What Elizabeth Edwards and African War Zones have in Common.

For the past couple of weeks, my friends and I have been vigorously debating Elizabeth Edward's decision to come out with a book and go on a book tour based on her husband's infidelity. Some of them think, "About time! Let her stick it to his cheating ass!" Others think, "Why is she doing this? Making herself so much more vulnerable? What about those poor kids?"

Then there is me and a handful of my closest friends who think, "Either divorce him or stay with him...but don't disgrace yourself by becoming a the poster child of a 'bitter woman.'" As my friend Meghan says, "She was married to him for like decades, c'mon. John Edwards was smart but who would ever think he was honest? I never did."

I kind of feel the same way but with reservations.

I am firmly of the opinion that Elizabeth Edwards should either divorce her husband or make peace with the whole situation. I think dragging things out like this is bad on her, her health, and her family. I also agree with Meghan in that it must be impossible NOT to know your man is cheating or capable of it. But, then again, I am often wrong there too.

I know this personally. And I know it from friends.

Last Saturday, at about 2PM, as I was laying in bed wishing the worst of my Malaria symptoms away when my good friend, Amy, called.

I have been dragging ass for about a week and was reluctant to get out of bed but Amy never calls unless it's important.

Amy is someone who should be given whatever the civilian equivalent of a Purple Heart is.

She is one of the finest humanitarian aid workers I have ever known. She is no bullshit, no frills, and no nonsense.

I met her in grad school many years ago and, immediately upon getting my first post-graduate job in DC traveling in Africa, she abducted my ass and dragged me to Somalia where she was working at the time. I was staying in Kenya for those two weeks and bragging about how I had been to "war zones" in West Africa when she decided that I really needed to see a war zone, live and in-person.

Those were the scariest 48 hours of my life but I have never bragged about being in a war zone again and I gained a whole new perspective on the world's absolute shitholes and the people like Amy that go in there everyday and try to help.

Not for fame, not for glory...but because she really believes that she has something to offer and something to contribute. And she does...

So I have always looked up to Amy but when she called Saturday from her current hellhole in a county close to me, I was concerned.

I answered and she was chipper at first but then her voice started to crack.

"What?" I asked. "What is it?"

"I am worse than John OR Elizabeth Edwards," she confided. "I am in love with a married guy...again."

Then she started sobbing uncontrollably.

"How can I be such an awful person?" she asked. "How can I believe in women's rights the way I do and then fall in love with another woman's husband?"

"I should just be shot," she concluded.

No, you shouldn't, I said.

But how does one explain this when it is something no one talks about?

It is not having sex with your secretary on a lunch break or getting bored with your wife and having a quickie with the maid. It is day-in and day-out living with someone else who usually becomes your best friend in the worst conditions imaginable. For Amy, living in a war zone in Central Africa for twelve weeks with three other people, one the French soldier who eventually became her best friend and then lover, was an alternative reality. One that she has lived, many times, for sure, but still not one where the normal rules of "cheating" apply.

Back in the European capital where they both live, they are trying to figure out what to do next. For all the pain that it causes her, Amy tells me, the soldier is in a relatively happy marriage and has two teenage children. Nevertheless, they spent twelve weeks in a war zone watching, on a day-to-day basis, as children as young as three were carried in by their mothers blown to bits. Where Amy spent her days trying her best to get teenage girls who had been repeatedly gang-raped by militia forces to talk to the tall, white woman with red hair so that she could then tell their stories to the outside world in hope of getting some attention, if not actual help.

Where the French soldier, originally sent in on a training mission, was abandoned by all of his African counterparts and had to defend a territory (and Amy and the one other organization that stayed behind to help) from nightly raids aimed at driving them out of the area by violence and death.

Do I condone that Amy and the French solider had an affair and that now she's a positive wreck about it? No. But do I understand that, in certain cases, "black and white" on marital infidelity doesn't always apply because you find yourself in extraordinary circumstances? Yes, absolutely.

"OK, Patti, so then WHERE is the line?" my friend Lisa asked via a chat on Skype tonight. "Why does a woman like the French soldier's wife forgive him because he was in a warzone whereas Elizabeth Edwards can't forgive her husband for cheating when he was in a 'political' war zone?"

Good question. And one I can only speak bits and pieces to in any comprehensive manner.

Being someone who has lived in both worlds for a little while (albeit NEVER to Amy's extent and certainly never to John Edward's extent), I still think it is a bit different. Falling in love, even "temporary love," to feel alive again when you have basically resigned yourself to the fact that death is always imminent is one thing. Taking up with a videographer when your ego is in overdrive is another.

People that live almost constantly in the world of wars and humanitarian crises, in part, become societal pariahs. It's not like they can open a dinner conversation with what they last saw and they feel trivial and guilty when they come home because they are getting to do and enjoy things that the people who they work with day-to-day cannot...nor likely ever will.

Amy is strong in that she is very, very honest about herself and what she does. Although I have lived on the periphery of these places and, at times, spent more time there than I would have liked, it is NOT a full-time job for me so I can be objective.

Amy, on the other hand, is objective in her own way. She has two therapists that she see regularly, she takes a mild anti-depressant, and she is a yoga fanatic---even doing it in the jungles of war zones to keep "her head on straight" so she can still work.

But, as last weekend proved, even Amy crashes down sometimes.

But she is single, which, to my mind, is an advantage in this case.When we last spoke, I told her that although I was sorry that she was feeling bad, she might want to look at it from the French soldier's perspective. They both came home traumatized and desperately in love, but she got to go home to her apartment to mourn by herself first and then with like-minded friends next. What did she think he was doing right now, I asked? "He's probably sitting at the dinner table with his wife and kids and trying to pretend everything is normal. And, I hope and I don't hope, that he is thinking of me. But, yeah, he is a much more uncomfortable place right now," she said.

The decision on Elizabeth Edwards remains up in the air among my friends but no one seems to likely to pass a stern judgement. Nevertheless, as far as infidelity goes, someone should send BOTH John and Elizabeth Edwards to a Central African war zone to hash it out. That would do more than any book tour for both their own marriage and probably for an insight into some other features of humanity.

(P.S. I told Amy I was thinking about writing a blog on her...she replied, "Please, by all means, get the word out."