This time between a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi doctor. Ignore the Guardian’s anti-war spin. This is a real Valentine’s Day story:
“It was kind of funny, I kind of flustered her,” says Blackwell, at home outside Pensacola, Florida. “She was telling me [a story], like: ‘They want to kidnap me’ [referring to the fundamentalists in Qud] and I just kind of smiled and said, ‘Well, I can’t blame them.’ She said: ‘What?’ and I said, ‘I’d kidnap you.’ I was just flirting with her. She got a little flustered and forgot how to speak English, and started talking to my interpreter in Arabic and he was translating for her, and then she started speaking English again. She was a little embarrassed. Open flirtation like that… well, it’s a big no-no actually over there. But… it happened to work. That was basically it about how we met, and she just continued to visit every two to three days for the next four months.”
He’s out of the military and she’ll soon be out of Iraq, headed for a wedding in Florida.
BETTER DEAD THAN GAY: Even corpses can marry in France, it seems.
EUROPE VERSUS AMERICA: Why isn’t there more attention to the fact that the split is far from simply caused by the U.S.? A good Euro-blog notes one German finding her compatriots culpable.
The Dish 