COLCHESTER, Vt. – Joanne Packer held a bouquet of flowers and wore a black outfit with a red shawl on her wedding day Thursday while her husband-to-be wore desert camouflage and sat at a table in Afghanistan.

The digital distortion and the picture that couldn’t keep up with the sound that connected Packer and her husband-to-be, Lt. Col. Leon Ensalada, by way of a videophone, didn’t keep Packer from crying and laughing.

There was a long pause after chaplain Charles Purinton asked Ensalada if he was willing to commit to the vows of marriage. A technician whispered that Purinton should ask again.

Then:

“I will,” Ensalada said to a relieved laughter in the Vermont room. “I will, I will, I will.”

After Purinton asked Packer if she was willing to make the same vows, she answered, “I will, I will, I will.”

Packer sat in a conference room at the headquarters of the Vermont National Guard. Ensalada was in Kabul.

Ensalada, 55, a physician who regularly practices in Waitsfield, is one of about 50 Vermont National Guardsmen on active duty in Afghanistan where they are training the Afghan National Army.

Ensalada arrived in Afghanistan in November. Ensalada and Packer talked about getting married after he returned from Afghanistan.

“There was something about the backdrop of war,” Packer said after emerging from the conference room, still clutching her wedding bouquet. “It had to be, we just couldn’t wait.”

At Christmastime, Packer asked Vermont National Guard Adjutant Gen. Martha Rainville whether she could marry Ensalada while he was in Afghanistan.

“She took it and ran with it,” Packer said.

Ensalada’s best man was Lt. Col. Jack Mosher of Bangor, Maine. The two met in pre-deployment training in Colorado before the two were sent to Afghanistan.

“Congratulations for loving a soldier and enduring the inexplicable bond that draws a soldier to the sound of the guns,” Mosher said in traditional best man toast given in a nontraditional way.

“I love you, wife,” Ensalada said before about 15 family, friends, Guard members and reporters cleared out of the conference room to give the newlyweds a few moments alone.

It’s unlikely the two will be able to see each other before he returns to Vermont from Afghanistan in July or August.

Vermont National Guard officials say they are unaware of any similar weddings between soldiers overseas and a loved one back home in the United States.

Packer, 51, is a psychologist in private practice. The two met about three years ago.

Packer said her husband served in the military during the Vietnam era. He joined the National Guard after 9-11.

After Rainville asked her staff to see if there was a way to allow the two to marry, National Guard attorney Ellen Abbott checked Vermont law and then consulted with another Guard officer who is also a Superior Court judge.

“I didn’t see any prohibitions,” Abbott said.

The videoconference was done over a regular ISDN telephone line.

But the wedding is more than symbolic. It entitles Packer to all the benefits and support that the military can offer.

“The Guard feels like family,” Packer said. “They have been wonderful.”