Fort Hood Texas
You never know how things are going to turn out, and even sometimes at the start you don’t even know it is “the start” of anything significant. I was talking to one of the lieutenants in our company and she was having some issues with her house; sort of home improvement sort of things. She was a sweet person who was on her on after having a somewhat sheltered life at home. Interesting sidenote was that she joined the Army Reserves and did so well at one of her schools that the military activated her and sent her to Fort Hood. I never knew that sort of thing could happen. Sure reserve componant units get activated during wars, but individuals during peacetime? News to me.
Anyway, she had bought a cute little house and it had some issues, so I volunteered to fix a few things. It was a calculation on my part that if I did a few favors for an officer, her friend, who was my platoon leader, might give me a few breaks or something. That’s how it started. But I kept visiting and she kept buying new fixtures and stuff, so my projects continued. We grew closer.
Finally I was over to fix a door in her pantry, and I ended up in her panties instead. Pantry, panties. An easy mistake, I think you’d agree. It kind of happened like this. I arrived and started taking down the old doors. I was installing bi-folds, I think. And she stopped me and said, what are you doing here? I was a bit confused and answered that I was installing the doors. She said, no, really, why are you doing all this for me? There was a bit of awkward silence as we slowly closed the gap and started to kiss. I picked her up, carried her into the bedroom and gently put her down on the bed. We slowly undressed each other, but as I was taking her panties off, she stopped me.
“This isn’t the best time for this to happen,” she said. I looked at her with a confused look, and she told me that she was having her period. “That doesn’t really bother me.” She nodded, went into the bathroom and cleaned up a bit and then we consumated the relationship.
It was really fairly awkward to have a relationship between an enlisted person (me) and an officer (her). Especially that we were both in the same company. Now normally a relationship like that is OK, sort of, unless the officer is in your direct chain of command. That situation in called fraternization. Seriously frowned upon. But in our case, that wasn’t what was going on, but still potentially she could be ‘in charge’ of me in certain circumstances, special assignments, etc.
So we kept it quiet. And had a relationship for about a year. We were sneaking around, more or less covert operations, but we had the most honerable of intentions. Eventually it came to light because one of the other officers wanted to fool around with her and she kept putting him off. So he started snooping and found out.
I believe he told a few people and then he confronted me, telling me that it would ruin her reputation and I needed to realize that the relationship needed to end. I was also at the end of my enlistment and was deciding on whether to continue my military career, or get out.
This complication made that decision easier. He threatened to exposed us and bring up fraternization charges, so I just processed out instead. This just left my future to be worked out. She wanted me to move in with her. She offered to pay to put me through college, which was my next step in life. For some reason all that felt uncomfortable to me.
I told her I was moving back to Arizona and that we were through. I just couldn’t see myself being supported by a woman. It made it a bit more weird because her family was wealthy and powerful. I really didn’t get into this earlier, but one of our dates was to some Texas debutant ball. It was hosted by the governer, who was a friend of her family. Some of that stuff just made me feel inadequate for some reason. I didn’t ‘fit in’ with that crowd, although I could fake it pretty well.
Once she knew I was going to Arizona and was breaking up with her it got pretty ugly. I have always had a knack for not knowing how to break up with women and this was just one more example. I like to think it was sort of noble on my part. Let me be the asshole and you can then feel better about yourself. Me being the asshole was a total “It’s not you it’s me” taken to the next level. I really did love her, I think, but there were so many things going on with me at that time that I couldn’t figure out how to deal with it, so I just ran. Probably I wasn’t playing the asshole, I was just being the asshole.
