Claim: Soldier scrawls his response to an unfaithful woman on the back of a tank.
Status: Multiple — see below.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2005]
Origins: Although the proverb tells us that "absence makes the heart grow fonder," that doesn't always prove to be the case. Many times one or both members of involuntarily-separated couples have found partners available in the here and now preferable to the uncertainty of distant paramours who may (or may not) return to their embraces someday.
Historically, men have been the gender whose activities most often took them away from home for extended periods of time, as they engaged in pursuits of exploration, commerce, and politics while their female counterparts remained behind to care for homestead and family. War, particularly, has always been a great
The spouses and girlfriends/boyfriends of soldiers in the field have not always dealt with the loneliness and uncertainty of long separations well, many of them opting to pursue "here and now" relationships with others rather than waiting to resume interrupted marriages and courtships when (and if) their partners eventually return. So common was the phenomenon of an American GI's receiving a dreaded letter from the girl he left behind informing him that she had taken up someone else, that during
All of this background leads up to the photograph displayed above, sent to us by a
Last updated: 25 April 2005