Purple Heart

by Patricia McCormick

  Matt thought back to the attack that had killed Sergeant Benson, their first squad leader. His leg had been blown off at the knee, and so it had to be placed in the body bag separately. But still, they’d taken pains to lay his body out in its proper configuration. He’d heard of guys being so badly blown up that all that was left of them were body parts, and he felt his stomach roil at the thought that perhaps that was what was inside the bag as it drew near.

  Still, he kept his head erect, his back stiff, his mouth set in a straight line as the gurney got closer. Then, just as it passed by, he flinched.

  MATT SPOTTED THE PIMPLY-FACED KID RESTOCKING A SUPPLY closet as he came down the hall toward his ward. His name was Pete. Matt had written it in his notebook. It was the only entry on the page “Things I Know.”

  “Dude,” Matt said, “can I bum a smoke off you?”

  “Only if I can come with you,” Pete said. “If anyone asks, you say you were feeling weak and you needed me, you know, to get a wheelchair or a bedpan or something.”

  “A bedpan?” Matt said.

  Pete shrugged. “You want me to say you needed an enema?”

  Matt got the joke. Meaghan Finnerty had said he might have trouble with “social cues,” but this was the second time he’d understood when someone was trying to be funny. A good sign.

  The two of them stepped outside, into an inferno. The sudden heat—as startling as a grenade blast—nearly knocked him back. It was the first time Matt had been outside in…he quickly calculated…three days or so, and already he’d forgotten the way Iraq could cook a man alive.

  The two of them sat on a stone wall while Pete pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his scrubs. He lit one for himself, then handed the pack to Matt.

  Matt lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, then coughed up a plume of smoke.

  “Been a while,” he said to Pete when he’d caught his breath. The truth was that he had never been a very good smoker; he could never quite hit the right balance between inhaling too much or too little. But smoking was one of those things he picked up, or at least tried to pick up, when the squad had any downtime.

  He’d even bought a carton of Marlboros when they left Kuwait for Baghdad, but he’d lost most of them the first night they got to Sadr City. While Matt was outside waiting in line for the latrine, Wolf and Justin took all his stuff—his bedroll, his night-vision goggles, his DVD player, his stash of beef jerky—and divvied it up among the other guys. When he got back from the latrine, all that was left was his cot.

  Matt had been forced to “buy” all his gear back, paying with the cigarettes he’d hidden in his duffel. After that, whenever he wanted to smoke, he had to bum his own cigarettes off the guys. Wolf, who was only a couple years older than Matt, always asked him to show ID.

  Pete exhaled, then said out of nowhere, “You think your whole life flashes before your eyes when you die, like they say?”

  Matt had thought about this before. He couldn’t fathom how eighteen years of Christmas mornings and riding bikes and playing war with Lizzy could flash before your eyes. Was it a sudden flash, he wondered, like a bomb blast—where your whole life explodes in your mind’s eye? Or was it like a home movie—with jerky images going by in fast-forward one last time?

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What if the last thing you see is something awful, like, you know…” His voice trailed off. “Or what if it’s something stupid? Like a chicken feather?”

  Matt just looked at him. “A chicken feather?”

  “This one guy, this Iraqi guy, was riding his bike home from the market with a chicken tied to his handlebar,” Pete said. “Got blown up by an IED. He had feathers all over him when they brought him in. He didn’t remember a thing about the explosion. All he cared about was his chicken.”

  Matt could picture the whole scene. The flying debris. The fine gray ash that settles over everything afterward. He could even imagine one single chicken feather floating back down to earth, cartoon-style, and the man lying in the rubble, dazed.

  “Why do you think that happens?” Matt asked.

  “Why do chickens get killed in wars?” Pete said. “You’re not, like, a vegetarian or something, are you?”

  This time, the joke was lost on Matt. He was too deep in thought. “The explosion,” Matt said. “Why couldn’t he remember it?”

  Pete shrugged. “Too much for the brain to handle, I guess,” he said.

  “I keep remembering things…” Matt said.

  Pete ground his cigarette out under the toe of his high-tops. “Dude,” he said, “sometimes it’s better not to remember.”

  “SMALL TOWN” WAS PLAYING ON FREEDOM RADIO WHEN Matt walked onto the ward. He took in the faintly stale smell of men’s bodies and felt a pang of something that he could only describe as homesickness. Homesickness for his squad. For the guys. Maybe it had to do with seeing the body bag. He didn’t just miss the guys. He was worried about how they were doing without him. He was the only guy who really knew how to fix the MK-19 on their Humvee when it got jammed.

  Matt wandered up to the nurses’ station, where Francis was talking to Nurse McCrae. “I’ll trade you a carton of Marlboro Lights, a twenty-dollar phone card, and I’ll throw in a Grey’s Anatomy. Third season. Please,” he said, taking hold of her wrist. “Just a couple tabs. So I can sleep.”

  Nurse McCrae freed her hand from his grasp, then tied and untied a piece of yarn around her pigtail. “Sergeant,” she said, sighing, “I do not need to get in trouble over this. And neither do you.”

  Then she walked away, leaving Francis at the desk, cursing under his breath. Matt put a hand on his shoulder. Francis spun around and took a wild swing, nearly hitting Matt in the jaw.

  “Jesus Christ!” Francis said. “Why’d you sneak up on me like that?”

  Matt took a few steps back, his hands in the air as if he were surrendering. “Whoa, dude, easy.”

  But Francis leaned in even closer, so close that Matt could smell the coffee on his breath.

  “You afraid of me?” he said.

  Matt shrugged. There was no right answer to that question.

  “Well, you should be.” Francis’s eyes were locked on Matt’s. “Because I killed my squad leader.”

  Matt felt his stomach drop.

  “You wanted to know why I’m here,” Francis said. “Now you know. You wanna know the rest?”

  Matt nodded almost imperceptibly. He didn’t want to know. But he knew Francis had to tell him.

  “One night, our piece of shit Humvee breaks down on a dinner run and so our convoy stops, like sitting ducks,” he said. “Out of nowhere we get hit by an RPG. Half of us run right, half go left. But it’s dark, like twilight, and we can’t find each other because our radios are fucked up.”

  Francis looked off in the middle distance and Matt knew he was seeing the whole thing all over again.

  “All you can see is shapes, silhouettes. And I turn a corner and see a muzzle flash. Thirty yards away. And I just laser in on it and fire. I see an arm pop up, waving side to side, like the guy is saying hello. Then he goes down. After the smoke clears, I go over and take a look. And it’s my squad leader.”

  Matt felt his knees actually go weak.

  Francis went on. “But now I hear from a buddy of mine back in Kuwait that the radio fuckup was because we didn’t have the right fucking encryption codes. Some douchebag changed them and forgot to tell us.

  “I’m here in the loony bin,” Francis said. “And that douchebag is still out there.”

  Matt blinked. He looked down the row of beds. No one, he realized, had any serious injuries, except maybe Clarence, but he was a nut job in a Rambo kind of way. He thought back to his first night in the hospital and pictured the kid with the missing hand. The next day, the kid was gone. Or was he the one who was gone? To some kind of special ward?

  “You know what happened to the douche who sent us out there with the wrong codes? He got demoted.” Francis p
aused for a second. “You know what the penalty is for killing a civilian here?”

  Matt swallowed.

  “Twenty years,” Francis said. “Twenty years for killing a haji and a demotion for getting my buddy killed!” He reached under his pillow and pulled out his notebook. He waved it in the air. “Well, I’ve got it all right here.”

  But Matt wasn’t listening any longer. Twenty years. He’d be thirty-eight by then.

  “YOU SAID LAST TIME THAT YOU WERE IN AN ALLEY….” Meaghan Finnerty said as she closed her door.

  She was acting like they’d just pick up where they’d left off. Matt thought maybe they’d ease into the conversation, talk about the weather or something first.

  He nodded.

  “You were under fire….” She was waiting for him to continue.

  But Matt didn’t like how fast this was going. He needed to explain. About how he could remember some parts and not others.

  “Can a person do something and not remember it?” he asked abruptly.

  Meaghan Finnerty leaned back in her chair. “I suppose…” she said. “There are some soldiers who experience posttraumatic amnesia. It’s common with head injuries.”

  Matt unconsciously lifted his hand to his head, to the tender spot at the base of his skull.

  She went on. “There are two kinds of amnesia,” she said. “Anterograde is when you can’t remember what happened after the incident. Retrograde is when you can’t remember what happened before.”

  Matt took his notebook out of his back pocket. He asked her to repeat both definitions a few times so he could write them down. Antero = can’t remember what happened after, he wrote. Retro = before.

  “I think I mainly have the first one,” he said, checking his notebook to be sure. “Where you can’t remember what happened before.”

  She opened the file on her lap.

  Matt gripped the arm of his chair. “Are you going to write down everything I say? I thought you said this”—he gestured around the tiny office—“that this was confidential.”

  She closed the file. “This is the army,” she said. “My job is to make an evaluation about your fitness to return to duty.”

  Matt felt sick. All he could think of was what Francis had said about the jail term for killing a civilian. An image of his mother came into his head, his mother pressing a Kleenex to her lips and trying not to cry. His mother and his little sister, Lizzy, in a courtroom, huddled together on a bench.

  “Matt,” Meaghan Finnerty said.

  It registered, dimly, that she had never called him by name before. He was always “Private Duffy” or “soldier.” He just looked at her. She really was pretty, in a pale, delicate kind of way; she probably only weighed a hundred pounds. And she was going to be the one who got him court-martialed.

  “Matt,” she said again, as if she were scolding him.

  He worked very hard now to pay attention, to stop thinking about how he would tell his mom.

  “I hear a lot of things in this office,” she said carefully. “And I forget a lot of what I hear. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He nodded. But he didn’t understand. And then, all at once, he did.

  This is the army, she had said. This was classic army behavior: to ignore certain breaches of the code. To say, “Sir, no, sir, I did not see Private Duffy giving his ration to that little boy,” as Justin had done when Matt gave his freeze-dried package of mac and cheese to Ali once. “I didn’t see a thing, sir.”

  “My job is to do evaluations,” Meaghan Finnerty said. “No more. No less. I can try to help you remember what you want to remember.” She paused. “But I don’t have to put it in my report.”

  Matt was too stunned to even nod.

  “But make no mistake, Private Duffy,” she said. “I will not send a soldier back to duty if I don’t judge him to be ready. I will not send a man into combat if I believe that he is, in any way, a danger to himself, to his fellow soldiers, or to the Iraqi people.”

  He nodded this time, reflexively.

  “Do we understand each other?” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  They both sat there a while, listening to the hum of hospital life outside her tiny office. From the distance came the sound of an approaching helicopter. The sound became a roar as the medevac landed on the roof. Eventually the engine wound down and the blades stopped churning. Finally Meaghan Finnerty leaned forward.

  “So…” she began again. “You were in an alley….”

  He nodded.

  “You were under fire.” She paused.

  “Uh-huh,” Matt said.

  “And you mentioned a dog….”

  “That’s one of the things that doesn’t add up,” Matt said. “Justin, my buddy, the guy who saved me, saved my life, he didn’t see the dog.”

  She furrowed her brow. “This was during the same incident? Is it possible you’re confusing two separate events?”

  “No. I’m sure,” he said. He stopped for a minute. “I remember sparks, too. Bullets kicking up sparks on the street. Right in front of the dog. He was sniffing through the trash. He didn’t even move.”

  She looked a little dubious.

  “It happens,” he said. “The animals here get used to it. Our cat, Itchy. If there’s shelling, he sleeps right through it.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t doubt that. I just…” She tapped her pen against the file. “Can you think of any reason why Justin wouldn’t have seen what you saw?”

  Matt nodded. Then he shook his head. “But he wouldn’t do that,” Matt said, more to himself than to Meaghan Finnerty. He blinked, then looked up at her. “He wouldn’t have left me in that alley by myself.”

  “But that’s how you remember it?” she said. “That you were there alone.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, sometimes,” she said, “the memories that don’t make sense are the ones you have to pay attention to.”

  Matt tried to take this in. There were so many things that didn’t make sense.

  “The little boy…” she said. “You mentioned a little boy last time. He was at the other end of the alley.”

  Matt nodded.

  “Was it the little boy you told me about? The one who was like your mascot?”

  Matt closed his eyes and saw it all again. The flash of light, the strange expression on Ali’s face, his arms thrashing.

  Suddenly, the office door shook, as startling as a burst of machine-gun fire.

  Matt jumped to his feet.

  A male voice from the other side called out Meaghan’s name. “I’ll be right with you,” she said. Then to Matt, “My next appointment.”

  He nodded, his heart still pounding.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “A lot of guys jump when they hear a door slam or a car backfire,” she said. “Normal sounds can trigger the body to go into its fight-or-flight mode. Once you’ve been in combat, you’re wired to be on the lookout for threats.”

  Matt knew what she meant. Itchy might be able to ignore the sounds of combat, but at the slightest sound the guys in his squad would wake up out of a sound sleep, jump out of bed, and pull their gear on. Wolf once put his gas mask on in the middle of a dream. And one time Figueroa hit the ground in the middle of the street when the wind knocked down a wooden sign.

  “Just keep track of everything in your notebook,” Meaghan said. “Random memories. Noises, sights that trigger you.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

  “But Private,” she said as he turned to leave, “I’d keep that notebook on the DL.”

  “SO, PRIVATE, ARE YOU ENJOYING YOUR STAY HERE?” DR. Kwong asked, glancing up from Matt’s chart. “The nurses tell me you’re getting stronger every day.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said. “Sir? This thing I have—TBI. How do I know when I’m better?”

  Kwong hung the clipboard at the foot of the bed and pulled a tiny
penlight from his pocket. “There’s no clear scientific way, if that’s what you mean.” He came around to the head of the bed and shined the light in Matt’s eye. “It’s more the absence of indicators—you understand?”

  Matt nodded. But he wasn’t sure he really did grasp what the doctor was saying.

  “You still having language-retrieval problems?” Kwong said.

  “Some.”

  “Mood swings?” Kwong’s voice came from over Matt’s shoulder as he shined his light in Matt’s ears.

  Matt blinked. “Sort of.”

  “How about your cognitive functioning? Are you able to absorb new information?” Kwong had put on his stethoscope and was listening to Matt’s heart. If Matt answered, what would it sound like through the stethoscope? Would his voice rumble in Kwong’s ears? Or would it sound like a fly buzzing just out of range?

  “How about focus?” Kwong asked, his stethoscope now on Matt’s back. “Are you having trouble concentrating?”

  Matt tried to think. He couldn’t even remember what Kwong’s last question was.

  “Not really,” he said.

  The doctor took off his stethoscope and stood in front of Matt. “Now let me see you take a few steps.”

  Matt slid off the bed and walked over to the window, exaggerating his posture and working hard to take even, measured steps so Kwong wouldn’t notice the way his right leg dragged ever so slightly. When he turned around to come back, Kwong was making notes.

  “One day, you’ll notice that the fuzziness is gone,” he said. “Then you’ll know you’re better.”

  PETE SHOWED UP AT THE NURSES’ STATION A LITTLE WHILE later, a pillowcase slung over his shoulder. He looked like a skinny, underage Santa in scrubs. He scanned the ward, spotted Matt, and came over.

  “A care package,” he said, setting the pillowcase on Matt’s bed. He reached in and pulled out a box of Little Debbies. “Oatmeal Cream Pie,” he said. “Not the best, but better than the Zebra Crunch.”