Sometimes outsiders do get it.
I’ve often lamented that the general public just doesn’t understand military life. They don’t understand the pressures of deployment. They don’t comprehend that our entire lives revolve around the military’s needs. They don’t realize that the most important days of our lives, births, weddings and even funerals can be overshadowed and altered by the military’s plans for our soldier husbands.
This photographer gets it.
Amateur photographer Angila Golik was visiting Washington D.C. when she happened upon a tender moment at the rotunda of the War Memorial. It appeared as though an airman, in uniform, was proposing.
She snapped her shutter and caught it on film. She tried to catch the couple afterwards but was too far for them to hear her. The photo went viral and within days she had found them. As it turns out, the couple was recently engaged and visiting the monument to scope out locations for their nuptials.
What I love about this story is how it captured Golik’s heart.
In media interviews before the couple was identified, Golik always returned to the “why?” of the couple’s story.
Was he leaving for deployment? Did he just return?
She gets it.
Was this the couple’s first moment together after he returned for war? Was it their last before he left again? Had they endured months, maybe years of separation and waited patiently for this moment?
So many military spouses have these types of stories – the whispered love notes as he boards the plane, the long embrace as he finally steps off of it.
Golik happened upon this sweet couple and was overwhelmed by the possible magnitude of that fleeting moment.
Sometimes I feel that if I were to tell my own love story, of my husband and I, it would be best told by describing mere seconds of time – stolen before, after and during all the craziness this military life has created. For stuck between deployments, trainings, pt, moving and the ever lengthening list of what we have to do as a military family are the brief moments when we are completely free to do what we want. It is then that a glance, a touch, a tear between us says more to each other than we ever have with words.
With the push of a button, Golik captured that same sweet, and sometimes heartbreaking, connection.
