War and the brokenhearted

Posted by Lianne Gutcher at 14:28 on 31 Mar 2010

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My friend split up with her boyfriend of six years and is heartbroken.

The breakup, conducted mostly over Skype, took place over a long and painful five months. She feels, in hindsight, she made a huge mistake in putting her job in Afghanistan before him.

After the breakup she organised a yoga retreat in Bali, thinking it would be a good way to start the healing process.

Negative.

On her return to the office she declared her holiday ruined by constant thoughts of him.

Then, the opportunity came for her to go to Helmand to write about the reconstruction taking place after the clearing of Marja of Taliban.

Her colleague and I agreed that a trip to Helmand may be more effective in helping her to move on - perhaps giving her some kind of bigger-picture perspective that an introspective yoga holiday couldn't.

But this got me thinking. Afghanistan, and these type of environments, are supposed to be full of "mercenaries, missionaries, misfits and the broken-hearted." I am here partly because the job offered a better income than freelancing which I suppose puts me in the charmingly quirky (rather-than-misfit, I like to think) mercenary category. But it's no fun when you're over 30 and your financial straits are so dire you can't afford lunch. Even on credit. (Empathy with Katy Regan there.)

But my friends going to Helmand and getting shot at: are they reeling from broken hearts? And is war a good way to fix them?

As I don't know any soldiers-in-combat - what can I say? I'm a REMF - I did a survey of those I do know who are regularly shot at: my (mostly) journalist mates.

The first person neatly dodged the question, replying: "The motif of the bloke having his heart broken and then going off to war is a common - one might say cliched - motif of romantic literature English, Russian and French for the past 500 years. It is not an original thing."

Pah. I am too lazy to try original thought. But, anyway, it turns out that none of my acquaintances are walking, talking cliches: no one admitted to going to war to get over a woman. Indeed, Journo 1 said that the "broken heart came about because the job was the greater love."

I learned that J2 and his buddies, when they were doing the ungodly night shift on a daily in London, agreed that the crucial thing was simply not to get seriously involved with any woman before they got their first overseas postings in case romance jeopardised things. I learned this from J2's now-girlfriend and I think that is kind of nice: he's got the job and the gal.

J3 wrote back denying he'd ever has his heart broken. "I can't answer the broken heart questions," he emailed. "Never happened to me. Not since Nam."

This came as a bit of a blow to the old ego. You see, J3 and I dated back in my Kabul salad days, and I thought we... I thought he.... Nah.

The journos all also agreed that war was, on the whole, a rubbish way to get over someone.

Taking my query a bit more seriously, as indeed he should, was J4.

He explained: "War makes you miss women more. Getting shot at makes time fly by and takes your mind of a lot of things, but war is 90 per cent boredom and leaves a lot of time for reflection."

He added: "Lying in your dos bag at night, without the privacy or comfort to masturbate turns the mind even more towards women. I'd imagine that if
you did want to get shot at to forget a woman, you'd only end up exacerbating your problems."

J5, the Wise Ass Yank, lamented the lack of potential "rebound action" in war, saying: "I did my first embed in Afghanistan after my fiancé and I broke up. I'd actually arranged it before the split, so it's not like she pushed me to war. It works as far as a healing process, but it sure ain't easy. For one thing, the chance of getting any kind of rebound action is, at best, negligible. You're surrounded by a bunch of dudes on a base where everybody is wearing uniforms. Also, in this war you can't even drink. So there you are on a Friday night, sober, stuck in a hole in the ground with a bunch of other guys, knowing that back home, she's getting all prettied up to hit the town with all those dudes who used to flirt with her when you were still dating. Getting shot at will take your mind off of her, but it won't last. When the dark comes you'll be right back in that hole, alone and trying to figure out why you thought this was such a good idea in the first place."

Wise Ass Yank did add, though: "The upside comes after you get home, especially if your story comes out just before you get back."

Which brings me to my next query. Do any of my dear mates use tales of their derring-do to impress girls?

(Obviously, I did at one point fall for J3 but did he tell me stories about getting rocketed and coming under fire? Trying to think back... well, when I met him he had just got back from Helmand and Christmas with the Marines. His biggest story of that embed, I recall, was about vegetables. Brussels sprouts, specifically, and how they'd gone MIA and Our Boys weren't going to be getting any to go with their Christmas dinner because of some logistics glitch. So, um, no: it wasn't his tales of the battlefield that set my heart aflutter. In fact, I don't think they ever came up. He had, however, also just come back from learning how to play buzkashi - the Afghan national sport likened to polo only played with a dead goat - and I thought that was quite heroic.)

Again, all of them denied using battlefield tales to score. Although more than one pointed me in the direction of a well-known UK correspondent who has now left Kabul but was apparently master-without-equal of this approach to wowing women. The others? Angels. All of them.

As for my friend, she is still forlorn after her return from Helmand.

"My heart is still broken," she wrote over email. "I still miss him."

PHOTO: Courtesy of Jerome Starkey. You can see more of his photos at www.flickr.com/photos/jeromestarkey/. 

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