Fort Bragg was Leonard “Hawk” Hawkins’ first duty station after enlisting in the U.S. Army back in 1979.
So when he and Lori moved to Fayetteville in 2005, a few years after their marriage, it was familiar territory for him.
Not so much for her.
She’d eventually find her way around—Hawk’s two-year assignment turned into six, ending with his 2011 retirement—but she’d already found herself on a different, frantic upward learning curve: a crash course on military hierarchy and protocol, cryptic acronyms, and the explicit (and unspoken) rules governing base culture.
In time, Lori would become a go-to resource for thousands of soldiers and their families.
Here’s how it happened.
The couple met while Hawk was stationed in Pensacola, Florida, serving mission-critical positions as an Army reservist after having logistics and contract positions in Germany and the United States. Lori had settled there near her parents after a divorce. He’d been married before, too. Lori’s lasted 16 years and produced three children; Hawk’s, which lasted 20 years, produced four.
They attended the same church and played for the church’s coed softball team—she as first baseman, and he as a reluctant “call me only if there’s no one else to play” pitcher. A friendship blossomed, love called; after an 18-month courtship, they married in the spring of 2002.
A few months later, Lori recalls, Hawk arrived home to say his reserve unit might mobilize.
“I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’” she said.
Soon after, the couple flew to Pennsylvania for deployment briefings. One session provided advice for soldiers and spouses about the separation deployment creates.
“So we’re sitting at this table, and this female major is talking to all of the families,” Lori recalled. “And she said, ‘Now, I’m sure if we have any questions, Colonel Hawkins’ wife can answer them.’”
Panic set in.
“I said, ‘Oh, no, no, no!’ I was fumbling,” she said. “I remember this like it was yesterday. I said, ‘I don’t know anything. We’ve only been married seven months!’”
Lori’s father served 23 years in the U.S. Navy. But she was just 14 when he retired, and never fully grasped military lingo—much less the myriad of other complexities active service members navigate.
She looked frantically to Hawk for answers.
“When we got back to the hotel, I said to him, ‘They expect that I know things,’” she said. “And he said, ‘Well, normally the colonel’s wife does.’ We sat in the hotel room that entire night, and he gave me Army 101 … He explained to me what a platoon was, what a brigade was, what a battalion was, what the rank of sergeant was. I mean, we literally sat, and we laughed, we had a bottle of wine. And I learned to speak Army.”
That was the start. After the move to Fort Bragg, Lori attended a Family Readiness Group session at Hawk’s suggestion. It was there an officer Hawk worked for told Lori she’d be perfect in an instructional role for other military families. “You’re very outgoing,” Hawk remembers the officer telling Lori. “He said, ‘I’m sure her enthusiasm would be really good in that role.’”
So Lori agreed to go to Orlando for another Soldier and Family Readiness Group session, designed to provide a network of support and problem-solving. She proved an enthusiastic volunteer, eventually becoming a part of the Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program—a reintegration program providing resources and assistance before, during, and after deployments—which was formed for National Guard and reserve members.
“That’s when they would bring the family and the soldier together for a weekend before they deployed,” she said. “They’d tell the families what to expect, what resources there were, how to get through it.”
Lori became a speaker for the Army Reserve Command and at program sessions, then a master trainer. Eventually, she’d travel as many as three weekends a month to speak—amassing enough expertise to offer 60 different classes “on everything from recognizing the signs of PTSD, children who were challenging—all that stuff,” she said.
Her combination of energy and vulnerability made her a popular instructor for 13 years.
“A lot of it was just offering them resources,” Lori said. “‘OK, here’s how you get set up, this is how you get a new ID card.’ So we would talk about logistics, but we would also teach classes about how to help the children …”
Sometimes, after classes, family members would catch her in the hotel’s elevator or in the lobby.
“And they’d say, ‘I’m so worried,’” she said. “We told them what to expect when their soldier comes home, because some of these soldiers came home wounded. Some of them came home with PTSD. And we would say, ‘Look, if he’s exercising too much, he may be trying to escape. If he’s playing video games, taking a day out, he’s trying to escape. If he’s drinking too much, if he’s starting to take pills that he never took before …’”
She remembers one wife asking, “How do you know when too much is too much?”
“I said, ‘If you’re having to ask me that you already know,’” Lori said. “And so a lot of it was them being able to ask somebody questions, and that’s what I offered. We had lots of teaching aids and resources for them, and so it really made it bearable.”
If called upon, she’d be willing to step in again to help.
“I might teach six classes on a Saturday,” she remembers of those days. “My throat would be so sore, and I’d be mentally and physically exhausted. But I would go back to my hotel room and I would think just how blessed I am—and what an honor it is to serve these families.”
She worked from a detailed outline when leading classes, but sometimes a thought or a story would spring to mind. She’d feel compelled to share it.
“I can’t tell you the number of times people would grab me afterward and say, ‘I needed to hear that.’ I’d say, ‘God put it on my heart to share that, but I don’t know why.’ Those were the things that fed me.”
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