Jeffrey Brown's story is about finding his first love before he deployed to Vietnam.
 | By Lauren Katzenberg Editor, At War |
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This week, At War has a piece from Jeffrey Brown, a former Army physician who served in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. His story is as much about finding himself on the front line as it is about finding his first love in the months before he left for basic training. For a time they stayed in touch, but their lives quickly went in different directions, and they wouldn’t reconnect for more than 50 years. |
Brown’s story reminded me of my own, but in this case, a war brought us together. In 2011, I was living in Kabul, Afghanistan, working for an Afghan media company producing shows for local television channels. We hired a video editor who was blond-hair-blue-eyes-English-accent handsome and often kept a hand-rolled cigarette behind his ear as he worked. His name was Jack. The handful of foreigners who worked for our company lived together, so we would stay up late with a bottle of whiskey bought on the Kabul black market while listening to music and smoking packs of fake Marlboro cigarettes. |
READ JEFFREY BROWN’S ACCOUNT OF HIS FIRST LOVE LOST |
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After weeks of flirting, I finally kissed him, and from that point on we were a couple. I was a senior project manager handling the company’s clients, and Jack was the creative mind with a stream of endless production ideas. When I organized a film screening for a series of short films we had produced with local filmmakers, Jack stayed awake for days on end, polishing the edits and adding subtitles. He mentored our Afghan colleagues. Together, we organized classes in the basement of our office for anyone who wanted to know about film. In our free time, we worked on short documentaries together. Once, I was trapped in my office for 20 hours waiting for a firefight to end between Afghan security forces and a handful of insurgents holed up in an empty building down the street. Jack was in Kandahar filming at the time, but he continuously checked in with me through the night. We later laughed at the fact that we had been so worried about him traveling to southern Afghanistan, which was less secure, when the real threat turned out to be just outside the office walls. |
In Kabul, it was easy for us to love each other; our only responsibilities were to our work, which we were both passionate about. Jack’s spontaneity balanced my Type-A rigidity. For Valentine’s Day, he turned his bedroom into a makeshift beach with pillows, blankets and a projector, while Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” played from his laptop. I wanted a life after Kabul with him, and by spring 2012, I had been accepted to graduate school in London, where Jack and I would move, together. |
Outside of the war, in a reality where we had to pay bills and taxes, and where Jack had to find regular work, while both of us adjusted to a new routine, the faults in our relationship began to reveal themselves. Jack grew antsy and struggled to find work. I constantly worried about money. We both drank too much. And we fought. |
Within nine months, we gave up on London and moved to Namibia, where we had both been offered jobs working on a wildlife sanctuary that took in injured and orphaned animals. It was a great opportunity for Jack. He’d be responsible for producing films and photography, while I did basic accounting in the finance office. My work was painfully dull, but in my off hours, I helped with the animals and mothered orphaned baby baboons (a story for another time). Stuck on a remote farm, we drank more than ever, and the fighting didn’t stop. I grew resentful of Jack because I felt so off-track from where I had envisioned my life going. I craved stability, and after nearly four years living abroad, I was homesick. In the United States, my friends were getting married, and my brother and his wife were about to have a baby. I was running out of reasons to stay in Namibia, even though I knew what leaving would mean for our relationship. |
 | | Jack and me in Parwan Province in 2011, in a similar photo to the one on my bookshelf.via Lauren Katzenberg |
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In February 2014, I said goodbye. Jack offered to come to the States with me, but for visa purposes we would have to get married, and we both knew that was not what either of us wanted. Our final minutes together at the airport were devastating. We both cried, knowing we would probably never see each other again. I questioned my decision the entire flight home and even in the first few weeks back in my mother’s house. But over time I started to rebuild a life that wasn’t defined by my years living in Kabul or by the man I had loved and left. |
Feb. 18 will mark six years since I moved home from Namibia. I rarely hear from Jack, other than an occasional chat on Facebook Messenger. He’s still traveling the world, making films. I moved to New York City, built a career in journalism and met the man I would eventually marry. |
A few years ago, my husband (then boyfriend), Kris, was going through some of my old picture frames and found a photo of me and Jack each holding a Soviet-era Kalashnikov rifle. We were on a picnic near the Salang Pass in Parwan Province. A pink head scarf lies clumsily around the back of my head. Jack is wearing a pakol, a wool cap often worn by Afghans. We’re both trying to look as serious as possible, but you can tell we have no business holding long guns. Not seen in the picture are our Afghan colleagues laughing at us as they snapped photos. |
Kris put the framed photo on our bookshelf, along with a few others of me and Jack. “I like the way you look here,” Kris said. “You look happy.” He was right. Jack and I eventually stopped being compatible, but for three years he was the most important person in the world to me. And my life in Kabul, years that would come to shape everything I did after I left, would have not have been the same without him. Kris appreciated that. |
In November, Kris and I moved into our first house. The photo of me and Jack with our rifles is still on the bookshelf. |
Lauren Katzenberg is the editor of The New York Times Magazine’s At War channel. |
The Afghan War Casualty Report: February 2020 |
 | | Afghan security officials taking part in an operation against the Taliban in the Nad-e-Ali District of Helmand.Watan Yar/EPA, via Shutterstock |
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At least 56 pro-government forces and 22 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan so far this month. [Read the report.] |
Behind the Numbers: 1,600 |
 | | Air Force personnel wore masks and gloves as they worked in 1966 in the fields around Palomares where three hydrogen bombs had accidentally fallen. Conventional explosives in two of the bombs went off, scattering plutonium dust. A fourth bomb fell into the sea.U.S. Air Force |
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That’s the number of airmen who in 1966 were sent by the Air Force to clean up debris left over by a classified atomic accident in Palomares, Spain. Many of these service members were made to shovel and discard soil laced with plutonium and were later found to have cancer and other serious ailments. Yet for years the Air Force denied that they were exposed to dangerous levels of the toxic particles, so their ailments were subsequently not eligible for medical treatment by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Many of these veterans have since died of cancer and related illnesses — including respiratory disease, testicular cancer and bone and joint problems — and those who previously filed V.A. claims were hampered by bureaucratic red tape, not least of which was the loss of data collected from the disaster site and the Air Force’s inability to get accurate contamination readings. But a new lawsuit, which is supported by the veterans’ legal-services clinic at Yale Law School, could potentially force the federal government to formally recognize the troops’ radiation exposure and make them eligible for health care they’ve so far been denied. Read the full Times report on the case here. |
— Jake Nevins, Times Magazine editorial fellow |
Here are five articles from The Times you might have missed. |
 | | The U.S.S. Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden after two suicide bombers attacked the destroyer in 2000.Dimitri Messinis/Associated Press |
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“Keenness to settle all historical terrorism claims.” Sudan’s interim government said on Thursday that it had reached a financial settlement with families of the victims of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, an effort to persuade the United States to remove Sudan from a list of state sponsors of terrorism. [Read the story.] |
“The second-highest person in the second-biggest agency in the federal government got fired, and no one knows why.” The mysterious firing last week of the deputy secretary of veterans affairs was only the latest in a string of incidents that have shaken the second-largest cabinet agency in the government as it embarks on ambitious changes to veterans health care. [Read the story.] |
Siding with Amazon. A federal judge in Washington ordered Microsoft on Thursday to halt all work on a $10 billion cloud-computing contract for the Pentagon, in a victory for Amazon, which had challenged the awarding of the contract. [Read the story.] |
“This war, this geography is very complex.” More than 18 years after the United States invaded Afghanistan, President Trump has conditionally approved a peace deal with the Taliban that would withdraw the last American troops from the country, potentially beginning the end of America’s longest war. Here is what the terms could look like. [Read the story.] |
Delays at Guantánamo Bay. A long-serving capital defense lawyer for one of the five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks asked the judge to be excused from the case, citing his health and other issues, casting doubt on whether the trial can begin as scheduled next year. [Read the story.] |
Beyond the World War II We Know |
 | | One of the love letters from the National WWII Museum.via The National WWII Museum |
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