So this is wedded Bliss

She had never flown.

That was one of the factors Sgt. Jon Bucher was turning over and over in his head as the wife he had barely spent time with in Coeur d’Alene was preparing to fly down to visit him at Fort Bliss, Texas, a couple of weeks ago.

The visit was going to be brief. The Army had promised 72 hours, but Bucher (pronounced boo-shay) had been around the military long enough that he knew plenty about Army promises. He wasn’t holding his breath.

But he had his own promises to keep and he wrestled with how best to tend to this fragile seedling of a marriage, protect it from this giant machine of an Army that went where it needed to go and didn’t much care what it trampled along the way.

They had met, he and Teresa, the first time he got out of the Army nearly seven years ago, leaving in the downsizing that followed Desert Storm.

“I went to visit the kids over at my ex’s house and she was there,” Bucher said. “About a month later there’s a knock on my door and it’s my ex and her. My ex was saying, ‘She’s just here to see your car. She’s got to see your car.’ ”

He had a ‘64 Catalina, and she loves cars. Of course she was there to see the car, Teresa said, and she ran right through the house into the garage. But of course there was more.

“His ex set us up,” she laughed. “He was standing there in his living room and I just ran through and waved ‘I’m here to see your car.’

“When I first met him he was all clammed up, but you get through that shy layer and he’s really good to talk to,” Teresa said. “He’s shown me a lighter side of life. He’s my comic relief.”

Jon and Teresa, each with kids, dated for a while, went their separate ways for about four years and got back together when they wound up at the same Fourth of July party in 2003. They decided to make the most of the second chance and got married in April.

“A week later I left,” he said, deployed to active duty along with hundreds of others in the largest call-up in the history of the Idaho National Guard.

And here he was behind razor wire in Texas and she’s back home with kids and no husband.

“I’ve just been trying to keep things on an even keel, paying the bills and living as a single parent again,” she said.

“I knew it was coming,” Teresa said. “But when it came, it was a harsh reality. He’s been through this before. Nothing about this seems normal to me.”

“That is so tough,” he said. “We didn’t have a honeymoon. Not that this is a real honeymoon, but I want to bring my wife down here, get her away from the kids and give her a break.”

“I knew what I was marrying into,” Teresa said, but “to be married this short of a time and get the see-you-later so soon … it’s rough. Him being gone has been an emotional roller coaster.”

But he earned some family leave and, even though the Army wouldn’t let him out of Texas, Bucher talked Teresa into flying down, him paying for the ticket even though all he had was his Army pay, and they would spend some time together.

This would be her first time flying. Plus, she didn’t take well to confined spaces, this dark-maned free spirit he had married.

His thoughts were far away. There were plenty of wheels turning: How would she be when the plane landed? What sort of charms could El Paso offer? How many hours would they really get to spend with each other? What’s a good, romantic place for dinner?

“She’s always wanted to come down to Texas. I hate the place, myself,” Bucher said. “They have this mountain range out here – the Franklin Mountains, and down at the end of it there is this road called Skyline Drive. You get up there and you can see from horizon to horizon … all of El Paso … into Juarez.

“Nothing but lights. It’s beautiful,” he said.

Bucher folded his lanky frame into his bunk bed. Wearing a brown T-shirt and tan desert camo pants, he curled into this cocoon of personal space that is roughly as big as a refrigerator box and weighed all the possibilities of what a fellow could do in 72 hours to make his wife’s visit a special one.

His little refrigerator box of privacy is the only place to get away from the clamor of 468 other personal dramas being played out in this crazy big tent crammed full of guys from North Idaho and Oregon and Montana and Pennsylvania – all National Guard soldiers and all of them crowded together since July 2 as they train for all the strange and terrible things that could happen during a year spent as combat infantry in Iraq.

“Has it been six weeks?” he asked. It’s easy to lose track of time. “There’s no calendar. And you’re always doing the same thing every day. You try to make some time for yourself where you can sit back and reflect … but it’s hard.”

And as the hours and days flow past with so much monotony that it’s hard to tell one from the other, many of the guys in the tent get twitchy and begin to pace restlessly, like a giant tent full of bored, heavily armed kids. Many vanish into computer games, others stare at movies aired on small DVD players.

Every so often, somebody will just throw his head back and howl.

It’s been hard in Coeur d’Alene, too, where Teresa spent the summer dealing with kids and bills and a pickup truck with a bad transmission and spent time with other wives who have husbands on active duty.

“You’ve got to make do with what you have,” Bucher said. His bunk is right up against the fabric wall of the tent, between two of the support pillars – prime real estate because it allows Bucher to store his foot lockers on the wall side of his bunk, for storage as well as display space. Everything back there was tidy.

“I got the wife. I got the kids,” he said, gesturing to photographs. “There’s my clock, my Kool-aid. You try to make it as homely as possible.”

Still, he sighed. There was so much that was out of his hands. Army promises, hah! Seventy-two hours, right!

“At first he called me all happy, they said they’d let him come meet me at the airport,” Teresa said.

He had to call back when that deal changed in a hurry. “We have a mission that night, then an AAR (after-action review),” Bucher said.

“Me? Anymore I’m from Missouri: Show me,” Bucher said, dismissing the surging tide of rumor and speculation that ebbs and flows throughout the tent.

He sighed again, rolled out of his bunk, laced up his boots and put on a shirt. He swung the 30-some pounds of body armor over his head and let the vest slide down his arms. In the late-August heat of El Paso you start sweating as soon as you snug the heavy armor across your body core, but soldiers can’t leave the tent without it.

The smoking area was almost comically incongruous. It’s a few long strides outside the big tent, under its own little two-walled flap of white tarpaulin. It was the sort of structure that somebody might rent and set up with flower pots for a backyard wedding. But here it was, creating a little square of shade on the stony ground of Fort Bliss, a few folding chairs clustered inside around one of those weird, pillar-necked plastic ash trays (one was so stuffed with butts that the neck melted into a flamingo shape).

It was early morning, yet the sky already seemed polished to a high gloss by the heat. If you stood facing two o’clock, the big tent and all the chaos it contained strangely dropped right out of mind. There was only the infinite blue sky, burnished by the desert sun, and the civilian jetliners looping down to hit the El Paso airport right over there. The civilian world – right there, across the wire.

“I was sitting out here smoking earlier, watching all the planes come in,” Bucher said. And it occurred to him, “I know what time her flight gets here. I could probably see the plane she’s on and watch it land.”

It was a romantic Plan B, and touched Teresa when she heard about it. “But he didn’t even get to see the plane come in,” she said. “I guess they stuck him on some kind of duty or mission and he didn’t get to see the plane.”

True, Teresa said, she had never flown before, and she has this thing about being crowded, and it would have been great to have her husband be the first to greet her. But the flight turned out fine. She had a window seat, and the unimaginable vista of seeing the world from above the clouds helped ease any sense of confinement, and the power and speed at takeoff was great, too.

“It felt like the Acme Rocket Company where Wile E. Coyote straps the rocket on and … pa-TOINGGG,” she laughed.

Jon’s sister-in-law picked her up at the airport. Jon called at 5:30 the next morning and they hooked up by 11.

“We had a blast. The whole time we laughed and we talked,” she said. “I think it was the best thing me and him have ever done together.”

They did go to Skyline Drive, she said. “Oh my God, it was beautiful with all the lights. Especially El Paso with this big star all lit up on a hillside.”

As it turns out, they only got about 48 hours with each other, but they filled it with enough laughter and light to nurture their marriage until the next time.