Maybe it wasn't such a great idea. As a warm-up exercise, I'd asked each workshop participant to bring in a photocopy of his or her wedding picture. The project was intended to remind these Marine Corps Key Volunteers (like Navy Ombudsmen) how military culture often means that couples meet each other at work or through work. They marry young. They marry soon.

When I passed out the worksheets, I noticed that the KVNs hadn't brought cuttable, pastable, markable copies. Instead they brought their real wedding photos.

So I scrambled while they told stories about their weddings -- about the bride's family who traveled across the country in a rented RV and arrived at the wedding certifiably insane. About driving up to the Justice of the Peace in the middle of a move with all their household goods in the back of their truck.

“We looked like the Clampetts,” said this bride. “Mattresses sticking out everywhere. It wasn't pretty.”

After listening to all these stories, no one had to cut or paste a thing. Nearly everyone in this group of solid military families had married young and married soon and deployed often. Some had white weddings and three tiered cakes. Many of them had been married in quick civil ceremonies after boot camp or before an overseas tour.

Either way, the marriages took. Yet so many of these spouses, especially if they were young, mentioned that they planned to do ‘a real wedding' later.

I was so struck by that. A “real” wedding? How much more real do you get than a wedding that yields a relationship tough enough to withstand two back-to-back tours in Iraq, an overseas tour, recruiting duty and stepmotherhood?

But I knew what they meant. I've read those wedding manuals that promise a beautiful wedding for “only $10,000 or less!” The magazines that feature simple backyard weddings that must cost twice as much as a church wedding. The experts who think it's “incredibly sad” if a bride doesn't get exactly the bouquet she really wants no matter how much it costs.

Those professionally staged pictures of fondant cakes and monogrammed favors are so beautiful, so perfect, than I can hardly blame anyone for wanting that.

Yet I saw so much more beauty in these snapshots where bridegrooms wore cowboy hats or dress uniforms. Where the bride didn't have the bouquet she really wanted. Where no photographers were called and the groomsman forgot the cake in the back of his car and it melted.

Instead the beauty of these weddings was in what they represented -- the urgency to BE married. Not the drive to have a wedding. More than the extra pay. Probably not the burn to have sex. But the need to actually BE married.

I can't remember the last time I saw that at a wedding that was planned for a year or more. All that preparation seems to take some of the passion out of the event.

I find myself envying some of what is found in these snapshots -- that once upon a time some Marine thought that he could not bear it another minute if this woman was not his wife. That these two people thought the most important thing in the world was to wake up between sheets that belonged to both of them together. That these couples thought they had what it takes to walk through the fire of military marriage -- and that nothing, nothing, mattered more.