Three weeks ago, Army Boyfriend left to Fort Benning, Georgia, for Airborne school. If you've seen Band of Brothers, you might be familiar with PLF's and phrases like "eyes on the horizon!" or "feet and knees together!" But if you're like me and have only seen the first 20 minutes of each BOB episode, succumbing to sleep after your brain starts to hurt from attempting to decipher all of the acronyms, then you'll need to know that Airborne, are basically parachuters. They are soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors who willingly jump out of planes into combat. Crazy kids.
Three weeks if no big deal, but even the shortest deployments, are still deployments. About a month before Boyfriend left, Commander, Boyfriend's father, proposed an insane, yet brilliant (mostly insane) idea. What if we flew out to watch his graduation?! Umm..what? Uhh..okay...So two weeks and a few hundred dollars later we had a 36 hour itinerary.
The night before graduation:
Fly from California to Tennessee, Tennessee to Alabama
Drive from Alabama to Georgia
*insert surprise here*
After a 40 minute graduation ceremony the next day:
After a 40 minute graduation ceremony the next day:
Drive back to Alabama
Fly to Dallas, Fly to California, 36 hours later.
Everything went pretty smoothly: our flights on time, not crowded. We did forget to factor in time differences, so by the time we got to Georgia it was already 10:30pm. Having already traveled 2200 miles that day, I was not going to wait until the next morning to see Boyfriend. After yelling profanities at Georgia's weird streets, we finally made it onto base, after Commander pulled rank and I pulled out my puppy face (not really..sorta)
Our friend James, who attended Airborne last summer, was in on our covert operation and directed us where to go. Despite this, it still took us an hour to find boyfriend. After coercing random Airbornes to go look for him, and calling his cell phone numerous times, our cadet still slumbered. Finally we got him downstairs, surprised, shocked, and a lot a bit groggy.
The next morning we show up two hours early to graduation. Airborne Charlie Company are going through graduation rehearsal, and the Commander interrupts to ask where they'll hold the ceremony. Out of 450 new Airborne, Boyfriend is singled out. and though he has a big grin on his face, I'm totally embarrassed for him. That's like, your mom going with you to the first day of high school to take pictures. Just plain embarrassing.
I got to pin Boyfriend's wings on (now Airborne Boyfriend), which was a great honor, and took great skill, since it was 42 degrees with a wind chill factor of ridiculous, so my California-trained fingers will not that excited. But it was a beautiful day, a wonderful ceremony, all the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment