Friends and family,
This past year has been action packed! Since I wrote last there has been a great deal of changes and happenings in my life. I will start with the most important one first. I got married!
Oh I know, who would have thought this day would come! I didn’t till I met this sweet little brunett named Cristin Cate Merrill. Cristin is from Vermont, lives in South Carollina. She got her degree at the University of New Hampshire in equine business management and rides horses for a living. She is a very talented dressage rider and works at a private farm where her and her boss’s train and ride the horses. She has been riding since she was a kid, so this has been a dream job for her.
Cristin and I met in Augusta,GA while we were both out with friends. I noticed her immediately to my right when I walked into the room. She was meeting up with friends on her way back home from a SPCA fundraiser. We started talking and my, life as I knew it, was over.
We started going on dates the night after we met and a month or so into it decided we should probably just go ahead and get married. We wanted to wait to get enguaged until after we met each others families. While I was on leave for Christmas, she flew to Texas to meet my family and they immediately fell in love with her. They gave me their blessing to go ahead and get married.
On Christmas day we both hopped on a plane to fly up to Vermont to meet her family after spending two days in Texas with my family. We get to Vermont and her parents picked us up from the airport. They were some of the most welcoming and friendly people I have ever met. Seriously, really great people. We spent a couple days there getting to know each other, playing games and exploring Vermont. It’s a small state but it is really pretty. Over breakfast on the day we were leaving I had a conversation with her parents and they gave me permission to marry their daughter. I was relieved to say the least. I proposed to her that morning and we started making plans to marry at the beginning of the year.
Being in the army it didn’t make much sense to wait and plan a big wedding at that point. I was about to get orders so logistically and financially, I was a better decision to have a small wedding so all the paperwork would be in order for her to be on my orders to come with me to my next duty station. If you have ever had to deal with the army, you understand the logic of this decision.
We were married on January 10, 2010 at the Angel Oak outside of Charleston, SC. I have never met someone who is such a perfect complement for me to move forward in life. Cristin is an amazing woman and I am so fourtunate she married me.
I have been in school here in Augusta since June and am finally done with my courses. I am a fully qualified 25s satelite communications systems operator and did a follow on course with General Dynamics on a couple other tactical satellite systems. A couple of the days were spent converting ip addresses to bianary numbers and hexadecimal, but it was all good knowledge. I am really fortunate to have gone to this school and learning this stuff has been fun. I made a number of good friends here and am excited to cross paths with all these people in the future.
While I was here my peers made me student leadership and I had the opportunity to be a class leader, squad leader and platoon leader to 145 other students. It was a good experience helping the soldiers out where I could.
I got orders to join up with the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii to do tactical satellite systems. Cristin and I are really looking forward to the move and the opportunity to live in such a beautiful place for the next three years. I am currently on hold waiting on my security clearance to go through in Virginia. It is frustrating waiting to leave, so I bother people everyday about it. I am aparently in a “que” waiting for my paprework to cross some beuracrats desk up in D.C.
When I am finally finished here in Augusta, we will be heading to Houston for two weeks to spend some time with family before we head off to Hawaii. I hope to see as many of you as we can while we are in town and am excited about introducing you to my new wife. I think my mom may be planning a party for us at the house in Katy when we do get there, so stay posted.
I will wrap this up by saying thank you for all your love and support for me and your continued support for our military through this transition in our nations history. I truly look forward to seeing each of you down the road.
All the best,
Brent D. Burns
(Pardon the mistakes, I wrote this on my phone.)
