Shot through the heart

When Michael returned, they started dating. Michael loved Diana’s beauty, her brains, her sexy German accent and the joy she brought to an otherwise anticlimactic military assignment. She loved his wit, how they liked the same things (their CD collections consisting of Beastie Boys, Nirvana and other ’90s alternative names were virtually identical) and the time they spent together watching American movies with subtitles.

But Michael’s German deployment had to end. When it was time to return to Dallas, he went alone.

The young man, who had never really lived free of either parental or military rule, wasn’t sure what he was going to do with his life. He needed to figure it out before dragging Diana into it, he says.

At 23, Michael traveled back to Texas, found a place to live and landed a job with Dallas ISD. He was on track. Except he wasn’t happy.

He asked Diana to come, but by now she was mid-way through law school.

BirMinghaM

WhenMichael Birmingham realized that he could not live without Diana, he had just moved some 5,200 miles away from her.

Michael, 18 and restless, joined the Army after high school. He was deployed to Korea, then Germany, and served a stint in Poland following the 9/11 attacks. Upon return to the base at Giebelstadt, Germany, around Thanksgiving 2001, he and his buddies were ready to unwind. They hit a nightclub called The Airport near the local university.

That same night, a Wednesday, a freshfaced student with ginger locks and a heartmelting smile would also join her friends at The Airport.

It didn’t take long for Michael to notice.

“After I had enough drinks to work up the courage, I walked up to her and said something lame and asked her for her phone number.”

Diana gave him the number. And he soon called her. And called her. And called again. “She was kind of flaky about returning my calls,” Michael says.

“I’d say I returned one out of every three of his calls,” Diana admits, but says she had a good reason. For one, she wasn’t used to speaking English, so conversations were awkward. In addition, German girls learned to exercise caution when dealing with American military men.

“Soldiers can be crazy,” she says.

Michael doesn’t argue. “She had a right to be weary. We did not have the best reputations.”

And so it went for three or four months. Then, Michael took a holiday vacation and didn’t call Diana for a week. “A whole week,” she exclaims, shaking her head.

“I thought, ‘That’s weird.’ ” she says. “Weird that he wasn’t calling and weirder still that I was so affected by the fact that he wasn’t calling.”

Unwilling to wait any longer, Michael quit his job, packed his bags and returned, this time as a civilian, to Diana’s hometown, Wuerzburg.

They married there on May 5, 2005 and stayed until Diana graduated. Then they said “good-bye” to Diana’s family and moved again, eventually settling, with their three large dogs, in a charming Lake Highlands home.

Here in the states, Michael can use the GI Bill to attend college, which he does while Diana works Downtown.

When he’s not in class, Michael is stay-athome dad to the adorable little product of this obstacle-busting romance, Lena Grace, who was born last February. Feb. 13, in fact, just after 6 p.m. In Germany time, seven hours ahead of ours, it was Valentine’s Day.