurry; I was barely strapped in by the crew chief before we were taking off much faster than usual. (I was quite familiar with Blackhawks; my first duty assignment had been at the 101st.) In front of me was my weapon: a pintle mounted 7.62 mm MG, belt fed with blanks and ready to go. We were rockin'! Feeling extremely cool, I began firing bursts. A moment later, someone was thumping on my shoulder. It was the crew chief, and he began tapping on his helmet, pointing to a switch. Suddenly I realized that I needed to turn my intercom on.
"-gade TOC! Tell that idiot to cease fire!" said a woman's voice, with a southern accent. I have to admit, the words stung a little bit; but I let everybody know that I understood. So I sat there, and probably sulked. Most of the tasks that we did that morning were boring, at least for me; slingloading pallets of supplies, and occasionally ferrying a load of soldiers who were going to a firing range for weapons qualification. The first few hours were cool; but it became tedious unexpectedly quickly. Finally, things got better. We'd been assigned a tactical mission, and came hustling in to this little clearing in the woods, where we literally bounced to a landing. A bunch of grunts came sprinting out of the woodline, and piled in while an NCO was shouting, "go go go go
go!" I could hear the crackle of small arms fire, and so I confidently began firing short bursts of suppressive fire. It was exciting; it was cool; and I was ready to rock-n-roll.
The NCO who'd clambered in was a platoon sergeant named McKenny. "What in hell are you shooting at?!" he screamed. "You're firing up your own troops!" Of course, I immediately ceased fire. Meanwhile, the pilot was (once again) evacuating the AO, ASAP. Loaded with troops, I could feel the difference in the way the chopper moved. We barely cleared the tree tops at the woodline; I could still hear small arms fire in the woods beneath us, over the howling scream of the engines. And then, on the intercom, it was
her again. "You can start firing any time, Sergeant!"
(Big sigh) That morning, I had fired when I wasn't supposed to. Then, I did that, again. So now, I wasn't firing. But I was supposed to be.
The door gunner assignment wasn't turning out to be so cool, after all.
At some point awhile later, we had some free time. I was going to hastily eat, but the pilot said, "We need to talk, Sergeant!" as she pulled off her helmet. It was the first time that I'd seen her face. (I guess she'd had her glare visor down. My journal didn't say, that I recall.) I don't know what I'd expected, but what I saw definitely wasn't it. I guess I was expecting a Halloween Witch with a long nose that had the obligatory wart, coupled with a gap-toothed leer, and an evil gleam in her eyes. And a southern accent. Instead, the pilot was extremely pretty (southern accent and all), and I'm afraid that I probably stared a bit too long. Now have you ever noticed that when a woman says "we need to talk", what that really means is, "I'm going to talk, and you're going to listen"? Well, that’s the way it was. We moved away from the others. I wasn't particularly fond of her at the beginning of our chat, and by the time that she'd finished, I wasn't any happier. It wasn't that she was mean, rude, angry, or anything of that nature. She simply explained to me that I'd acted like an idiot, and she did so in a charming way that had me smiling and nodding with agreement.
After we got back to work, she didn't say anything else to me that I recall. I just held my fire during the rare instance when I was needed, using a newly acquired sense of timing: I waited until I was sure I was on the verge of being bitched at, and then I'd let 'er rip. I guess I did well enough; nobody yelled at me for the rest of the day.
The next time that we took an extended break, it was starting to get dark, and someone told me that we might be there for awhile. I decided that it might be a good idea to break out some night vision goggles and patrol the perimeter for security… although with only one person, "perimeter security" is an admittedly difficult task. So anyway, I soon enough noticed that the aviators had started a small
campfire.
It was hard to miss, in my night vision goggles. I'm sure that I just sighed, shook my head, and continued my worthless patrol. To make matters worse, the crew chief and the co-pilot/gunner kept bursting out with loud laughs. A bit later, I saw a silhouette trudging toward me using an electric torch, coming from the campfire. I was pretty sure I was going to get chewed out again, although for what, I couldn't imagine. I did feel rather foolish; I was prowling in the darkness wearing night vision goggles… to defend a cheerful campfire with loudly laughing aviators. The silhouette turned out to be the pilot. "Aren't you going to ask me 'who goes there', or something?" she said, sounding amused. "Hey… I brought you a marshmallow, Sergeant!" she added, cheerfully. She was carrying a small stick, and she shined the electric torch toward its tip to reveal a toasted marshmallow. It was just so rediculous that I made a separate peace with our simulated "threat" aggressors and went back to the campfire with her.
That night, the pilot and I became friends. We still called each other "Sergeant" and "Sir",
but I soon realized that she was unquestionably the most exceptional woman I'd ever met. (She still is. I'm so lucky! :love
Soon enough, I was loudly laughing along with the rest of her crew as she would tell jokes and make humorous observations about life in the military.
The next two days turned out to be extremely cool. She and I quickly realized that we seemed to have a "once in a lifetime" chemistry between us, and we were delighted to discover that we were stationed only 18 km apart. We maintained a strictly professional relationship for the rest of the training; but we couldn't wait to spend some time together when we weren't in uniform, so to speak.
I got to experience some flying that most grunts never do; and a time or two, I have to admit, I was starting to feel pretty queasy. (Stop the music! Stop the
music! I wanna get
off !!) An important point that I should add is that Havely's crew seemed both pleased and amused by our intense attraction to each other, coupled as it was by restraint. They were her friends, and brothers in arms. As I quickly saw, any concerns that I had about jealousy were not only groundless, but inappropriate among such a team of professional soldiers as the three of them were.
Now there's a final thing I need to add. As a young Infantry NCO who thought he knew it all, the campfire and the flashlight and all of those things had really bothered me, in my well-intentioned concern for what seemed to be egregious violations of Tactical Ops. But as it turned out, my concerns were needless. The US Army wants its Aviation personnel to be sharp and alert during training; and so, the combined arms training that's so important to Infantry and Armor and Artillery is really somewhat of a holiday for the people who are normally flying Medivac and other "real" missions, most of the time. I am both honored, and proud to have shared a toasted marshmallow or two with a US Army Aviation crew in Graffenwohr, a long time ago in a country which no longer exists. The gunship flyboys get all the glory, but the unsung heros of all nation's Armies are the Logistics Aviators. Its hard, thankless work that they do. To this day, when someone asks Havely what she did in the Army, she modestly says with a straight face that she was a "taxi driver".
So… that's the way that it happened! I believe that very few men can recall the first words they ever heard their wife speak, but I'm one of them. Unfortunately.
Given one or two small advantages, maybe, through a few simple and inconsequential mods.
