#13 - 2002 - Getting Married and Our Haunted Apartment

2002. Jeremy is a brand-new captain with 130 soldiers, a wedding in ten weeks, and a war nobody will give him a date for. This is the year he corrected a lieutenant colonel for not saluting him — thirty minutes after leaving a meeting about enforcing salutes — and then laughed about it, which did not help. The year he and Lorrie moved into a garden-level apartment in a Savannah mansion that turned out to be genuinely haunted: banging in an empty hallway upstairs, a door that opened on its own, smoke rising above a lamp, and one night, a woman's face beside the bed. The year he cancelled his honeymoon over a deployment date that kept moving. And the year he signed one piece of paper releasing a staff sergeant from a stop-loss so the man could follow his wife to Korea — which is how that sergeant came to be home in Georgia on leave the day he won $150 million. Along the way: a company that nearly mutinied when he jumped them into the deepest woods on Fort Stewart, a full-bird colonel who opened the wrong vehicle door at the worst possible moment, fifteen soldiers crammed into a van singing Hootie and the Blowfish, a saber arch, a brother who was carried home from River Street and immediately ran back downtown, and a Christmas spent playing the same video game for three days straight before an announcement that changed everything. Terry's 2002: four kids, two in the marching band, and a 16-year-old who came home and said he'd like to take a girl to a dance — right after they'd finished reading a book together about not doing that. Also in this one: an argument about Ohio State that takes three minutes and a live Google search to settle, a bobblehead Terry built himself out of scrap wood and ballpoint pen springs, a mailbag message from the woman who introduced Terry's parents to each other seventy years ago, and the house at 104 West Gaston Street — built in 1856, where an infantry unit received its colors before marching off to war, and where a company commander would live 141 years later, getting ready to do the same thing. 603rd Aviation Support Battalion: if you were there, say so in the comments. And help us name Terry's bobblehead — best name wins merch. A Most Unpredictable Life is the true story of Jeremy Lewis's life, told one year at a time, with co-host Terry Lewis (no relation). New episodes every Wednesday.