How I had gotten myself into such a fix was a long story.  My new husband had spent a tour as a fighter pilot in Korea, then returned to the training command in Pensacola to teach cadets how to land on a carrier.  Five days a week he waved them aboard and qualified--or disqualified--them in the final stage of flight training.  

Ten landings on the carrier and they were qualified.  On a pitching, rolling deck.  Some of them didn’t make it. He washed them out before they killed themselves, or more seriously, killed their instructor.  As long as there was sunlight, Ken was working on the carrier.  Waving "nuggets" aboard.  Every night he came home dead tired.  After four months of this, I was so homesick that I got on a bus and went back to Oklahoma.  

The only thing Ken said to me was, "Are you coming back?"  

Of course I was coming back.  I'm not a quitter.  I just needed a break.  As the pilgrim said in "Pilgrim's Progress,"  I had fallen into the "Slough of Despond."  I had been in Florida for four months, and was desperately lonely for something that was familiar to me.  I was a fish out of water.  I was not an adult just because I got married.  I was a kid living in an adult world.  I had very few coping skills.  I had never had to cope before. 

I hadn't had a clue--when I married Ken--what being plopped down into a military world was going to be like.  I knew nothing about the military.  I had grown up in heaven.  A small Oklahoma town where everyone knew everybody else.  Pensacola, Florida was not heaven.  

So...I spent our first Christmas in Oklahoma without Ken.  I had been there for two weeks when he called and asked that question again, "Are you coming back?"  I was.  I had learned during those two weeks in Oklahoma that I really loved him and that he was my home now.  That wherever he was, was where I had to learn to exist.  And that if he wasn't with me, Oklahoma would never be my home again.  I was just going to have to buckle up and become an adult. I needed a manual:  "Marriage for Dummies."            (Continued.)