Lindsay McKenna | Meet Sergeant Matt Culver

You asked me if I expected to meet the woman of my dreams in Afghanistan where me and my team operate out of? You’ve got to be joking! No one in the black ops community has time to fall in love. Especially in this war torn country. With ISIS now infiltrating it and joining up with the Taliban and Al-Queda, we’re busier than ever. I’ve been over here for five years straight, and every time I’m deployed back to this place, it’s worse than before.

Look, I’m in my late twenties, and no, I’ve had no such dreams or a vision of
finding the ‘right’ woman. Not in my career. I enjoy women. They’re
interesting, and intelligent. I like a woman I can hold a wide-ranging
conversation with, among other things. My mother, Dilara, is Turkish and Greek,
and few people know this, but Feminism is alive and well in her country. She was
raised to be highly independent and go after her dreams with no apology. That’s
why she runs Delos charities, our family’s worldwide charity. And I tend to
gravitate to that type of woman to spend my downtime with.

Do I have an idea of the kind of woman I’d like to have as my wife? No. In my
business, there just isn’t time to cultivate a serious relationship. Why would
I put any woman I loved in that kind of situation? She’d worry all the time
because she knows how dangerous my work is. I don’t want to put anyone through
that. My family suffers enough with anxiety over my black ops career, much less
having a woman I loved, have to go through that, too.

I got blindsided by Dr. Dara McKinley, though. I wasn’t expecting to be
attracted to pediatric physician. That wasn’t ever on my radar. But when she
did a USO belly dance with her sister, Callie, I sure as hell changed my mind.
Of course, there were four-thousand other military men in that chow hall for
that Thanksgiving show thinking the same thing I was: I wanted that blond
haired woman in that incredibly beautiful red belly dancing outfit she wore. To
make it even worse on me? Those sisters knew Turkish belly dancing, which is
pretty rare. I’d spent every summer growing up as Kusadasi, Turkey, my mother’s
home and the home of her extended family. I knew what great belly dancing was
all about. And those two sisters delivered. They brought the house down with
their dances.

Yes, Dara grabbed me, heart and soul. I used my black ops abilities to reach
out to her and persuade her that she should have dinner with me later that
night. I don’t know what happened, but I remember my mother telling me when the
right woman came along? I’d know it. I’m pretty intuitive, but I don’t talk
much about that except to say it has save me and my team out on a mission,
enough times that I pay attention to it.

What was so funny, was that I knew that night when I had dinner with Dara, she
was ‘the one,’ for me. I knew it in my bones. I knew it in my heart. But
then? Everything went south shortly after we met. A safe Afghan village where
she and her sister were going to render medical aid a week later, turned into a
life-and-death situation. And if I hadn’t been there with my friend, Sergeant
Beau Gardner, who had eyes for Callie McKinley, those sisters would have died.