(photo: trish brunner | blog)
This morning I stumbled into the story from last year of James and Lena Ahearn. James, the American officer, Lena the Iraqi woman who was apparently the first war bride in Iraq in 2003. They’d met in Baghdad’s Green Zone and it was a rather charming romance of flowers, with perhaps the customary intensity one so easily finds in marriages made in wars. But it’s a tragic story, as James was killed last year by a roadside bomb. As Lena tells it: “This is the man I always dreamed of but he got to go so fast.”
Such marriages are rather rare in this war, perhaps illustrating the seemingly immutable gulf that separates our civilization from theirs. Or the greater the violent interest of some to keep it that way. But stopping them altogether no matter how considerable the cultural divide, always seems to be impossible.
Which got me to remembering a rather lovely passage that appears in Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. A story about a very different war, but one with similar problems for men and women brought together by the seemingly eternal savagery of history. And inexorably, the crueler debts of war romance are always paid by women:
All over the world at that moment men torn from their homes were meeting strange girls and falling love with them. On every girl’s tongue was the question she almost never asked: “Are you married?” At first she reasoned, “well, we’re not in love, so it doesn’t matter.” Later she reasoned “we love each other, so it doesn’t really matter.” In strange ways they discovered that their lovers were married men, or in jubilation they found that they were not. But rarely did they ask the simple question: “are you married?” For they knew that most men would tell them the truth, and they did not wish to know the truth.
(Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener)