Since 9/11: A Military Wife Remembers

In commemoration of the decade since Sept. 11, Goose Creek Patch is looking at the stories of several local residents on that day and how it has impacted each of their lives. Share your first-person stories by emailing greg.hambrick@patch.com. We'll collect them and run them Sunday.

In eastern Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, Stephanie Saporita was situated between Washington, D.C., New York City and Flight 93's crash site. Meanwhile, her future husband was on a Navy supply ship in the Middle East. "The uncertainty of it," she said. "You knew something more was going to happen. It was so stressful."

In May 2002, Saporita married her husband and became a Navy wife. "At that point, it wasn't on my mind," she said of the threat of terrorism and the role her husband would have to play. "I was in love."

Now, she's a mother of three — the youngest just three months old — and her husband was deployed earlier this month for service in Somalia. Saporita said her husband has built a career in the Navy while balancing the needs of his young family. And she's built her own career as a successful paralegal in downtown Charleston.

Saporita is calm about facing family life with her husband gone. "I've built a good solid network," she said, including fellow military wives. "We maintain a pretty close-knit bond."  And for Saporita, the anxiety of Sept. 11 has come full circle. "It's stressful for me, but the kids just miss him," she said of her husband's deployment. "They don't understand what going out there means."

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