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In 2007 someone posted the following anecdote to the Revenge section of a web site dedicated to collecting true tales of relationship break-ups: Other readers quickly noted that this break-up tale was used in a M*A*S*H episode years and years ago (i.e., 1981) and therefore you know it's an old story. Indeed this legend is much, much older than most people realize, having appeared in print a century before it found its way into an episode of M*A*S*H. Although modern tellings of this legend position the heartbroken swain as a lad serving in the military, in earlier forms it lacked any reference to the young man's occupation: Yet even those aren't the oldest sightings of this tale, as this find from 1881 demonstrates: In those long-ago versions there was no mention of the jilted lad being a military man, and some of the tellings even presented the warring couple as living in the same town (an assumption garnered from the boy's request in one tale to have the extraneous photographs returned by the bearer of this). More recent renditions both position the ditched lover as serving with the armed forces and the couple as separated by considerable distance (usually via his having been posted overseas, often to a war front). These two seemingly insignificant changes worked to keep the legend current: absent those shifts, a story about an engagement terminated through an exchange of letters sent winging through the mails wouldn't have sounded all that plausible. Yet by presenting the lad as a soldier serving at a distant outpost in some war-torn land, all potential questions that might have served to cast doubt upon the account were quashed; there is no Do people really break up by letter these days? Why not in person? Why didn't she send him an e-mail? Or phone him? Nowadays, the advent of cell phone technology that enables people to keep in constant touch even across the farthest reaches of the globe and digital photography technology that has done away with the concept of each picture's having a single original (negative or print) has somewhat lessened the currency of this legend. But despite its considerable age, the story continues to enjoy a robust life as a much passed-along anecdote thanks to its intrinsic message about what many continue to regard as the proper way for a fellow to deal with romantic disappointment. This is what a real man does, says the tale. This is how a manly man handles having his heart ripped from his chest and tromped on by the gal he'd given it to: he doesn't break down and cry over her perfidy (especially not in front of his buddies); he instead convinces the world that he never cared all that much in the first place. Real feelings of grief, abandonment, and rejection are squelched in favor of a steely-eyed, lantern-jawed display of bravado. Just as Aesop's fox makes his peace with having to abandon the luscious grapes hanging beyond his reach by pronouncing them sour, so does this legend counsel a heartbroken man to pretend to the world that he hadn't been that much in love with the gal who'd sent him packing. Sightings: In an episode of television's M*A*S*H (Identity Crisis, original air date 2 November 1981) a wounded soldier reads Hawkeye and Hot Lips a Dear John letter he has received from Gloria, his girlfriend back in the United States: Hawkeye responds by cooking up and implementing a revenge scheme on behalf of the jilted G.I., which he presents as shown in the following video clip:
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