When Love Outranks the Uniform: A Marriage Built on Choosing Each Other

A Coast Guard courtship, a rushed wedding, an unfinished commission, and the farm they built instead.

FEATURED STORYTHE HOME FRONT

Camille D. Ford

13 min read

In the spring of 2020, with the whole country just beginning to shut its doors, a Coast Guardsman stood on an island in Alaska that nobody was allowed to leave. A federal travel ban was in place. His wife, Camarie, was more than 3,600 miles away in Virginia, days from giving birth to their first child, and every answer he was getting said no.

He went to his executive officer anyway. "Hey, my wife's about to go into labor," he told him. His XO looked at him and said something he still repeats word for word years later: "None of my folks have ever missed a birthing child, and you're not going to be the first." The command went to the Department of State. The approval came through. He got on a plane.

He almost didn't make it in time. He says so plainly, without embellishment, he almost missed the birth of his own son. But he got there.

A Recruiter With Bad Timing

Camarie never grew up dreaming about the Coast Guard. She'd barely heard of it. Her only real exposure to military life came from an NJROTC program in high school, and by the time she reached Hampton University she was chasing a Navy ROTC scholarship, the kind of opportunity that mattered enormously to a first-generation college student whose family had already stretched to get her that far. Then her braces got in the way. She couldn't get a date to have them removed in time to qualify, and the scholarship went with it.

She kept looking. One afternoon she was in the library, scrambling for anything that would let her stay enrolled at Hampton, when a familiar face sat down across from her. It was a guy she and her friends had known in passing the year before, fresh out of Coast Guard boot camp and still wearing the uniform. He went from a friendly hello straight into recruiting mode before she could get a word in.

"You have no idea why I'm in this library right now," she told him. She was there hunting for scholarship money. He was there offering one, for a branch of the military she had never once considered.

What he described was the College Student Pre-Commissioning Initiative, a Coast Guard scholarship built for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other federally designated minority-serving institutions. It would cover her final two years of tuition and pay her an active-duty salary while she finished her degree. In exchange, she would ship out to boot camp that summer, commit four hours a week to the recruiting office during the school year, and come out the other side with a guaranteed commission as an officer. He walked her through the entire application, drove her to the recruiting office himself, and stood beside her through what she remembers as a long and highly selective process. She got in. They celebrated together, still just friends, with no idea what they were actually starting.

Camarie and Jonathan Rogers. Photo courtesy of the Rogers family.

Camarie and Jonathan Rogers early in their relationship. Photo courtesy of the Rogers family.

She came back to campus that fall wearing a crisp U.S. Coast Guard uniform with an Officer Trainee designation. After boot camp, the scholarship paid her as an active-duty E-3 with a housing allowance, which relieved her family's financial burden and let her buy her first car and pay for a place off campus. She also felt something closer to duty: as one of three officer trainees from her school in the program, she considered it her job to go find her own replacement, someone else from Hampton who could walk the same path she just had.

She and the man from the library became coworkers first. Their friendship held for three or four years before anything romantic entered it, so that by the time they finally started courting, in earnest, there was not much left to discover about each other. The courtship itself lasted eight months.

"You have no idea why I'm in this library right now."

Married on the Courthouse Steps

By the time they decided to marry, the timeline had turned urgent for reasons that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with military law. Camarie was still an enlisted CSPI student. Her husband had gone on to Officer Candidate School and was weeks from commissioning. Once he became an officer and she remained enlisted, their relationship would run straight into the Coast Guard's fraternization policy, a career-ending problem for two people who had only been officially dating for a matter of months but building a life together for years.

So they moved the wedding up. Camarie flew to Connecticut during her husband's first weekend of liberty at OCS, and they were married on the courthouse steps before his commissioning cleared in November. Getting there took both of their commands signing off. "It was a very fair process," Camarie said. "They knew that we had already established this courtship and everything while we were enlisted. So we weren't doing anything wrong." They were barely into their twenties, he twenty-two, she twenty, threading a legal needle so they could get married on their own timeline instead of the Coast Guard's.

Camarie and Jonathan Rogers in their early years together. Photo courtesy of the Rogers family.

Camarie went back to Hampton to finish her degree. Her husband shipped out to Kodiak, Alaska, in the Bering Sea, where deployments stretched for months and the two of them stayed in touch however the Coast Guard's email schedule allowed, sometimes only once every three days.

Eight Weeks In

Camarie graduated, earned her own commissioning slot, and reported to Officer Candidate School to become the officer the Coast Guard had spent years developing her to be. When she attended, OCS ran seventeen weeks, and it was built to be unforgiving on purpose. Candidates get drown-proofed in the pool, learn to tow a shipmate and handle their own gear underwater, and get certified in first aid and CPR so they can save each other if something goes wrong. Sleep gets scarce on purpose too. "It's mainly mental," Camarie said of what actually carries a person through it. "The Coast Guard, our biggest enemy is time. You have to be able to do your role second nature, subconsciously, in a deficit."

Eight weeks into that program, something felt wrong. She was lightheaded in the mornings. In class, where nodding off got a candidate sent to stand in the back of the room, she found herself standing through every single session, unable to understand why fatigue seemed to be beating her worse than it was beating anyone else around her. She had missed her monthly cycle and told herself it was stress, the kind everyone in that building was under, and decided to get checked anyway.

OCS runs on structure, and asking to step out of class to see a doctor was not a quiet errand. When she got there and told the intake staff she needed a test, they repeated the word back to her loudly enough that the rest of the waiting room understood exactly what kind of test she meant. She sat and caught the side conversations, other candidates guessing out loud at what it might mean for her.

The physician finally called her back and asked why she had come in. She told him she just wanted to check something off her list. "You are in fact having a baby," he told her. She asked to see the paper herself. She needed to see it in writing before she could believe it. When she read the result, she burst into tears because she already understood what came next. She would have to leave.

She could not call her husband first. He was underway, out of reach. Instead she found the person on base who had become something like a mentor to her and told him what was going on. He read it on her face before she finished the sentence. "Congratulations," he told her, and then, gently, laid out what she already knew: OCS was not built for a pregnant candidate, and she would need to be processed out. He helped her move her things to another barracks and had her issued what the program called a yellow belt, a signal to instructors that she was on light duty and should not be pushed through the physical training anymore.

She was nine weeks from finishing a program most people never even get selected for. She left with weeks still on the clock and her husband on the other side of the world.

"You are in fact having a baby."

A Pregnancy by Satellite Phone

What followed was close to two years apart, spanning her entire pregnancy. Camarie moved in with her grandparents, who fed her and looked after her the way her husband could not. He was four time zones away, in Kodiak and then out in the Bering Sea, reachable only through the narrow windows the Coast Guard's communication schedule allowed. When those calls came through, Camarie tried to compress an entire pregnancy into them: the size of her belly that week, a kick she had felt that morning, photos and videos she had saved up to send. "The whole thing was virtual," her husband said.

Jonathan Rogers in his Coast Guard officer's dress whites. Photo courtesy of the Rogers family.

They saw each other exactly twice during those months. The first time, he met her at a port call in Victoria, British Columbia, after a crossing that had nearly ended in disaster. The ship had come close to capsizing in a storm on the way there, and the entire crew was kissing the ground once they finally made it to shore. When Camarie flew out to meet him days later, it was the first time he saw the pregnancy for himself. The second reunion came that December, for a single day, because a single day was all the port call allowed. "I don't care," he said of the cost of the last-minute plane ticket. "We only had one day in port, and I'm so thankful that she took it." Camarie describes the months without him plainly: she spent most of the pregnancy by herself.

Back at Hampton's recruiting office, the Coast Guard had reassigned her to recruit other students into the exact commissioning program she had not been allowed to finish. Every day, someone reminded her, on purpose or not, that she was supposed to be at OCS right now, supposed to be commissioning any day. She sold the program anyway, because she still believed in what it had given her even after it had cost her the officer's bars she had trained years for.

The Ban, the Baby, and the Belt

Which brings the story back to that spring of 2020, and the son born into it. COVID hit while Camarie's husband was still deployed in the Bering Sea, and by the time he made it back to the mainland the entire country was locked down, including the island he was stationed on. When Camarie went into labor, he needed the Department of State to approve his travel just to leave.

They had planned a home birth and hoped he would be there for it. He was, barely, after his executive officer went to bat for him and the Department of State approved his travel. Their son, Elijah, was born into a pandemic and a family that had already spent most of the pregnancy figuring out how to show up for each other from a distance.

Not long after, Camarie had the option to go back and finish Officer Candidate School. She was seriously weighing it. Then she got pregnant a second time, with a child who would end up sharing Elijah's exact birthday, one year apart to the day.

Camarie is careful not to overstate what happened next. Nobody told her directly that she could not keep having children and stay on a commissioning track. But the response she got made the message clear enough. She had been on Coast Guard recruiting materials before this, put up for awards, held out as an example of the kind of officer the service wanted more of. Then, almost overnight, that attention disappeared. "It was almost like I was just a sitting log in the office," she said. "People walked around me. I didn't necessarily exist anymore." Eventually the Coast Guard laid out her options: an honorable discharge, her four-year enlistment obligation fulfilled, her benefits intact, nothing negative attached to her name. She was closing in on that four-year mark anyway. She took it.

Her husband is careful to frame what happened to her honestly. The Coast Guard had invested heavily in developing her toward a commission, and by any accounting, that investment had just walked out the door pregnant with their second child. He does not dispute that the institution had reason to be disappointed. He just does not think that disappointment was ever really the point. "We embraced life," he said. "We weren't put on this planet to be in the Coast Guard. We were put on this planet to do greater things than that."

"We weren't put on this planet to be in the Coast Guard."

The Most Productive Thirty Days

Her husband had already started plotting his own exit, in his own way, before Camarie's second pregnancy made the decision for both of them. The call telling him he was going to be a father had done something to him immediately. He knew he did not want a Coast Guard career that kept him at sea for three months at a stretch, missing most of his children's lives to a schedule that never let up. He canceled orders that would have sent him to Bahrain for another year away from his family and started praying through what else he might do instead.

The answer came from a book he picked up during a rare stretch of downtime in port: Rich Dad Poor Dad. He started studying real estate on the side, going to work during the day and working the business at night, waking at four in the morning to put in a few more hours before his shift, on almost no sleep.

When Elijah was born, her husband had roughly thirty days of leave, and he calls it the most productive month of his life. He bought a duplex. He bought a couple more properties. He took a real estate course and applied everything from it immediately, in that short window, before he had to fly back to Kodiak for another three months. By the time he made it home for good, Camarie and Elijah were living in an actual house instead of her grandparents' spare room, and the business that would become J.D. Commercial Property Specialist already had its first properties on the books.

Camarie got out that June. Her husband followed that November, once the business had grown to the point where the family could survive without his Coast Guard paycheck. Their lifestyle took a hit for a while. Neither of them looks back on leaving the Coast Guard as a loss.

Camarie and Jonathan Rogers on a trip together. Photo courtesy of the Rogers family.

Twenty-Three Acres

The farm wasn't part of a long-term plan. They were living in Hampton, browsing property listings one evening for fun, when a twenty-three-acre farm for sale caught their eye in a place neither of them had ever heard of. They bought it.

By then they had already been circling the idea for years. Stationed in Alaska, living in an RV trailer on an island with more bears than people, Camarie and her husband had gotten a taste of a kind of freedom neither of them had grown up with in Virginia Beach, and it stayed with them the whole way through the rest of their time in the Coast Guard. They had been reading about homesteading even before the farm came along, imagining a version of family life with more room in it, further from a version of childhood they did not want for their own kids by default.

Jonathan Rogers with a young goat on the farm. Photo courtesy of the Rogers family.

They have been on the farm about three years now, raising goats, chickens, guineas, and livestock guardian dogs, and still learning most of it as they go. They have five children, the oldest six, several of them born close enough together that the math of the years since Alaska barely leaves room to breathe.

What Honorable Means

Ask Camarie what it meant to leave the Coast Guard the way she did, and she does not reach for the usual answer. She doesn't see leaving as walking away from service. She sees it as moving on to the kind of service she was called to.

"I would say leaving with a greater reason than why I even joined," she said. "I joined because I wanted to serve my country, I wanted to serve, period. So now leaving, I'm going into doing the serving I was called to do. I'm supposed to serve my husband. I'm supposed to raise my children. That's why I was created." Her husband, who watched her carry that decision through a training environment that made her feel invisible for making it, points out that she still finished what she owed the Coast Guard. She served her full four years honorably, worked through every bit of quiet criticism that came with staying pregnant in an institution that expected something else from her, and left with nothing on her record to apologize for.

Camarie Rogers with a young goat on the farm. Photo courtesy of the Rogers family.

These days, the two of them split most mornings between goats, guineas, and five kids whose ages span barely six years. Jonathan’s multiple businesses pay the bills now instead of a Coast Guard paycheck. Nobody on the farm asks Camarie to explain her discharge, and nobody sends her to stand in the back of a classroom for looking tired. When the subject of her four years in uniform comes up, she doesn't talk about the commission she never finished. She talks about Elijah's birthday, and the one that follows it exactly a year later, and the twenty-three acres, and a husband who canceled his own orders to Bahrain so he could come home for good.

Resources

College Student Pre-Commissioning Initiative (CSPI) | https://www.gocoastguard.com/active-duty-careers/officer-opportunities/programs/college-student-pre-commissioning-initiative

The Coast Guard scholarship program for students at HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions that first brought Camarie and her husband together.

Coast Guard Officer Candidate School (OCS) | https://gocoastguard.com/get-started/officer-applications/officer-candidate-school-ocs

Details on the officer commissioning program both Camarie and her husband attended.

Coast Guard Mutual Assistance | https://mycgma.org/

The official relief society of the U.S. Coast Guard, offering interest-free loans and grants to members and families facing financial strain, including during separations and deployments.

Military OneSource | https://www.militaryonesource.mil/

Free 24/7 support for service members and military families navigating deployment, separation, and reintegration.

SBA Office of Veterans Business Development | https://www.sba.gov/about-sba/sba-locations/headquarters/office-of-veterans-business-development

Training, counseling, access to capital, and contracting help for veterans, service members, and military spouses who want to start or grow a business.

USDA Beginning Farmers and Ranchers | https://www.farmers.gov/your-business/beginning-farmers

USDA programs and loans for new farmers, including veterans transitioning into homesteading and agriculture.

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