The love story of Annemarie and Shannon Tutor began in a way that is similar to many others.
“The moment I laid eyes on Annemarie, I knew I was going to marry her,” Shannon recalls.
“Shannon definitely caught my eye, too,” Annemarie says.
Where their story diverges from the norm is when you realize where the couple was when that chance encounter happened.
“In July, 1993, we both ended up at Ft. Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis, her from Massachusetts and me from Kentucky, to attend military occupational specialty training,” Shannon says.
“The very first morning of training, we were in accountability formation and needed to turn to go to the chow hall. When you do that, everybody marches past you in sequence until you are all turned around the right way.”
“This absolutely gorgeous, brown-eyed girl marched right by me.”
If we were telling a normal love story here, we’d say “The rest is history.”
But we are not, because when Shannon and Annemarie fell in love with each other, they also accepted that there would be a metaphorical third person in their relationship—the United States Military.
For Annemarie, the military life wasn’t hard to get used to. She’d already done that years ago.
“I would like to think that it’s been my life, so I don’t know a life without the military in it,” she says.
“My dad was active duty National Guard,” she says. “My grandfather was a POW in World War II, so the military was just always something for us.”
“And of course, It wasn’t hard for me to fall in love with a military man, either.”
The Tutors got married in 1994, with Shannon stationed at Fort Benning and Annemarie serving in the Georgia National Guard. Eventually, they were joined by their daughter Emma. As is the case with most military families, it wasn’t long before they were tasked with a move. It was, for Annemarie, the best time for her to leave the military and enter another phase in her lifelong relationship with the United States Military.
She became a full-time military wife.
They were still a young family when Shannon received word of his first overseas assignment, which would take him away from them for a year. Shannon left for Korea while the family was living in Ft. Benning, Georgia and returned to a new home in Cadiz near Ft. Campbell.
“I had been assigned to Mighty 101st Airborne Division in Ft. Campbell,” Shannon says.
“Annemarie and Emma relocated to Ft. Campbell themselves, bought a house, and got everything going without me. It was amazing. They’d moved everything from Georgia to Kentucky on their own.”
When Shannon rattles off his various deployments and assignments that took him through until his retirement in 2013, it’s dizzying. There are trainings that took him away from his family for months, reassignments to posts in the Pentagon, immediate deployment actions for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan during “surge” times, home a year and then gone again for a year.
It’s not difficult to imagine what a toll that must take on a family.
“It was very stressful, to say the least,” Annemarie admits.
“I’m very independent, so I do okay as far as taking care of things, but it’s very hard to be the mom and the dad. It’s hard to raise a child that way.”
“When Emma was little, she didn’t understand. When she was older, it made me sad that she expected that daddy wouldn’t be there for things. That was difficult.”
It was hard to parent, but Annemarie says it was also difficult to be a wife.
“He was home a year, gone a year a lot. The stress that he had to go through was hard to watch. It was difficult when he came home to jump back in and try to be Dad on a day-to-day basis. It took a while to incorporate back into day-to-day.”
“We’ve been married for 26 years, and we weren’t together for a lot of that.”
But for Annemarie, there was always a feeling that shined brighter than the difficulty—a feeling that led her through the hard times and the long days alone.
“I was always very proud to be a military wife,” she says.
“I know a lot of people see the bad side of it, but I always saw the good parts. I was always very proud of him and very proud of what he was doing.”
“That somehow made it easier.”
Fortunately for Annemarie, Emma inherited some of her mother’s strength, and the two relied on each other to thrive during the times when Shannon was away.
“My daughter is a very strong girl, and she was older at the end when the deployments came one after another,” she says.
“She was my backbone.”
Some of you may be reading this tale focused on the immense sacrifice this family had to endure. But trust me when I say that this is not a focus the Tutors share.
Now they are living the new season of their lives. Emma’s parents call her a “superstar” young adult. She teaches speech language in a school only two miles from the entrance of Ft. Campbell, where her mom says the thing she loves most is that she gets to teach military children.
Annemarie eventually went back to school and became a nurse who now works in the cardiac telemetry unit at Baptist Health Paducah. Shannon serves as Regional Manager for Beacon Property Management and SOCAYR Incorporated, where he has his hands in the construction and management of most of their properties in Western Kentucky.
They look back on their military lives with what amounts to gratitude. They feel blessed that they were able to be a small part in it.
“I wish that everyone could have spent a small time in the military,” Annemarie says.
“You see the deployments on television and all kinds of things, but you don’t see the day-to-day struggles or the pride that you feel.”
“Shannon was always very prideful in simple things, like being in a formation with other people and knowing that you’re all working for the common good of the country.”
“I think it’s a wonderful sacrifice, and I think that everyone should experience it at some point in their life with someone in their family. It would make them understand the importance of fighting for your country, the importance of our flag, and why that should be important to everyone.”
“I had the good fortune in 20 years to spend time around some of the bravest and smartest people and just amazing people all over the world,” Shannon says.
“I’ve put my boots on the ground in a lot of different countries, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
