Crisis Sends Marines Scurrying to Altar

Lance Cpls. Steven Murriel and Madeline Quinones had been making wedding plans for the last 10 months and had arranged, until a week and a half ago, to get married last Saturday.

But when Iraqi troops overran Kuwait, and the United States began sending troops to the Middle East, life at Camp Pendleton took on a frantic pace. Chaplains no longer were available for such luxuries as wedding ceremonies.

For Murriel, 22, and Quinones, 19, that meant scratching plans for a wedding on base and a honeymoon in Puerto Rico, where Quinones is from.

“We’ll just try to make the best of it,” Quinones said before the 10-minute ceremony Friday at I Do Weddings, a wedding chapel in a Vista business park. “Right now, we can’t really plan on anything.”

Wearing their uniforms and military-issue black shoes, the two said their vows while an overhead speaker played soft music.

Meanwhile, Lance Cpl. Steven Johnson and his wife-to-be waited in the lobby for their turn at the altar. Keitha Gaines had flown in from Tyler, Tex., to marry Johnson, who expects to be shipped out soon.

“If I get back in one piece, we’re going to redo it,” Johnson said. “I just wanted to get married before I left.”

Gaines wore a pantsuit when exchanging her vows, and she wonders what she’ll do with the white lace and pearl, Queen Victoria-style wedding dress she had bought for her wedding.

Betty Coplin runs the wedding chapel, which is 10 miles from Camp Pendleton’s back gate. She said she has performed more than 50 weddings involving Marines since the United States began sending troops to the Middle East on Aug. 7.

“It came as a surprise to me that it was of this magnitude,” Coplin said. “I’ve about had to put my other wedding business on hold.

“We average 80 to 90 total weddings a month here, and we figure usually somewhere between 25% and 30% are military, but now it’s been exclusively military.”

Coplin said that, during 10 years in business, nothing has compared to the current wedding rush.

“The closest thing to this I’ve ever had is the 31st of December every year, when people want to beat the taxes,” Coplin said.

Coplin said most of the recent military weddings have had no or few guests, with Coplin’s clerks serving as witnesses.

Coplin conducts the simple ceremonies in her white studio, filled with 2 dozen empty, white folding chairs. Plastic flowers adorn a white trellis while a recorded version of “Here Comes the Bride” plays overhead.

Although the fanfare of a large wedding is missing, Coplin, a nondenominational minister, performs the traditional ceremony with dignity.

She believes that every couple she has married during the recent crush already had plans to tie the knot but “sped it up to get married now.”