THE ROMANTIC

Margaret Caldwell is a nurse at the West Roxbury Veterans Administration Hospital, in Massachusetts.

"It's weird," she says, quietly. "The guys from Iraq are coming back -- injured or having problems. At first it just freaked me out a little bit. There was this big banner in the lobby: 'Welcome home, Iraqi veterans.' At first that made me cry. But it's okay now."

Her husband, Todd, was a 401(k) planner with Putnam Investments in Norwood, Mass. He joined the National Guard in 1997, originally for tuition to go back to school, to explore an interest in marine biology.

For their first date, Charles "Todd" Caldwell, took Margaret Yasharian to the circus. He had gently and persistently wooed her after they met in a biology class at UMass Boston. He proposed to her in May 2002, on the rocks at the edge of the sea, at Brenton Point, in Newport.

Todd's deployment to Iraq, at age 37, changed their wedding plans.

Back then, Margaret had insisted: You're not going away without us being married.

He answered: I don't want to go without marrying you.

On Feb. 4, 2003, they married in a 10-minute ceremony at Attleboro Town Hall. They stayed half an hour, for pictures. Family joined them at a reception dinner at Marchetti's, in Cranston.

Todd loved the military, and became one of his squad's team leaders.

Margaret recalls, "Todd would say, 'You're not mad at me because I want to go [to the Middle East], are you?' He would check back after every drill to see if it was happening. He wanted to go there and prove what he was trained to do and do a good job. I really can't be mad at that."

"I sent him a mini tape recorder [in Iraq], and I had one," she says. "Those tapes were the best -- they were just an hour of babbling. We were going to get married again, do it all over and have everyone come, have a big party, go to Hawaii.

"He was very romantic. You'd look at him and you wouldn't think that of him. He would come by my work and leave a rose on my windshield. Or leave little notes: 'I'm thinking of you today.'

"I don't think that's ever going to happen for me again."