I was nineteen when I Early Outed and Re-Upped for Six more and a 10-49 to Germany. My desire to remain in the service was there before I joined at seventeen but my desire was not as much to get to Germany as much as it was to be somewhere else.
At nineteen I still skated and I found myself falling for one girl there that was great to dance on the skates with and she was easy to look at also, important to a nineteen year old, self involved, young man. Her mom and dad liked me and seated on the front porch, smoking cigars and drinking Iced Tea, her dad asked me if I had tried the product? (Yes, I said that much nicer than he did.)
I almost swallowed my cigar but managed a, I'm sure, weak sounding, "No." He then told me she was soon going to be bedded by someone because she was soon going to be thirteen. Yes, I got into my '56 Merc. and did not go into Columbus, Georgia any more. A couple of months later her mom was working in the PX located closest to the 11th Air Assault and she wanted me to come by and lay down with her daughter and that we should, then, get married before she was thirteen.
Had I not escaped to Germany, this marriage would have been legal in Georgia but not in Texas, my state would have thrown me in the Slammer! The problem is not something that is peculiar to this or to that people and all of us need to open our eyes and then begin to work on it.
I understand that Mary was, likely, about twelve and Joseph had to be thirty before he was old enough to marry. But that was then and I don't live in the First Century A.D.
