Couple’s bond strong despite military service

Most love stories don’t begin while watching a motorcycle wreck, but that’s exactly how seniors Leigh Ann Pittman and Nathan Dixon first met.

Two and a half years later, after countless fraternity and sorority events, motorcycle rides and separation due to military service, they’re getting married.

The couple will graduate in May and marry in September.

Dixon is a former president of Phi Kappa Tau, an aspiring math teacher and a member of Indiana’s Army National Guard who served two tours in Iraq. Pittman is a motorcycle enthusiast and member of Phi Mu.

Dixon said he first went to Iraq for 12 months in 2003 after finding out in basic training that he would be deployed. He served as security for the small Army camp where he was stationed in the middle of the desert, a job he called “not that exciting.”

After returning, he enrolled at IU in 2004 and joined Phi Kappa Tau.

In the fall of 2006, between Dixon’s first and second tours, he was out riding motorcycles with his friends when one of them tried to pop a wheelie and wrecked.
Pittman was out riding her motorcycle with some of her friends and saw the crash, and,while helping collect debris from the accident, saw Dixon for the first time.

“I turned around, and there’s Nathan in all of his glory,” Pittman said. “It was love at first sight. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get to know this guy.’”

Little did Pittman know, Dixon and his fraternity brothers were planning on going to Phi Mu for dinner the next night. The two started dating shortly after talking at the house dinner.

In 2008, Dixon was called back to active duty. But before he shipped out, he and Pittman spent a week together at Fort Stewart in Savannah, Ga.

While walking on the beach one afternoon, Dixon told Pittman he had a surprise for her.

“He asked me, ‘Do you want the surprise now?’” Pittman said. “I didn’t see anything in his hands or pockets so I said yes, and he got down on one knee, asked for my left hand and said, ‘Will you marry me?’”

Pittman said yes and, soon after, Dixon headed to an old Iraqi air force base in Tikrit, Iraq. While there, he said, he escorted supply convoys throughout northern Iraq.
“Occasionally we had to detonate roadside bombs,” Dixon said. “My unit had the best find-to-detonate ratio for roadside bombs in the batallion.”

While Dixon lived in an abandoned Iraqi air force base, Pittman yearned for him in Bloomington. She said she was in shock for the first three months he was gone and kept expecting him to come back, but after a while, the waiting became “really intense sadness.”

“We talked on Skype, and in our conversations we didn’t really have much to say at that point,” Pittman said. “We were tired of small talk, and we didn’t have much more to say other than, ‘I’m really ready for you to come home now.’”

Dixon said he wasn’t really worried about safety while he was gone, but he said there was one incident with a roadside bomb when he did get scared.

“We rolled up on an IED and didn’t know it,” Dixon said. “We were trained to look for certain visuals. When you realize what it is, you clench. I yelled, ‘Get out of here!’”
Eight months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Pittman waited with her sister in an airplane hangar for Dixon to come home.

“He’d gotten delayed before, so I was almost scared to get too excited for him to get back,” Pittman said. “But when he landed and he finally got to me, all I could do was squeeze him. We hugged for a good 20 minutes.”