Nothing Says "True Love"...

I get the point of this story, and I think there's a time and a place for love stories--especially regarding the military-- it just struck me as odd at a few points, entering the TMI zone:

Ed’s plane was shot down over Vietnam in 1968. He spent five years enduring torture and eating bread smattered with rat feces in North Vietnam. Suzanne, sure he was dead, mourned and reluctantly moved on.

Nothing says "True Love," like bread smattered with rat feces.

And the story again ventured into the weird zone here:

He was kept largely alone. He would prick his wrist with small pieces of bamboo and scrawl messages to his fellow POWs on rough toilet paper with his own blood: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” “Hang tough.”

On Friday, he pointed to the white specks beneath his wrist watch. “That was my inkwell,” he said.

That kind of reminded me of the famed comic book of Kiss lore.

A final oddity of the piece surrounded bad timing, in a divinely antagonistic set of circumstances, both missed marriage by a week:

As it turned out, Ed came home from Vietnam just six days after Suzanne had married another man. “Boy, were we all surprised,” Suzanne said. “It wasn’t pleasant. I was married for 10 years. I knew right after the marriage occurred that it was a big mistake. I committed, so I stayed in it.”

Ed went to law school and worked as an insurance fraud prosecutor in Austin, Texas.

Suzanne and her first husband had two children. But the marriage ended in the early 1980s. Suzanne sent a letter to Ed’s sister, saying she’d made a terrible mistake, that she still wanted Ed in her life. It’s now known as the “letter from hell.”

Ed was to be married six days later. When he learned that Suzanne had reached out, he stopped the wedding plans and rushed to see her. But he couldn’t believe this was happening and dismissed it all as a fairy tale.

A unique, newsworthy story. It certainly shows how love sometimes works in the wackiest ways.