THE WAIT Jonathan Gordon married Adrianna Rojas in March.
WAR can focus people, fast. Last New Year’s Eve, Adrianna Rojas, 17, a high school senior, learned that her boyfriend, Jonathan Gordon, 20, who pumped gas at the Citgo here on Route 57, was going to be shipped to Iraq with the New Jersey National Guard. Right there, on the spot, she proposed to him.
“I said, ‘We’re getting married,’ ” she recalled. “He said, ‘You know, I’d marry you in a heartbeat.’ ” But he’d been drinking, and the next morning he told her, “Ade, I have to think it over.”
She gave him a month; she was graduating from high school a half year early and told him she needed his answer by then. In the weeks that followed she tried not to bother him about it, but then she finished up at Hackettstown High, February arrived, and still no answer. “I said I have to know. He said he wanted to wait until he could get a ring — but yeah. So I made him ask me.”
Many things had attracted Adrianna to “Gordon” — she usually calls him by his last name — and one was his decision to enlist. “This is a small town,” she said. “A lot of people here don’t have much ambition, don’t do much with their lives. Some of Gordon’s friends — they just hang out. Joining was giving him a head start over everybody. When he gets back, he’ll use the education benefits toward college. He’ll be working toward something.”
Jonathan’s mother, Denise Gordon, 57, deals regularly with the public — she’s in customer service for A. M. Best, an insurance rating company — and knew what people might say when they heard the two were marrying so young. “Some people think, ‘Oh, she’s pregnant,’ or ‘They’re on drugs or messed up,’ but it’s not any of those things,” Ms. Gordon said. “Adrianna’s just very sure of herself for her age. She’ll make Jonathan’s life so much better.”
And so, in September, at dinner in a restaurant near Fort Bliss in El Paso — the last time the mother, the son and the 17-year-old wife were together before he shipped out to Iraq — Ms. Gordon invited her new daughter-in-law to move in with her while Jonathan was overseas.
“I said: ‘I’m living alone, I’d love the company. You can have Jonathan’s room,’ ” Ms. Gordon recalled. “I brought it up in front of Jonathan on purpose. I wanted him to see how much I thought of Adrianna. She just brushed it off fast. Not a topic to continue. I guess her mind was on other things.”
NEARLY half of New Jersey’s 6,000 citizen-soldiers are serving a yearlong tour in Iraq, the largest mobilization of the state’s National Guard since World War II. In June, they left for two final months of training at Fort Bliss, and in late summer they were given four-day passes to say goodbye to loved ones. Private Gordon’s mother and young wife traveled to El Paso together to see him off, though Ms. Gordon flew home two days early, to give the couple time alone.
For many Guard families, the deployment is a hardship, particularly for those with kids and those whose spouses are on their second tours — about 30 percent of the 2,850 soldiers in Iraq. But for young men like Jonathan Gordon, it’s an adventure that offers the financial means to escape small-town life, including a $15,000 signing bonus, the G.I. Bill for college and an $1,894 monthly combat housing allowance for the families left behind.
When Jonathan and Adrianna met in early June 2007, she didn’t know it, but he was already planning to enlist. He’d been talking to a recruiter from the Hackettstown Armory who used to take his meals across the street from the Citgo, at the River Star Diner.
“He wanted to get out of this town,” said Jonathan’s stepfather, George Evans, who is separated from Jonathan’s mother. “They liked Jonathan at Citgo — he’d been there two and a half years, he was one of their lead men, they trusted him with the keys.” But all he had was a high school diploma, and even living at home, it was hard to save much. “You’re stuck,” Mr. Evans said. “Not a lot of opportunity, not a lot of jobs.”
On June 23, 2007, Jonathan signed papers and quietly began readying himself for basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. “He stopped smoking and got his lungs in shape,” said Mr. Evans. “He’d run two miles to his job and run home the two miles — he wouldn’t take a ride.”
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
HIS ROOM Mrs. Gordon is living in her husband’s room, left, which she redecorated, and often receives a dozen text messages a day from him.
In the RegionComplete Coverage
This is the second in a series of articles about New Jersey National Guard Families in
The first two months he and Adrianna dated, she assumed his first name was Gordon. “That’s what everybody called him,” she said. They spent long hours together. “I’d always go to Citgo to see him.”
They were surprised by how much they had in common. Both read the same horror novels and were fans of the “Night of the Living Dead” zombie movies. Jonathan had never met a girl who liked “Resident Evil,” the video game. They shared a passion for TV shows about physics and the universe and both loved to paint and draw. “He’d pick up a pencil,” Mr. Evans said, “he could draw anything on the paper and it would just come out and stare at you.”
They liked going to New York City, making the 90-minute trip to skate at Rockefeller Center, visit museums and galleries. “People complain how there’s nothing to do here,” said Adrianna. “But they never get up to do anything. Gordon hadn’t done this stuff before, but he never had anyone to do it with. I was really happy I’d met someone interested in doing things. He actually turned out to be very intelligent.”
Though she was three years younger, she knew. “Gordon liked me.”
His mother sensed she was different than the others he had dated. “I remember him having a bunch of people over,” said Ms. Gordon. “When they left, I asked, ‘Who was that girl?’ Jonathan never said much, but he says: ‘Oh, that’s the girl I was telling you about. Do you believe she likes “Resident Evil?” She likes the same things I do.’ ”
Still, Adrianna considered ending it. There was a rumor that the Guard was going overseas. “If he went to Iraq, I felt I’d break up with him,” she said. She wasn’t against the war. “In 2001, when this started, I was 11, so I really don’t understand the whole thing,” she said. It was that he would be away for a year. She had plans, and a year seemed a long time to wait for a boy.
MS. GORDON drove to Fort Benning to spend Thanksgiving with her son. By then, he knew he would be going to Iraq. “He didn’t want me to breathe a word,” she said. “He was afraid Adrianna would find out. Afraid she’d leave him. He told me. He’s my boy. We’re close.”
In December, when he finished basic, Adrianna and her stepfather flew to Georgia to bring him home to New Jersey. Her feelings surprised her. “I missed him a lot,” she said.
After she proposed, people wondered how she could be so sure. “I only had two other boyfriends and they weren’t that serious,” she said. “With him, I knew I wasn’t interested in anyone else, so why not marry him? Even if we weren’t married, we’d be together forever.”
Her mother and stepfather were supportive and not surprised, she said; she had told them right after she proposed on New Year’s Eve, without waiting for Jonathan’s answer. “I knew he was going to say yes,” she said.
Her biological father, whom she said she rarely sees, was opposed, which upset her. “I don’t like when people say we’re too young to get married. It’s more maturity than age. Some people 35 are not ready.”
Ms. Gordon, however, was pleased. She’d noticed how suited they were to each other. “They could be on the couch doing some little thing together, like origami, and be perfectly content. One of the things us older people picked up on — his grandmother and I — how nice it is when you meet your soul mate. You know. They’re so attuned to one another.”
WAR can focus people, fast. Last New Year’s Eve, Adrianna Rojas, 17, a high school senior, learned that her boyfriend, Jonathan Gordon, 20, who pumped gas at the Citgo here on Route 57, was going to be shipped to Iraq with the New Jersey National Guard. Right there, on the spot, she proposed to him.
“I said, ‘We’re getting married,’ ” she recalled. “He said, ‘You know, I’d marry you in a heartbeat.’ ” But he’d been drinking, and the next morning he told her, “Ade, I have to think it over.”
She gave him a month; she was graduating from high school a half year early and told him she needed his answer by then. In the weeks that followed she tried not to bother him about it, but then she finished up at Hackettstown High, February arrived, and still no answer. “I said I have to know. He said he wanted to wait until he could get a ring — but yeah. So I made him ask me.”
Many things had attracted Adrianna to “Gordon” — she usually calls him by his last name — and one was his decision to enlist. “This is a small town,” she said. “A lot of people here don’t have much ambition, don’t do much with their lives. Some of Gordon’s friends — they just hang out. Joining was giving him a head start over everybody. When he gets back, he’ll use the education benefits toward college. He’ll be working toward something.”
Jonathan’s mother, Denise Gordon, 57, deals regularly with the public — she’s in customer service for A. M. Best, an insurance rating company — and knew what people might say when they heard the two were marrying so young. “Some people think, ‘Oh, she’s pregnant,’ or ‘They’re on drugs or messed up,’ but it’s not any of those things,” Ms. Gordon said. “Adrianna’s just very sure of herself for her age. She’ll make Jonathan’s life so much better.”
And so, in September, at dinner in a restaurant near Fort Bliss in El Paso — the last time the mother, the son and the 17-year-old wife were together before he shipped out to Iraq — Ms. Gordon invited her new daughter-in-law to move in with her while Jonathan was overseas.
“I said: ‘I’m living alone, I’d love the company. You can have Jonathan’s room,’ ” Ms. Gordon recalled. “I brought it up in front of Jonathan on purpose. I wanted him to see how much I thought of Adrianna. She just brushed it off fast. Not a topic to continue. I guess her mind was on other things.”
NEARLY half of New Jersey’s 6,000 citizen-soldiers are serving a yearlong tour in Iraq, the largest mobilization of the state’s National Guard since World War II. In June, they left for two final months of training at Fort Bliss, and in late summer they were given four-day passes to say goodbye to loved ones. Private Gordon’s mother and young wife traveled to El Paso together to see him off, though Ms. Gordon flew home two days early, to give the couple time alone.
For many Guard families, the deployment is a hardship, particularly for those with kids and those whose spouses are on their second tours — about 30 percent of the 2,850 soldiers in Iraq. But for young men like Jonathan Gordon, it’s an adventure that offers the financial means to escape small-town life, including a $15,000 signing bonus, the G.I. Bill for college and an $1,894 monthly combat housing allowance for the families left behind.
When Jonathan and Adrianna met in early June 2007, she didn’t know it, but he was already planning to enlist. He’d been talking to a recruiter from the Hackettstown Armory who used to take his meals across the street from the Citgo, at the River Star Diner.
“He wanted to get out of this town,” said Jonathan’s stepfather, George Evans, who is separated from Jonathan’s mother. “They liked Jonathan at Citgo — he’d been there two and a half years, he was one of their lead men, they trusted him with the keys.” But all he had was a high school diploma, and even living at home, it was hard to save much. “You’re stuck,” Mr. Evans said. “Not a lot of opportunity, not a lot of jobs.”
On June 23, 2007, Jonathan signed papers and quietly began readying himself for basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. “He stopped smoking and got his lungs in shape,” said Mr. Evans. “He’d run two miles to his job and run home the two miles — he wouldn’t take a ride.”
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
HIS ROOM Mrs. Gordon is living in her husband’s room, left, which she redecorated, and often receives a dozen text messages a day from him.
In the RegionComplete Coverage
This is the second in a series of articles about New Jersey National Guard Families in
The first two months he and Adrianna dated, she assumed his first name was Gordon. “That’s what everybody called him,” she said. They spent long hours together. “I’d always go to Citgo to see him.”
They were surprised by how much they had in common. Both read the same horror novels and were fans of the “Night of the Living Dead” zombie movies. Jonathan had never met a girl who liked “Resident Evil,” the video game. They shared a passion for TV shows about physics and the universe and both loved to paint and draw. “He’d pick up a pencil,” Mr. Evans said, “he could draw anything on the paper and it would just come out and stare at you.”
They liked going to New York City, making the 90-minute trip to skate at Rockefeller Center, visit museums and galleries. “People complain how there’s nothing to do here,” said Adrianna. “But they never get up to do anything. Gordon hadn’t done this stuff before, but he never had anyone to do it with. I was really happy I’d met someone interested in doing things. He actually turned out to be very intelligent.”
Though she was three years younger, she knew. “Gordon liked me.”
His mother sensed she was different than the others he had dated. “I remember him having a bunch of people over,” said Ms. Gordon. “When they left, I asked, ‘Who was that girl?’ Jonathan never said much, but he says: ‘Oh, that’s the girl I was telling you about. Do you believe she likes “Resident Evil?” She likes the same things I do.’ ”
Still, Adrianna considered ending it. There was a rumor that the Guard was going overseas. “If he went to Iraq, I felt I’d break up with him,” she said. She wasn’t against the war. “In 2001, when this started, I was 11, so I really don’t understand the whole thing,” she said. It was that he would be away for a year. She had plans, and a year seemed a long time to wait for a boy.
MS. GORDON drove to Fort Benning to spend Thanksgiving with her son. By then, he knew he would be going to Iraq. “He didn’t want me to breathe a word,” she said. “He was afraid Adrianna would find out. Afraid she’d leave him. He told me. He’s my boy. We’re close.”
In December, when he finished basic, Adrianna and her stepfather flew to Georgia to bring him home to New Jersey. Her feelings surprised her. “I missed him a lot,” she said.
After she proposed, people wondered how she could be so sure. “I only had two other boyfriends and they weren’t that serious,” she said. “With him, I knew I wasn’t interested in anyone else, so why not marry him? Even if we weren’t married, we’d be together forever.”
Her mother and stepfather were supportive and not surprised, she said; she had told them right after she proposed on New Year’s Eve, without waiting for Jonathan’s answer. “I knew he was going to say yes,” she said.
Her biological father, whom she said she rarely sees, was opposed, which upset her. “I don’t like when people say we’re too young to get married. It’s more maturity than age. Some people 35 are not ready.”
Ms. Gordon, however, was pleased. She’d noticed how suited they were to each other. “They could be on the couch doing some little thing together, like origami, and be perfectly content. One of the things us older people picked up on — his grandmother and I — how nice it is when you meet your soul mate. You know. They’re so attuned to one another.”
On March 1 they married, moving into a $400-a-month apartment off Route 57, not far from the Citgo or the Staples where Adrianna had taken a job. Though she was enrolled at the local community college, her dream was to attend Tom Savini’s Special Make-Up Effects Program in Monessen, Pa. (Mr. Savini worked on “Dawn of the Dead,” “Friday the 13th,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.”) For now, she said, “I don’t have the money for college, nor can I move to the middle of Pennsylvania myself.” Instead, she enrolled in beauty school. “I figured I’d get my cosmetology license and save up money to help with Special Effects in the future.”
This is the second in a series of articles about New Jersey National Guard Families in wartime.
BY early September, when she returned from El Paso, Adrianna no longer felt comfortable alone in their apartment. “It was sad,” she said. “That’s where we lived.”
She could have moved back with her family, but she has three younger sisters — ages 15, 6 and 5 — and says the house is often noisy and chaotic. One thing she’d loved about living with her husband: “Being alone with one other person who’s quiet is so nice.”
A week later, Ms. Gordon brought up Jonathan’s room again. “This time, I didn’t say come move in,” Ms. Gordon recalled. “I said, ‘If you want to clean out his room, you could just use it if you ever needed it.’ ”
“I liked the idea of fixing it up,” Adrianna said.
Jonathan’s sloppiness is legendary, and the two women worked long hours filling trash bags. “We found school books, library books never returned, his skateboard, a broken video camera,” said the mother.
“A doughnut half eaten in a drawer,” said the wife.
They disagreed about what to do with it all.
“Throw it all in the trash,” Adrianna said. “If he goes through it, he’ll want to save stuff. This way he’ll forget — he obviously doesn’t need it.”
“Being the mother,” Ms. Gordon said, “I know a year from now he’ll want some book and get bent out of shape when it’s gone.” She had final say, and is storing the trash bags in her garage until her son returns from Iraq.
ON a Sunday in mid-September, Ms. Gordon invited her daughter-in-law for a nice salmon dinner. Sitting together in the kitchen, Adrianna said, “Do you mind if I take you up on that offer to come over here?”
Ms. Gordon did not mind.
Adrianna spent the next two weekends painting Jonathan’s room, replacing the electric fixtures and putting up shelves. She’s quite handy — she says she gets it from her stepfather, who is in construction.
In late September, a few days before her 18th birthday, she moved in, bringing along her paintings, her electric guitar and her books. She’s reading “The Iraq War,” by the British military historian John Keegan. “I want to understand what’s going on,” she said. “Gordon’s part of it.”
The two women get along well, they say.
“She’s very quiet, I’m very quiet,” Ms. Gordon said. “She’s at school all day, I’m at work. She’s neat and tidy, straightens up the bathroom towels before leaving in the morning, remembers to clean out the coffee pot.”
“It’s been pretty easy,” Adrianna agreed.
They do have a shared interest, which they’re reminded of every time a cellphone jingles in the house, signaling a text message from Private Gordon.
While he texts his mother once or twice a week, he often texts his wife a dozen times a day. The mother is not jealous. “No,” she said. “He and I are tight, but he’s transferred his attention to her, which is how it should be. She’s his wife.”
Indeed, she considers it one of the benefits of living with her daughter-in-law. Every time the young Mrs. Gordon’s cellphone jingles, the elder Ms. Gordon knows their shared interest is safe.
This is the second in a series of articles about New Jersey National Guard Families in wartime.
BY early September, when she returned from El Paso, Adrianna no longer felt comfortable alone in their apartment. “It was sad,” she said. “That’s where we lived.”
She could have moved back with her family, but she has three younger sisters — ages 15, 6 and 5 — and says the house is often noisy and chaotic. One thing she’d loved about living with her husband: “Being alone with one other person who’s quiet is so nice.”
A week later, Ms. Gordon brought up Jonathan’s room again. “This time, I didn’t say come move in,” Ms. Gordon recalled. “I said, ‘If you want to clean out his room, you could just use it if you ever needed it.’ ”
“I liked the idea of fixing it up,” Adrianna said.
Jonathan’s sloppiness is legendary, and the two women worked long hours filling trash bags. “We found school books, library books never returned, his skateboard, a broken video camera,” said the mother.
“A doughnut half eaten in a drawer,” said the wife.
They disagreed about what to do with it all.
“Throw it all in the trash,” Adrianna said. “If he goes through it, he’ll want to save stuff. This way he’ll forget — he obviously doesn’t need it.”
“Being the mother,” Ms. Gordon said, “I know a year from now he’ll want some book and get bent out of shape when it’s gone.” She had final say, and is storing the trash bags in her garage until her son returns from Iraq.
ON a Sunday in mid-September, Ms. Gordon invited her daughter-in-law for a nice salmon dinner. Sitting together in the kitchen, Adrianna said, “Do you mind if I take you up on that offer to come over here?”
Ms. Gordon did not mind.
Adrianna spent the next two weekends painting Jonathan’s room, replacing the electric fixtures and putting up shelves. She’s quite handy — she says she gets it from her stepfather, who is in construction.
In late September, a few days before her 18th birthday, she moved in, bringing along her paintings, her electric guitar and her books. She’s reading “The Iraq War,” by the British military historian John Keegan. “I want to understand what’s going on,” she said. “Gordon’s part of it.”
The two women get along well, they say.
“She’s very quiet, I’m very quiet,” Ms. Gordon said. “She’s at school all day, I’m at work. She’s neat and tidy, straightens up the bathroom towels before leaving in the morning, remembers to clean out the coffee pot.”
“It’s been pretty easy,” Adrianna agreed.
They do have a shared interest, which they’re reminded of every time a cellphone jingles in the house, signaling a text message from Private Gordon.
While he texts his mother once or twice a week, he often texts his wife a dozen times a day. The mother is not jealous. “No,” she said. “He and I are tight, but he’s transferred his attention to her, which is how it should be. She’s his wife.”
Indeed, she considers it one of the benefits of living with her daughter-in-law. Every time the young Mrs. Gordon’s cellphone jingles, the elder Ms. Gordon knows their shared interest is safe.
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