Purple Heart

Throughout Purple Heart, McCormick intersperses images that illustrate the way Americans have superimposed—sometimes literally—their own culture over the Iraqi one. Learning the hospital where he’s recuperating once belonged to Saddam, Matt notices the “curvy, mysterious alphabet of Arabic” (10)everywhere, while underneath are English signs written in Magic Marker. When Matt visits an Army office in Saddam’s former palace, he sees a portrait of Saddam covered with an American flag, U.S. soldiers painting a mural of the Twin Towers on the palace wall, and a worker eating a very American bag of Doritos. On the streets, Iraqi children sing rap lyrics and beg for Skittles, and Justin says, “We’re bringing these people America!” (28). Through these repeated reminders of American culture—and through the tragic fate of Ali, a child who likes “skittles and American slang” (190) and dies for a pair of soccer cleats—the author illustrates the cultural disruption, much of it negative, that the American presence in Iraq has caused.

Baseball, an aspect of American culture, reappears several times in Purple Heart. Matt attempts to memorize facts from a book of World Series trivia as he’s working on regaining his memory. The hospital chaplain, Father Brennan, always wears on Oakland A’s baseball cap and tells Matt that in Iraq, you might “wonder about God […] but there’s always baseball” (9). Father Brennan provides a source of comfort and support for Matt, and as his baseball cap is mentioned almost every time he appears, it becomes a part of that comfort—a reminder of a safe, idealized American life.

The Catholic rituals of confession and Communion reappear throughout Purple Heart. Matt remembers, as an altar boy, the “cool, dark” confessional box (110), the sense of “calm” and “comfort” (133) he derived from confession and prayer. Matt longs for a bit of that comfort now, but in the violent landscape of Iraq, he can’t quite grasp onto it. However, Iraq brings its own kind of confession, as late at night, soldiers share secrets “not in the formal words prescribed by the Catholic Church but in combat slang: I dropped a guy today. I lit up a house” (111). These raw, honest confessions become even “more sacred” (111) to Matt than the confessions he remembers from his youth.

The Communion ritual appears in the novel when Matt watches Ali join a line of soldiers taking Communion so that he can eat the wafer. Ali does this not once, but twice in a row. Throughout the novel, Matt occasionally flashes back to the memory of “Ali going up to take Communion, his brown, bloated belly and the way he gobbled up the Host” (76). The image highlights Ali’s physical hunger and desperation—the same qualities that led him to join the insurgents—but it also signifies a kind of redemption for the boy. Ali acted from a place of abject need, and even though he betrayed Matt, Matt ultimately can’t blame Ali for his actions.

Throughout Purple Heart, the author uses sounds to illustrate the unique world of Iraq, and specific noises jar characters into flashbacks or bring up emotions. Both the muezzin call to prayer and the sound of an AK-47 jolt Matt into remembering the incident where he was injured. During his hospital stay, Matt remarks that the quiet—“or rather the ordinariness of the sounds” (65)—seems strange. Matt has become so accustomed to the constant sounds of war, such as gunfire, shouting, and explosions, that noises like “cell phones trilling” and the “hiss of air” as someone opens a soda can seem “extraordinary” (65). When Matt returns to his squad, the first thing he notices is “the chatter of crickets” (134), which wakes him: “[I]n the middle of the night, when all the shelling and shooting had stopped, crickets would pipe up, relaying information back and forth to each other in an eerie, high-pitched frequency all their own” (135). Through small details of sounds like this one, McCormick brings to life the strange and unique world of the Iraqi war zone.