Fast Forward

Fast Forward
Friday, 11 May 2012
2030

Recently I’ve been getting a number of positive comments on my blog posts about Kuwait, Qatar and the deployment/redeployment process.  It’s nice to know that some of the information is still useful to other people as they go through the experience themselves. This blog has been moribund since I returned from overseas, but more and more often recently I’ve had the thought “I should make a blog entry about that”, so I think it’s time to start posting again.  I probably won’t be posting as often as I did when I was deployed, for a variety of reasons.  But my life is still an excellent adventure, and there are parts of it I’d like to share.

How do you “catch up” on a blog that hasn’t had a new post in over a year?  I think the answer is: you don’t, not really.  But so much has happened in the past year that I have to say at least something before I start in again. There are a few things in particular that I want to cover, at least one of which deserves to be treated in some detail. So where to start?  It’s probably best to start right where I left off, after a little detour into the past from before my last post in April 2011.

When I wrote about demobilizing at the CRC in late 2010, I mentioned my girlfriend.  Well, now she’s my wife. When we first started dating, she made me promise not to talk about her in my blog, as she is a very private person and was apprehensive about how open and public it was. Now, for reasons I will go into a bit further down, her life is more public than mine ever was, so I think it’s OK to write about us here. 

I met Teresa Irish on June 9^th, 2009 on a Delta flight from Detroit to Atlanta when I was returning to Qatar after R&R leave. She was a corporate executive who travelled nearly every week for work, and on this flight we were seated across the aisle from each other.  I was in uniform, and she was feeling sentimental about the soldiers going off to war. She is a very caring, empathetic person, but she was especially sensitive to seeing soldiers going to war because her father had been a veteran of World War II.  After his death, she had discovered a trunk full of his war memorabilia, including nearly a thousand letters that he had written home to his fiancée and family during the war.  She had been so moved by the letters that she decided to publish them in a book, and was working on it at the time we met on the plane. She started the conversation by asking me “So, are you headed home or headed out?”  I told her I was headed back to the Middle East to finish my tour. We talked for the entire flight, exchanged email addresses, and kept up a correspondence while I was deployed. 

When I came home from that deployment, we started dating.  We continued to date while I was stationed in Germany. She visited me there, and we travelled around Germany as well as to Switzerland and the Czech Republic.  It was pretty cool – how many people get to conduct their courtship while traveling through Europe?  I asked her to marry me a bunch of times, but she didn’t seem to think I was serious.  Finally on New Year’s Eve 2011, I convinced her to say “yes”.   J

In March 2011, someone asked her about her progress on the book.  After giving her usual answer of “Well, it’s coming along but I don’t know when it will be done”, I was struck by how stressed she got whenever someone asked her about it.  It had been such a happy subject before, and was in fact the reason we had met and “clicked” in the first place. It seemed a shame that it had become such a burden to her.  I suggested, and (after some persuasion) she agreed that we would finish it together and surprise her family with it at our wedding in October.

So that’s what I did last year.  After I got to Fort Bragg in April, nearly every free moment we had was spent working to finish the book.  We learned a lot in six months!  She had spent a lot of time and effort trying to get publishers interested in the manuscript, with no success (which is completely the norm in that industry). We decided “to heck with them” and started her own publishing company, ATLH Publications. 

The amount of work involved in publishing a book is staggering – I have a whole new respect for writers and editors now.  While she finished writing the introduction and closing chapters, I worked on the technical details and learning the mechanics of getting the book published.  We edited the text together. We chose about a hundred photographs from the several hundred that she had found in the trunk and from other sources. We had them scanned, cropped and formatted them, and developed captions from the information on the back of each photo. We collected historical information for contextual notes from a variety of sources.  We developed several appendices as well as a glossary of military terms. We spent countless hours going over the layout of each page to make sure they looked right. We worked with a graphic designer to create the cover. We started a website to publicize and sell the book. And finally, we printed pre-publication proofreading copies just in time to unveil the book at our wedding in October. We presented the first copy to her mother.  J

The Cover of "A Thousand Letters Home"

We went to Idaho on our honeymoon, and spent much of our time proofreading the book and planning for the future. Over the next couple of months we finished editing and arranging for the production of the first print run.  We really wanted the book to be available in time for Christmas, and it was delivered just in time for us to get the pre-ordered copies in the mail by mid-December.

You can read more about the book (and buy a copy) at the website:

www.AThousandLettersHome.com

Since publication, we have both been very busy with our regular work and with managing the book activities. Teresa has found that she really enjoys speaking to groups about “the journey of the letters”. It is such a compelling story of love, faith, and perseverance in the face of adversity that people respond to it very emotionally. She has now retired from her corporate career and will be spending her time on speaking engagements and other outreach activities, developing the themes in the book and sharing its inspiring, life-affirming message with a variety of audiences.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. The events of the past year have changed my life, and we’re just getting started.   It’s truly an excellent adventure!

Mood: Happy
Music: Nena, “(Du Bist Mein) Geheimnis”
http://www.nena.de/musikvideo/videos
http://www.nena.de/musikvideo/lyrics/lyrics/1881