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Marine marries ABC News correspondent

As romances go, it wasn’t exactly normal.

Capt. George Anthony Bancroft III was stationed in Japan at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in spring 2006 when ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz sent him an e-mail: he had to meet her young female co-worker.

Raddatz, ABC’s chief White House correspondent, thought the F/A-18 Hornet pilot she first met a year before while covering news in Iraq would make a good match with fellow correspondent Andrea Canning.

“She said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this pretty girl you should meet. She works with me in Washington,’” Bancroft said. “I said, ‘OK, cool,’ but didn’t think much of it at the time.”

Two years later, Bancroft and Canning were married on June 7 in Canning’s hometown of Blue Mountain, Ontario. It was a wedding neither one of them saw coming when they began e-mailing back and forth from Washington and Japan.

Perhaps the couple caught a few lucky breaks, though.

About three months after they began corresponding from across the globe, Bancroft’s deployment to Japan ended, allowing him to return to MCAS Miramar, Calif. — dramatically closer to Canning.

Still, the long-distance flirtation continued from opposite coasts — to the point where when Bancroft didn’t send a photograph of himself to Canning, Canning found out what he looked like by buying a DVD of the “West Wing” television series, which he had appeared on as a Marine pilot extra.

“I was so excited when this little light bulb went off in my head,” Canning said of figuring out a way to see what Bancroft looked like. “You literally see him for three seconds in the DVD … but I said, ‘Wow, he’s really handsome.’”

The couple met for the first time in person in November 2006, when Bancroft flew to Maryland to visit family for Thanksgiving. The chemistry was immediate, they both said.

“I turned around and saw this gorgeous girl, and that was a good start right there,” Bancroft said of first seeing her in his hotel lobby.

“We ended up talking in a Denny’s until 6 o’clock in the morning,” Canning said. “We really hit it off.”

Things progressed quickly from there, and Bancroft said he is now looking forward to when his Marine contract ends in about a year, so that he can move east to New York, where Canning now works.

They also remain close to Raddatz, who not only attended their wedding, but sat at the head table as a guest of honor, they said.

As for not sending Canning a photo, Bancroft said he was being an “idiot” at the time, and has learned not to be surprised by her ability to track down information.

“She’s a hound dog, man, especially as an investigative reporter,” Bancroft said with a laugh. “She’s one of those people who just keeps going after the story.”