Taking a call from roughly 7,000 miles across the globe can cause extreme happiness. When she receives such a call, Aubrey Ferguson screams and runs to her phone in excitement. When she looks down at the caller ID, the area code reads "808" or "717," numbers that have become familiar to her over the past five months.
"I scream like a little girl every time I see that number pop up," Ferguson, a senior speech-language pathology major, said.
These brief phone calls, which she gets almost weekly, are from Elrie Ferguson, her husband and Navy corpsman who is fighting in the Marjah area of Afghanistan. They were married last summer after meeting online when Elrie was on his first tour in Iraq.
In March 2009, Aubrey was told about the social networking website My Yearbook. While being bored at home during one Spring Break, she decided to try it.
"There's this application kind of thing called ‘secret admirer.' When you click on someone it sends them a notification that someone clicked on you," Aubrey said. "Well, I clicked on him and he clicked back on me. It sent us both a thing that we had a match."
Once she received the notification, Aubrey sent Elrie a message and introduced herself and asked how he was doing. His reply said, "In Iraq."
"So we just started talking, and we were talking online all the time," Aubrey said. "He would call me all the time, and we finally met when he came home at the end of April."
They met in the electronics aisle of Walmart in Muncie. After Elrie returned to the U.S. and went on leave, he flew from North Carolina to Indianapolis, where his family picked him up. After that, he decided he needed a phone charger from Walmart and told Aubrey to meet him there.
"[We've been] perfect ever since," Aubrey said.
After dating for almost a year, the two were engaged during Easter weekend and married over the summer, just a few months before Elrie was deployed on his second tour, this time to Afghanistan.
"They deployed July 19, 2010," she said. "It's ingrained in my brain. They leave on white buses. I hate those buses."
Elrie's job as a corpsman entails being a medic for the Marines who are in combat. Elrie's mother, Cindy Young, said that the military and medicine have been a big part of their family. Elrie's brother is in the Air Force, his grandparents were a nurse and EMT and his mother was also an EMT.
"Elrie had a lot of medical problems with his ears when he was younger. He dealt with the doctors a lot in younger ages," Young said. "From then on, he always wanted to go into the medical field. He thought the Navy was the best place for that."
While Elrie is overseas, Aubrey will usually get to talk with him once every week for about 30 minutes. He is currently outside of the wire, meaning away from the safety of a base camp. The only way he can contact Aubrey is through a satellite phone. He was unavailable for an interview.
Aubrey said she always worries about her husband when he is in combat areas. She said that when he is at the Forward Operating Base [FOB], she still thinks about him but knows he is much safer than when he's not at the FOB.
"Especially since he's outside of the wire, I think about him all the time," she said. "When he's outside the wire, he's not there, he's on a mission. When he was at the FOB, I was OK. I didn't worry about him, I just missed him a lot, because I knew he was safer there."
When Aubrey does get the chance to speak with him, she said they talk about all kinds of things, but hardly about what he's doing there.
"Sometimes he tells me the weirdest things that I don't want to know," she said. "Like one time he told me that there was only one day that week that they didn't get shot at. One time, I asked him if he loved the desert and he said ‘Actually, the area I'm in right now is kind of like a jungle.' And then I started singing ‘In the Jungle.'"
While he's away, Aubrey has a few precious mementos that she keeps with her at all times. She wears a copy of his dog tags. Aubrey said the soldiers have several dog tags.
"They have some that they wear, some in their boots - that way in the worst case scenario, they can identify [them]," she said. "It's really special to them."
The other item she wears is Elrie's name-tape around her wrist as a bracelet. The name-tape has his last name on it and is from his desert cammies.
"It feels like he's still here," she said. "The only time I take them off is for clinic, because we are supposed to be professional, so minimal jewelry."
Besides wearing around special things that remind Aubrey of her husband, she often reads stories about the happenings in the military. She follows a group on Facebook called "Family and Friends of the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines."
"I'm so proud of what he's doing, that he's over there. I don't want to say sacrificing but he pretty much is, because his life gets put on hold when he's over there," Aubrey said.
Aubrey and Cindy talk on the phone once a week to stay in touch while Elrie is away.
"I think she is doing really well," Young said. "Right now, he's in a stressful, high-combat area. He's in a bad place, very bad. She knows that. And she's here and she's got the stress of senioritis on top of everything with Elrie. It's very stressful and I think she is handling it pretty good."
Aubrey said Elrie is set to arrive back in the U.S. during February 2011 and cannot wait until she gets to be with him again. After next semester, she plans on graduating and moving down to North Carolina while her husband finishes his Navy duties at Camp Lejeune.
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