While dad was gone, Michael junior stepped in to handle some of his chores, from shoveling snow off the driveway to caring for the lawn. He was looking forward to telling dad he's as tall as mom now.

I hadn't met him while researching a feature on the fire station's daily routine. Long before I began hanging around the firefighters he had taken leave to serve as a master sergeant for the Marine Corps in Operation Enduring Freedom. Still, he appeared on the cover because the photographer had been working on the fire station story off and on for a year or two. Somehow, he heard about his prominent photo and felt compelled to send me an immediate message that he titled, "The REAL hero."

"In the last year and a half, I have been away approximately 11 months with the Marines Corps, including a tour in Bosnia," he wrote. "During this time I left behind a wife and 2 children, daughter Aja, 17, and Michael, 14. The real hero in all this is my wife, Grace. While I'm away she is the one who has to be both mother and father, the repair person, money manager. She keeps my spirits up and her own going. She has done this on numerous occasions in our 19 years together."

He went on to boast about her paintings and her beauty, but then returned to the issue at hand.

"She did ask me once to leave the Marine Corps. This was just prior to the Gulf War. Casualties in my particular field were expected to be severe, and she knew it. But at the same time, she knew I had to go, because that's what I do. If she wasn't there, especially during times of war, I couldn't do what I do. It's an unsung job, but I liken it to the crew that works on an aircraft carrier. The planes are very cool and sexy, but they don't fly unless the people seven decks below keep the screws turning, the food coming, the mail sorted and delivered.

"There are other wives throughout the Puget Sound region who cope with the same loneliness and fear of the dreaded notification from the Defense Department: Dear Mrs. Washington, We regret to inform you that your husband Master Sergeant Michael Washington USMC was . . .

During the Gulf War, Michael used an infantry vehicle in his unit as a bulletin-board valentine for his wife.

"She is my inspiration," he wrote, "and without her support of me and my mission I couldn't do what I am doing here."

I MET GRACE a week later at the family's Tacoma home, and she greeted me with the same easy warmth he had described. She looks younger than her age, which is 40, and seemed younger still with every lilting laugh.

She showed me around the house, taking a few moments to discuss each of her paintings, most of which celebrate African-American life, history and spirituality. One called "Juneteenth" involves the day when slavery ended after the Civil War. Each piece featured the human face or movement.

She paused in front of a wall crowded with photographs that froze moments in the lives of the couple.

In one, they were smiling 13-year-olds, thin and big-haired, standing in front of their lockers in a Northridge, Calif., junior-high school. Grace was an honor student, so reserved she used her artistic talent to create sets so she wouldn't have to perform in school plays. She was a violinist, but found comfort knowing she was surrounded by others in the orchestra. Michael was a bit of the joker and an athlete, but responsible and industrious. He'd first walk his younger brother home, then walk back to school and get Grace to walk her home. Though he was a minor, he held a job at a liquor store, working off the books.

	The length of Grace's weekly to-do lists shows not only all the roles she must fill when Michael is gone, but also the organization, dependability and stability he says she has shown throughout their 19-year marriage.
	Aja, 17, and Michael junior, 14, help mom with daily chores like grocery shopping when dad is away.

Another photo shows a grown-up Michael, shirt off, arms folded over his chest. He's leaning against a wall towering over his crawling baby son. Grace took the picture, which won a national award, and caught that universal moment where a dad seems larger than life.

A portrait of Michael's father shows him in full Marine uniform, looking appropriately serious. Michael and his father were estranged for much of his life before connecting later, so he was essentially raised by his mother and grandparents. His grandfather instilled traditional values and a sense of decorum in him — that men and women act a certain way. When Grace's sister spit once, he was mortified.

As a firefighter in California, he'd return home as excited as a kid on Christmas, explaining how he helped. When his father visited them in Tacoma not long ago, Michael was disappointed that there were no emergency calls. He wanted his father to see him in action. Then, after dinner at a Tacoma restaurant, Michael took off running when he saw an apartment fire. The 9/11 attack hit him especially hard. His values, and the lengths to which he pursues them, would strike many as dated, but Grace says he simply wants to help.

"Michael is the most patriotic person I've ever met," she says. "He is truly not of our generation."

Another framed picture on the wall shows him in fatigues, standing along the side of a truck during his service in the Persian Gulf War a decade ago. The truck is lathered in dust, but not so much that you can miss the words he has scrawled on it: "MICHAEL LOVES GRACE."

The Washingtons, married for 19 years, have moved around the country as he served at Marine bases or with fire departments. He was working in San Diego County, mainly dousing wildfires, before he got a job with the Seattle Fire Department seven years ago. To him, big-city firefighting is the equivalent of baseball's major leagues.

Grace is a graphic artist who wanted to pursue her fine-art painting instead, but held herself back for the sake of a steady paycheck and raising their children. Michael not only offered to take another part-time job on his days off from the fire department, but got her an art show. "Now you have to do it," he told her. Never letting up, he even left inspirational notes on her windshield some mornings. Just before he shipped out for the Middle East he told her she had to keep her commitment to a show in Southern California, no matter what.

"When I started my fine art, I got scared," Grace says, "but he didn't. He's always sure of himself and adventurous, which is the opposite of me."

Both of them carry notes they've written to each other, expressing those feelings that married couples often forget to say. One of the notes he carried was destroyed in a Ballard ship fire he fought last summer.

MICHAEL HAD been home from peace-keeping duty in Bosnia and back on the job at Station 21 only about four months when the terrorists attacked. One month later, he set off for the Middle East to head up a unit.

Grace, who pursues her artwork with Michael's support, uses it as a sort of therapy when he's off to war. Her paintings are celebratory because, she says, "There is enough negativity in the world."

This conflict is far different for his family than the Gulf War was. That one was chronicled around the clock on television. Grace could almost keep track of what his unit, a light-infantry platoon, might be doing and where they were. This one was far murkier. Instead of watching TV and guessing, Grace searched for solace in her painting and tried to put up a good front for the children.

Each time he leaves, Grace does some sort of remodeling job to keep herself busy and divert her attention. This time, she worked on the kitchen. "Banging on that tile in the kitchen was great therapy!" she said, laughing.

She was having trouble laying the new kitchen floor and casually mentioned it to the firefighters who shared his shift at Station 21. They regularly checked up on her and were soon at her home, laying linoleum and installing molding. They even told her they missed hearing his teeth grinding each night when guys on the shift bunk down.

"She's our responsibility while Mike is gone," said Mark Lundquist, a firefighter who has worked alongside him the past three years. "He'd do the same for us."

An Air Force veteran in the neighborhood down the street also helps out, and other friends check up on the family, but being a Marines Corps wife in the Northwest may be harder because there is no base here and no ready source of support or information.

	While Michael was in the Middle East, fellow firefighters volunteered to help Grace remodel the kitchen. Left to right, Ed Newell, David Behrends and Mark Lundquist install new molding on the floor as Grace takes time out to share a laugh.

"Everyone gets on with their daily lives," Grace says. "People will ask me how I'm doing when they see me, but that act of picking up the phone or stopping by really means a lot to anyone in our position."

Grace and Michael consider themselves interlocking pieces that complement, but are not complete, without one another. She is steady and humble, as happy with an electric screwdriver as any other gift. He pushes the envelope. When the couple lived in the Midwest, Michael came home one day and announced he was going to be a stand-up comedian in his spare time. Soon, he was onstage at open-mike night and she was in the audience with some of his Marine buddies. The first joke was greeted by deafening silence. She wanted to bury her head in her hands, but he didn't seem to notice. He plunged ahead and got steady laughter from then on.

In fact, much of his life is centered on plunging in. As a firefighter, he never knows what the next call will bring. He rued that he was off-duty the night of the Pang warehouse arson that killed four firefighters several years ago. When he was working in the San Diego area he drove up to Los Angeles after his shift to see if he could help respond to the riots sparked by the acquittal of police involved in the Rodney King beating.

After seeing his picture on the cover of Pacific Northwest (left, next to David Behrends), Michael Washington wrote to insist that his wife was the real hero in their house.

Just before he left for the Middle East, he taught his son how to change a tire, just in case, and gave him a pep talk. Much of Grace's job when he left for duty was to fill his shoes. In his absence, Grace served as single parent, friend and coach. When her son was having a hard time with his soccer team she took a deep breath and tried to talk to him as Michael would. Essentially, she told him how Dad would handle the situation.

"I overheard how Michael was talking to his Marines once, and I could not believe the language! During the Gulf War he was in charge of four or five Marines to a vehicle. They were all much younger than he was, even then, and none of them got hurt. I realized that he had to do what it took to get the job done and make sure they respected him, and everything came out all right."

		Michael and Grace have trimmed their '70s hairdos, left, but maintained their bond since seventh grade. Below, eager to get back into the routines of family and work after a tour in the Middle East as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, Michael heads out to dinner and then home at last with Grace.

MICHAEL RETURNED last month, arriving by commercial flight at Sea-Tac on a Thursday night. It was nothing like those scenes you see on the TV, in which waves of soldiers or sailors flood into the arms of waiting loved ones. But Grace, Aja and Michael Jr. were there, and that was plenty.

By the following week, he had gone to his son's soccer practice and checked in with the fire-department battalion chief to set up a return date. Grace started preparing for another art show. And next month, the two of them will attend Aja's high-school graduation.

It turned out Michael never faced during this past tour the kind of obvious danger he'd experienced in the Gulf War. This time he was able to call and e-mail periodically, though he couldn't give details until he got back, and he was not one of those soldiers engaging al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in the mountaintops. But every place there brings some element of danger and uncertainty.

I asked him why, given his relationship with his wife and children, he continues, at age 39, to put himself in harm's way.

"During Desert Storm, I felt that while the overall issue was oil, the people of Kuwait were being occupied by a brutal regime and had to be liberated," he said. "In Bosnia, I felt being a peace-keeper now was better than my son fighting there in five years.

"Now my family is being threatened. And while I hate being away, especially so soon after Bosnia, I don't hear people beating down the doors of the recruiting office back home. This time, I'm protecting me and mine as well as the country."

He has been a Marine for 21 years and can retire without losing benefits. He is looking around first, though, weighing the pros and cons. He knows how Grace feels.

She and the children understand what drives him to be out there, but "understanding something doesn't always make it easier to accept," she says. "It's just who he is. He wouldn't quit on his country, and he wouldn't quit on us, either."

Richard Seven is a Pacific Northwest magazine reporter. Benjamin Benschneider is a magazine staff photographer.