I love to write, so when I saw a message posted on an AOL message board asking people to send letters and christmas cards to the injured Marine Corps recruits in rehab I decided to go ahead and print out the address. I had second thoughts a couple times about sending anything, but after sending cards out to my friends and family I had some leftover and decided to go ahead and send a couple. About a week after I sent the cards I got a thank you letter from a recruit. He seemed like a nice enough guy so we started writing back and forth, and eventually exchanged pictures. For my 20th birthday he sent me a stuffed bulldog, which I thought was incredibly sweet. He finally graduated from boot camp in February, and I agreed to send him my phone number so that we could finally talk "in person". We hit it off right away, but then he went home for a month and I figured that I wouldn't hear from him. Sure enough though, I got a letter from him saying that he would be going to school the next state over from me, and mentioned that he would like to get together. I couldn't believe the luck of that, but I was even more excited when he called to tell me that the plans had changed, and that he was going to school less than 2 hours from me!

We agreed to meet, so one saturday I headed down 95 south to visit him. It was pretty awkward at first, but it still went very well. I ended up driving down every weekend for 6 weeks straight, and although he's stationed in California and I'm still here in Virginia, we're still a couple. I'm flying out to see him for the first time in 6 months next month! Oh, and he likes to joke around and call himself my mail order marine :)