When he pulled into a grocery store shortly after the encounter, he realized the vehicle the girl drove was parked in employee parking.

He described the encounter with extreme detail, remembering exactly how much the items cost that his future wife, Desiree, rang up for him.

"I walked up to the register with a gallon of milk, a bottle of Tree Top apple juice and a copy of Super Chevy magazine. It came out to $9.63," recounted the lieutenant, who lived in the dorms across the street from the commissary, but instead drove seven miles to the grocery store she worked at to do his shopping.

Of course, like any love-struck human being, he would rather shop at the grocery store seven miles away just to see her.

"By definition, it was stalking," jokes Litchfield.

Like all good fairy tales, they got married and had three children over the next few years.

During that time, he spent almost 10 years in the enlisted corps, then separated to go to college to get his bachelor's degree in statistics. During his time in college, he joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps and subsequently earned his commission.

In 2009, Litchfield and his family moved to Hill Air Force Base, Utah, where he became a logistics readiness squadron flight commander.

Early last year, they discovered his wife was pregnant with their fourth child. "We had always wanted four kids," he explained.

But then disaster stuck. In July they discovered that Desiree had miscarried. "We were pretty dejected about that - we had never experienced anything like it," Litchfield said.

Merely days afterward, he found out he had been tagged for a 365-day deployment to Iraq.

The Litchfields decided if they weren't pregnant again before the lieutenant left for his deployment, they were going to stick with three kids.

That September, Desiree found out she was pregnant again.

"We felt joy; we were still worried because of the previous miscarriage, but we still wanted to have four children," he said.

After completing pre-deployment training, the lieutenant spent a short time with his family before finally leaving for Baghdad in early April, where he became the Iraq Training and Advisory Mission-Air officer in charge of the foreign excess personal property program.

Five days after he left, Desiree packed up the kids and the dog to go stay with her family in her hometown of Enid, Okla.

Once in Baghdad, Litchfield settled in and kept in touch with his family every chance he could using the Internet in his room. He followed the remainder of his wife's pregnancy with bated breath.

As the due date drew near, Litchfield knew he had an opportunity to see the birth, even though he wasn't going to be there.

He bought an iPad for his wife so the two could still talk in the hospital using Facetime, a video messaging program.

On the big day, the lieutenant holed up in his room and watched the entire thing online, from the epidural until after the birth of his child.

"I was really worried that the Internet was gonna go," Litchfield said about his expeditionary Internet connection.

But apart from a little rain, there were no interruptions to his Internet stream. "It was fabulous - there was no delay," he said.

Word spread quickly through the hospital about the unique situation in Desiree's room, and a steady stream of nurses came through to see what was going on.

"Every nurse that came in asked 'Are you Desiree? Are you the girl whose husband is deployed?,'" said Litchfield.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the former enlisted command post controller was relaying information back and forth between his friends and family back home on Facebook.

"I was the 7,000 mile away guy keeping everyone in the neighborhood informed," he said.

In the end, Desiree gave birth to their fourth child, Cohen James Litchfield, on May 16. He weighed in at 8 pounds, 10 ounces.

"This one was a complete surprise," he said. Up until that point, the couple had no idea what gender their baby was going to be.

Once Cohen was born, Litchfield lost the limelight to the new baby.

"When I called before, I was the 'first show' in town. Movies stopped and everyone came to talk to me. At the hospital, I was the 'second show' in town because everyone wanted to see the baby," he said.

And see the baby they did. But no one saw him with the same perspective as his father.

"You never forget the birth of a kid... I'll never forget this."