At My Wedding My Mother Said Uniforms Were Not for Me Until Hundreds of Service Members Rose to Their Feet

and that he did not entirely know what it was yet, and that he was not afraid of it.

I turned around.

I have been in enough significant moments in my life to know that the ones that matter do not always look the way you expect them to look. They do not always arrive with music or clear lighting. Sometimes they arrive as a room full of people standing up in the middle of a vineyard in North Carolina on a Tuesday afternoon in October, quietly and without being asked.

There were nearly two hundred of them on their feet.

I knew most of their faces. I had served with many of them or alongside them or under their command or with them reporting to mine. I reco