The Brewers' rambunctious, active son, who she says resembles her husband in his ability to eat cake by the handful, also keeps her occupied for much of the day. "I still think about Scott, but it's a lot easier having Mini-Me around," she says.
Jennifer, wearing a black T-shirt with the emblem of Scott's unit on it, talked as Austin somersaulted on the floor, knocked over a lamp, chewed his mother's long brown hair and bit her right forefinger.
Jennifer has decided not to cut her son's hair, which is starting to curl upward in blond tufts, until her husband's return. "You've missed too much already," she told Scott during a phone call last week. "You deserve at least that."
The couple met 3 1/2 years ago, when he worked as a dishwasher and she bused tables at a Hanoverton tavern and inn. He was from Summitville, another Ohio hamlet five miles away. She was 16, he was a year older. "We just liked each other," Jennifer remembers. "He had muscles."
She wrote him a letter every day he was at Army basic training at Ft. Knox, Ky., mailing them in batches. In October 2000, Scott took a half-carat marquis-cut diamond ring out of his red Dodge pickup and proposed to her on his knees. The next month, he was transferred to Ft. Stewart. On July 6, 2001, they were wed in the same Ohio tavern where they met. She moved to Hinesville that August.
In Iraq, Scott's unit went ahead of the main 3rd Infantry Division force, performing reconnaissance as the armored column rolled north from the Kuwaiti border to Baghdad. A Humvee driver, he was involved in a few firefights, he said, in which Iraqi fighters were killed by his fellow scouts and Bradleys obliterated the vehicles trying to rescue them. As of Thursday, he said he had fired one shot, into a door as he and other soldiers were clearing an area in southern Iraq.
Shortly after the brigade arrived in Fallouja, a platoon from Scott's regiment was attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade. No one was hurt, and Scott was careful not to mention the incident to his wife. But Jennifer heard about it from another wife at Ft. Stewart, he said, and asked him about it. Scott assured her he hadn't been on that patrol, and that none of his patrols had been attacked.
The young cavalryman's four-year enlistment is up in June 2004, and both he and his wife have decided he's getting out. "I like the military OK, but I'd rather be a fireman," Scott says. He was a volunteer firefighter in Ohio before joining the Army and intends to train to join a municipal force.
