WAR WIDOW When the Taliban killed Captain David Patton during a special forces mission in Afghanistan, his wife PAULA MAYRS thought she would never recover. She tells how it has taken a decade for her to find peace – and love again

Ruth Tierney

On the day my husband David was due back from serving in Afghanistan, I received the news every army wife dreads. It was 27 June 2006, and I’d last seen David ten weeks earlier. In that time he’d missed our only child Joanna’s first birthday, instead calling her from a secure landline in Kabul, breaking down in tears when he heard her giggling. It was the longest we’d been apart since meeting 11 years earlier, and I’d missed him like mad. I was buzzing with excitement about his return, impatient for the phone to ring, to hear his voice from the army plane. But that call never came. David was dead, lying face down in a field, gunned down by the Taliban who had ambushed his paratroop patrol during a covert mission in Helmand Province. I would never again see my husband’s face (not even at the funeral where his coffin was sealed), and our daughter would never remember the dad who had so doted on her.

Would I have got involved with David if I had known the dangerous nature of his job from the outset? Growing up in Coleraine, Northern Ireland during The Troubles, I’d vowed never to date a policeman or soldier, much less someone from special forces, who everyone knew were targeted. I had seen first hand the devastating impact army life could have on the wife left behind. My sister’s husband, who was in the regular army, had been shot dead in front of her by the IRA at their home while on Christmas leave in 1992. But in 1995, when I was 29, and introduced to David by a mutual friend, I remember looking at this exceptionally handsome man and thinking, ‘Oh golly.’ We just fell for each other.

While I knew he’d been in the army since he was 16 (he was 27 when we met), for the first four months of our relationship I was kept in the dark about him being in special forces. I had my suspicions, though. There was something different about David: he didn’t seem like regular army – for one thing, his hair was longer than the usual compulsory crop. He had a special bearing: a quiet confidence, understated rather than cocky with a presence about him. Army business wasn’t the kind of thing we discussed. There were security risks and people were naturally cagey in Northern Ireland. David didn’t talk and I didn’t push. Even after he confided he was in the SAS, he never told me the nature of his work. His job was the elephant in the room.

We got married in 1998, on the week of the Good Friday Agreement [a peace deal that brought an end to The Troubles in Northern Ireland], in a very low-key ceremony at a local register office with just immediate family present. We knew the Agreement would change things, that his role

Paula, 50, at her new home. Left, from top: with David and six-month-old Joanna in 2005, and at David’s grave on the first anniversary of his death