10/7/10: Day 1
I was running through Charlotte Airport after landing in Carousel B. My next flight into Jacksonville was departing from Carousel E – in 15 minutes.
Panting, I was the last passenger to get onto the 30-person plane. The girl I was sitting next to smiled and said some friendly words as I fastened my seatbelt and tucked my purse under the seat.
“What are you going to Jacksonville for?” I asked while stuffing my face with a Whopper Jr. I to-goed.
“To see my boyfriend,” she said, smiling.
“Oh … what does he do?” I asked, unsure if I really wanted to hear the answer.
“He’s a Marine.”
Of course he is.
She had met him six months ago when she went to Jacksonville to see her pregnant sister.
Ah, I see, I said. While taking another bite of Whopper, I thought, wait a minute, why was her pregnant sister even in Jacksonville?
Hesitantly I asked to which she responded, “She married a Marine.” Duh.
Mallory went on to describe how her sister just gave birth to their first child but was now bracing herself to raise the baby alone while her Marine husband deploys to Afghanistan for 9 months.
“Isn’t that hard?”
Mallory shrugged essentially saying it is what it is. She then said her own boyfriend was deploying in three months as well. This time, I asked her, “Isn’t it hard?” while wondering, why would she sign up for the same difficult life as her older sister’s?
She described the relationship with the Marine to be something special. He was a southern gentlemen — something hard to find in her own hometown of Detroit where all the guys were either gangbangers or druggies — or both.
Because the relationship was difficult from the offset, (the long distance and the inevitable doom of deployment to name a couple), Mallory appreciated the little things and never took anything for granted as she would with any other boy.
“If he sends me a text message saying ‘Good morning.’ I go ‘Really?! Wow, thank you!’”
Sounds cute, huh? Too cute. That’s because Mallory is 19-years-old.
A baby started screaming from a couple rows back. The air pressure was hurting his ears.
When we landed, Mallory’s Marine boyfriend was waiting for her at the terminal. I waved goodbye to her watching her face stretching wide with the happiest smile while walking away in his arms. She could barely contain her excitement. She hadn’t seen him for three months. Her boyfriend looked just like the four other boys standing around at the terminal — built, arms crossed, their blonde hair shaved into a half a centimeter trim.
I walked to a seat and thanked Jesus there was free wifi in this three-terminal dinky airport — I was barely making deadline. While impatiently waiting for my Mac’s AirPort to catch on, I saw the mother of the flight’s screaming baby across from me. She was awkwardly bouncing the baby up and down while muttering, “I hope my dumb husband is smart enough to know where the entrance is.”
She was a petite white girl with blonde hair wearing flip-flops and jeans. She looked like she should’ve been writing her college applications about now. Or waving a pom pom in a JV Cheerleader uniform.
Her husband finally came. Looked just as young as she did.
He kissed her, then she gave him the baby to hold while cooing, “Say hi to daddy, say hi to daddy.”
It was painful to watch.
None of the men who enlist in the Marine Corps have gone to college and for most of them it was because they simply didn’t have the option to. Lacking faith in their parents to be able to provide, these young high school students had a rare maturity that most of their colleagues applying to college lacked. It takes a different mindset to think of one’s future and sign up for a four-year contract that offers an opportunity to die for your country before being able to vote in it.
It’s a job with a steady paycheck, free health insurance, and a $40,000 stipend for college tuition — after you finish your service, of course. These boys grow up fast, bypassing another four-year student status and jumping right into the working life packed with rifles, MK-47s and humvees.
When there’s the threat of losing your life, it’s only human to latch on to something, anything, worth living for. For the majority of these 20-something Marines, it’s marrying their high school sweetheart. God knows when you’re surrounded by dudes all the time — 24/7 — having a female voice on the other line at the end of the day could be the life vest when seeing nothing but cock-infested water.
And all throughout the four-hour-long flight from LAX to Charlotte, then from Charlotte to Jacksonville, all I could think was, “What the hell am I doing in North Carolina?”
