Purple Heart

The next morning, Justin drops off Matt’s duffel bag and a note that he’s being awarded a medal for saving Matt. Justin is relieved that his dad, a decorated Vietnam vet, will “finally stop harping” (44)Justin to get some medals of his own. Matt pulls a picture of his girlfriend Caroline out of his duffel, recalling how before nighttime missions in Iraq, he’d take the picture out and look at it. Now Caroline seems “more like someone in one of those celebrity magazines” (46)—someone you feel like you know, but “all you really know is their picture” (47)—and Matt seems perplexed by this new sense of distance. Next Matt takes out a picture by the Iraqi boy Ali, a depiction of a battle with “precisely drawn” (47) M16 and M4 rifles. Matt remembers the last time he saw Ali, when his squad mate Charlene caught Ali trying to steal a tarp from their Humvee. Ali had “become a bit of a pest” (47), always begging, but when Charlene had shooed him away, Matt insisted that “[they]’re here to help these people” (48).

Matt takes another walk through the ward and talks to a 42-year-old National Guard member, who considers himself “too old for this crap” (49) and is shocked the Army sent him to Iraq. Matt is still having trouble walking and almost falls returning to his bed, but Francis helps him. Matt asks what the military police wanted with him, and Francis responds with “you can’t handle the truth” (51).

Later, during an exchange with a new soldier on the ward, Matt remembers the time his squad played with a can of Silly String, “playing war” (53) in spite of the real one outside. At the time, Matt concluded that war wasn’t about “politics” (53) or terrorism. Rather, “it was about your buddies; it was about fighting for the guy next to you. And knowing he was fighting for you” (53). Matt imagines what his squad might be doing at that moment and clearly wishes he was back with them.

Francis gives Matt a notebook and tells him to write down everything he knows so that he’ll be prepared when the officers question him. First Matt lists the things he doesn’t know—quite a bit, it turns out—but when he tries to list the things he does remember, he finds “he couldn’t think of anything he knew for sure” (55).

Matt receives a letter from Caroline, full of mundane details like being “sooo scared” (58) over an upcoming bio test. Before, Matt was always comforted by the “normalness” (58) of Caroline’s letters, which reminded him he was fighting so that his girlfriend and family could continue their safe, everyday lives. Now Matt finds himself irritated by Caroline reminding him to clean his gun as if she’s “some expert on the war,” and casually signing the letter “love ya” (58). While Caroline is having nightmares about pop quizzes, Matt reflects, he’s in a hospital in Iraq with a traumatic brain injury.

Francis shows Matt a photo of his young daughter, saying he’s asked his wife to tell everyone who visits to come to the side door. When the Army comes “to give you the bad news” (60), they always use the front door, so this way every time the doorbell rings, his wife won’t “imagine the worst” (60).

Since Dr. Kwong told Matt he might have trouble retaining new information, Matt quizzes himself on facts from the World Series trivia book he’s been reading. But he finds himself unable to focus, his mind going “blank” (61). At his meeting with Meaghan, Matt still has great difficulty recalling words from “everyday life” (61), as Meaghan puts it.

When the sound of the muezzin call to prayer—a regular occurrence in Iraq—interrupts Matt’s session with Meaghan, Matt feels like all other sounds are wiped out by the “long drawn-out strains of the ancient, mournful call” (62) and is unable to hear Meaghan’s voice. He’s never reacted to the sound this way before, and the experience leaves him shaken.

Outside Meaghan’s office, an assistant waits with a wheelchair, which Matt has to ride back to the ward on doctor's orders. The assistant, a boy about Matt’s age, is listening to his iPod and offers one earbud to Matt. Matt remembers sharing a pair of earphones with Caroline on the bus after school, how he would “marvel” at her “impossibly soft” (64)skin, and then how he would picture the two of them together on the bus while he was actually riding a Humvee in Iraq.

Back in bed, amid the quiet of the medical ward, Matt suddenly hears “the staccato pop-pop-pop of an AK-47” (66) and experiences a flashback of the incident that landed him in the hospital. “Back in the alley” (66), Matt sees a little boy darting in and out of a doorway; a single shot resounds, and the boy is “lifted into the air, paddling his arms like a swimmer,” appearing “terrified” (67)as he rises high into the sky until he disappears. When Matt opens his eyes, realizing he’s still in the ward, another patient tells him the “dumb hajis” (67) were shooting to celebrate a soccer victory. Matt, rather than feeling relieved, holds his blanket to his mouth and sobs.

The next morning, Matt is waiting outside Meaghan’s office when she arrives at work. He wants to talk to her about “a memory thing” (69). Matt begins to tell Meaghan about Ali—that he’s an orphan who lives with his sister in a giant drainage pipe, which the Army “brought over to rebuild the place. Except we never did” (70). Ali is a great artist and soccer player, and Matt reveals: “I think I killed him” (71). Matt says he can picture the alley, a dog crossing the street, a “kid ducking in and out of a doorway” (72), and after that, he doesn’t “really know what happened” (72).

Meaghan tells Matt she’ll work with him more that afternoon, and back on the ward, Matt uses the notebook Francis gave him to write down everything he remembers about the incident. He’s confused because Justin didn’t see a dog, “which didn’t make sense” (74)—unless, Matt realizes, he was in the alley alone.

Later, Dr. Kwong reports that Matt’s X-rays came back with no problems. When the doctor asks Matt about his coordination and emotional stability, Matt deliberately downplays his issues. While he still has weakness in his right leg and “f[inds] himself on the verge of tears half the time” (75), he tells the doctor “I’m all good” (75). Kwong responds that Matt should be able to return to his unit in a few days, and in the meantime, he sends Matt to the cafeteria to “bulk [him] up a little” (75). When Matt sees his greasy food, he pictures Ali taking Communion, “his brown, bloated belly and the way he gobbled up the Host” (76), and he pushes his food away.

Returning to the ward, Matt sees an orderly with a body bag on a gurney, but the contents appear misshapen. Matt remembers when Sergeant Benson, his first squad leader, was killed, his leg was blown off at the knee and placed separately in the body bag. Matt’s heard of soldiers “so badly blown up that all that was left of them were body parts” (77), and his stomach turns as he wonders if that’s what he’s seeing now.

Matt spots the young orderly he shared earbuds with before, Pete, and asks if he can “bum a smoke” (78). Matt and the orderly smoke outside, and Matt understands Pete’s jokes—a “good” sign that he’s still understanding “social cues” (78)after his brain injury. Matt remembers how when his squad first arrived in Sadr City, his squad mates Wolf and Justin stole all his stuff and forced him to “buy” it back with cigarettes. Pete and Matt speculate about what you experience right before you die, and Pete describes a patient who didn’t remember an explosion that could have killed him—it was “too much for the brain to handle” (81), Pete supposes. Matt mentions that he’s starting to remember his own near-death incident, and Pete warns him that “sometimes it’s better not to remember” (81).

Back on the ward, Matt feels “a pang” of “homesickness” (81) for his squad, and he worries if they’re okay without him—he’s the only one who can fix the jammed MK-19 on their Humvee. Meanwhile, Francis is begging the nurse for painkillers, and Matt accidentally startles him. Francis responds with a “wild swing” (82) and tells Matt that if he’s not afraid of him, he “should be” (82)—Francis killed his squad leader. Francis explains: his squad was hit by an RPG in the dark, and their radios were “fucked up” (83) so they couldn’t communicate. Francis saw “a muzzle flash” (83) in the darkness and fired, then discovered he’d killed his squad leader. Francis rails against the injustice of the military justice system, saying “twenty years for killing a haji and a demotion for getting my buddy killed!” (84), and Matt immediately calculates how old he’ll be in 20 years—because he’s beginning to fear he’s killed a civilian himself.