My weekends were spent driving back and forth from Alabama to North Carolina bringing carloads of stuff at a time. Josh had found a tiny apartment close to the base for us to start living in. Josh would not have the time or permission to start setting up our new place, so that became my task whenever I was in Fayetteville. The apartment consisted of a TV and Xbox on the floor, minimal kitchen utensils, and an air mattress in the middle of the living room. The heat was intensifying in North Carolina in late spring, and we couldn’t afford to pay for air-conditioning at my current place in Jacksonville and at our new apartment, so we put the air mattress in the living room under the only ceiling fan. A combination of the devastating heat and a low-quality mattress caused us to gradually roll toward the middle of the bed as the air leaked out during the night. By morning we would be face-to-face, breathing each other’s air and stuck in the middle of the mattress like hot dogs in a bun. While I always missed Josh when I had to go back to Jacksonville at the end of a weekend, I was thankful to sleep on a real mattress when I got back.
Over time, not only did the distance wear on me but so did my decision to not live with my husband after I married him. True, we were actively trying to get a home together in Fayetteville, but night after night in Jacksonville I would look at the ceiling and think What married person lives with roommates, neither of which is her husband? Matt McLaughlin and Brittney Whitten were my grad school roommates and my best friends. However, I was so bitterly jealous of Matt and Brittney getting to see each other every day. They were planning their own wedding and doing all parts of it together, while I sat in my room and wondered if Josh was getting beat up by someone at work as part of another training exercise. I just wanted to pout. I never saw Josh. When I did make it to Fayetteville, he was still pulling fourteen-hour days on the base and had little time left over for me. I was lonely and withdrawn. I could tell I was becoming a downer for Matt and Brittney, but if I put on a good face and tried to carry on, how would anyone know how unfair my life was? Regardless, they did their best to give me grace, space, and patience so our relationship wouldn’t have to be buried alongside all my hopes and dreams when I decided to marry a guy in the Army.
I was applying for jobs in the area with no luck, so I decided to work as many volleyball camps as I could in northeastern Alabama to save up money for my official move to Fayetteville. By the spring of 2011, Josh was immersed in language school and was becoming fluent in conversational Spanish. He sat in a classroom for almost ten hours a day where no one was allowed to speak English. It was a huge change of pace from the two or three nights a week in the woods for land navigation training that he was used to. I was working a volleyball camp near Birmingham and noticed that Josh was trying to call me a few hours after lunch time. I couldn’t answer because I was in the middle of a session, but I thought it was extremely odd timing. There’s no way he is on his lunch break or off work for the day, so how is he even on his phone? Am I needed at another courthouse wedding? I called him back and he told me he had bad news. The language school group was required to complete a five-mile run at lunch time that day. High noon is not a typical time to conduct physical training, but this was more or less a pop quiz for the guys in the Q Course. Josh and some of the other candidates were in language school, where they spent most of their days under the rule of a civilian native Spanish speaker. The design of the course was to learn conversational Spanish with regional dialects in eight weeks. Candidates were banned from speaking and writing in English and spent long hours doing vocabulary, perfecting their speech, and completing mounds of assignments. During the language phase, physical training became each soldier’s responsibility, and the expectations for running, marching, push-ups, and sit-ups would not slacken due to their heavy workload in the classroom. Each soldier was expected to be battle ready at all times, even if it meant running in the noonday heat in summer. Josh explained that there had been several dropouts from the heat, some resulting in serious injuries. Josh quickly assured me he was not one of them. In fact, if Josh had fallen out of this run, he probably would have been recycled through the same course or required to redo the run. Instead, he lasted. He kept on his feet, helped others when they were falling out, and kept moving, but he failed the test… by five seconds. Not the seasoned worrier that I am, Josh was having a hard time concealing his concern about what this failure meant for his future. However, when he said around seventy guys had fallen out, I was certain Josh had nothing to worry about because they would have to retest everyone, right? Seventy people fell out of the run. Failing that many guys is not a good look for the military, right? Surely, they will reschedule this for a regular PT time so everyone can actually have a shot at making it. I tried my best to reassure Josh and rationalize that
