Military spouses honored with cruise
BY SANDRA WALSH, The Beaufort Gazette
Published Monday, October 2, 2006

BEAUFORT -- Diamond rings glinted in the sun as a crowd of women waited to board a 73-foot passenger yacht at the Downtown Marina in Beaufort.

Some of the women were pregnant, some of them were noticeably young with tears streaming down their cheeks and others a little older and stronger, but all the women were without the men they married.

And all of the women would have to get used to it.

Sunday afternoon, 81 spouses of deployed Marines and sailors got together for a free three-hour dinner cruise down the Intracoastal Waterway.

"It sucks," a teary eyed Heather Cebulla said of her husband's deployment while waiting to board the boat.

Cebulla's husband, Cory, has served two months of his six-month deployment in Iraq. The couple have been married three years and Cebulla said this is her husband's second deployment.

"When he was deployed the first time, I stayed with my family," she said.

This time, Cebulla has a 2-year-old, Jayden, and said she has decided to wait out her husband's tour of duty in Beaufort.

And that's the idea behind the cruise, said Theresa Thoma, Air Station Marine Corps Family Team Building coordinator, to empower spouses and make them feel like they are a part of a community and that they can make it on their own.

Thoma said that there are between 800 and 1,000 spouses of deployed military at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, and there are several programs for spouses, including mental health, financial planning, social networking and education.

"It's never easy, but it gets easier," said a Talina McFarland whose husband is in Japan on his ninth deployment. "I feel like I am a strong woman, in the beginning I wasn't."

McFarland said she was looking forward to the cruise because it would give her some much needed down time from her four children, ages 2 through 13.

"This is important to us," she said. "It gives us women adult time -- adult interaction and conversation, without children."

The cruise was paid for by Marine Corps Community Services and Vagabond Cruise, a private Hilton Head Island company that typically charges $45 per person for nightly dinner cruises that set sail from Harbour Town.

This is the second cruise aimed at recognizing military spouses during deployments, the first cruise set sail in July.

Ellie