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thedrifter
03-19-06, 07:26 AM
Sound of wedding bells rings quickly for two Marines
Couple from Morris enlist, marry

BY ROB SEMAN
DAILY RECORD

ROCKAWAY -- For Jeremy Kemp and Taryn O'Leary, timing was everything.

Kemp, who recently completed four years in the Marines, seven months of which were spent in Iraq, was back in the United States and decided to re-enlist. After five years at college, O'Leary finally got her own chance to enlist in the corps.

Kemp is due back at Marine camp in Cherry Point, N.C., on Wednesday morning. O'Leary got home from boot camp a week ago and is expected to leave for combat training in Missouri this week. It will be three months until they see each other again.

They'd dated only about five months, been engaged about three, but Saturday seemed as good a time as any to get married.

"Why not now?," O'Leary said. "It seemed right."

The couple stood before friends and family on Saturday and exchanged vows at the United Methodist Church on Hoagland Avenue in Rockaway.

The wedding and reception, which was held at Picatinny Arsenal, was planned by their parents ever since Kemp proposed in December.

Kemp's sister, Amanda Hemenetz, who is studying to be a minister, gave her own blessings to her brother and his new wife in a homily.

"I always believe that some things were just meant to be," Hementz said. "I see you two as living proof of that."

"The fact that both of you feel this way today is a gift," Hemenetz said. "That's true love, and that is God."

The engagement came as a surprise to most of Kemp and O'Leary's friends and family.

Kemp and O'Leary sat in two classes together and spoke less than a half-dozen times in the years they spent at Morris Hills Regional High School.

O'Leary hung out with the kids from her hometown of Wharton, Kemp with those from Rockaway. All O'Leary really remembered about Kemp that he was a quiet, but nice, guy.

Marine Corps ball

After high school, they didn't speak again for about seven years. Kemp joined the Marines and spent seven months in Iraq. Then, he heard from some old high school friends that O'Leary was thinking about enlisting. He e-mailed her, and they got to talking. Eventually he decided to ask her if she would be his date for a Marine ball.

O'Leary accepted. It was there at the ball, when they saw one another face to face again, that O'Leary said they fell in love.

"That was it," O'Leary said. "I knew it."

The speed at which the relationship moved from dating to engagement to marriage wasn't easy, especially since it was compounded with the bride and groom's enlistment into the Marines, and the potential that they could be sent to dangerous locations like Iraq as newlyweds.

Hemenetz, in the homily, recalled the conversation she had with O'Leary, sitting in O'Leary's black truck in the driveway, the day before O'Leary left for boot camp. O'Leary was crying, frightened by the pressure of the timing of the events in her and Kemp's lives.

"You were so scared something would go wrong and this wouldn't happen," Hementz said to O'Leary.

"Then, you lifted your head and you said, 'I just want Jeremy to be happy,'" Hementz said.

"Well," she said, looking to her brother, "look at him."

Kemp's friends said they never heard him talk about settling down, and didn't expect him to do so anytime soon. O'Leary's friends were somewhat taken aback by the suddenness of it all.

"He's the last person we expected to get married," said best man Kris Ferranti.

O'Leary's cousin, Christine Junkermeier, who lives in Wharton, said she met Kemp for the first time at the wedding.

"I had no idea she was so serious," Junkermeier said.

Amanda Wadleigh, a classmate of the bride since kindergarten, knew both Kemp and O'Leary in High School. She remembered Kemp as the quiet guy in the marching band, and O'Leary as a hard-worker who would work after school at Alexis Diner on Route 10.

Wadleigh said that they were a little surprised when they found out their friend was getting married, but supported her nonetheless.

"They're absolutely sure," Wadleigh said. "And if they're sure, then we're sure."

O'Leary's mother, Lori Valverde, said she was shocked but pleased, also.

"She knew," Valverde said. "She knew and I knew her, and I'm thrilled. She couldn't have made a better choice."

Kemp broke the news to his parents at 2 a.m. one night, said his father, Bruce, who added that coincidentally, he was awake at the time that night. Bruce Kemp said he wasn't surprised.

'Chemistry'

"The chemistry was there," Bruce Kemp said. "She's very considerate, and he can be a gentleman."

Kemp's father said he was more concerned when his son, who he said had a fascination with military memorabilia, decided to join the Marines in 2001.

"We were a little dismayed, a little concerned, and very proud," Bruce Kemp said.

Nobody, at least before and after the ceremony, was talking about the Marine Corps, or Iraq. The guests, which did not include other Marines, were focused on their friends getting married.

That doesn't mean the concern of what could happen to the couple once they returned to their military lives, was all that distant.

"Of course I'm scared," Wadleigh said. "And proud of both of them."

Rob Seman can be reached at (973) 267-9038 or rseman@gannett.com



Ellie