Jean Havoc

Havoc is a tall, fair-haired man with blue eyes, almost never pictured without a cigarette clamped in his mouth. The habit is so constant that those close to him can pick him out by the smell of smoke alone, even when he is in disguise. His features and lean build lend him a distinctly French air among the Amestrian ranks.

A self-styled country boy, Havoc is easygoing, honest, and dependable, a hard worker who leads his own subordinates by example. He shares Mustang's weakness for women and his habit of flirting, and while he is no genius, his plain common sense and street-smart wit make him the grounded, sarcastic voice among his more theatrical comrades. He also holds his own remarkably well in a fight.

His running misfortune, though, is romance. Time and again a promising relationship slips through his fingers, whether because a transfer to Central pulls him away from a new girlfriend in East City or because the woman he fancies, such as Alex Louis Armstrong's younger sister Catherine, wants nothing to do with him.

In the 2003 anime Havoc is largely a supporting player, offering comic relief and backup beside Heymans Breda, Vato Falman, and Kain Fuery, with his standout moment coming near the end when he impersonates Mustang as a decoy during the Central coup. The manga hands him a far weightier arc. He takes part in the operation to lure out the homunculi using Barry the Chopper, and around this time boasts of a new girlfriend named Solaris, unaware that she is the homunculus Lust mining him for intelligence on Mustang, though he lets nothing important slip. He helps smuggle Maria Ross out of the country, then, under the codename Jacqueline, keeps watch over a safe house alongside Hawkeye and Fuery.

The turning point comes in Laboratory 3, where he and Mustang confront Lust. When she floods the room and soaks Mustang's ignition gloves, Havoc saves the day by lighting the flammable gas with his cigarette lighter, but the regenerating Lust runs him through the abdomen, and the wound to his spine leaves him paralyzed from the waist down. Believing he can no longer serve, he accepts a discharge and furiously orders Mustang to stop pitying a pawn who can no longer move and to press on toward the top without him.

He keeps training his upper body from his hospital bed and refuses to be sidelined entirely, quietly running a covert arms operation out of his family's general store. When Mustang's unit is scattered, Havoc alone can still act freely, passing along Hawkeye's message about the Promised Day, and during the assault on Central Command he supplies the weapons that arm the counterattack. By the story's close he is in physical therapy and may be regaining the use of his legs; in the 2009 anime, Mustang is implied to have used part of Marcoh's Philosopher's Stone to restore them fully.