Purple Heart

by Patricia McCormick

  Matt sighed. A bunch of second-graders had sent his squad a mother lode of Little Debbies. Little Debbie must have gotten herself on some kind of list for what to send to soldiers.

  Pete reached into the pillowcase again. “A slightly used copy of Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover’s Soul: Stories of Feline Affection, Mystery and Charm.”

  “Where do you get this stuff?” Matt said.

  Pete shrugged his skinny shoulders. “Around.”

  “You’re not, like, taking stuff from…you know, where they keep supplies….”

  Pete held up his hand. “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’” he said. He started to walk away. “Oh,” he called out over his shoulder, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I also threw in a copy of that Us Weekly you asked for. The one with Zac Efron on the cover.”

  THERE WERE A COUPLE OF MPS WAITING AT THE NURSES’ station when Matt got back from lunch. He tried to pick up his pace as he went past, but his right leg was still weak and dragging a bit, which meant he sort of half hopped as he went by.

  “Is this the soldier?” one of them said. He was a skinny guy with a skinny mustache.

  The blond nurse nodded, and Matt’s mouth went dry.

  “Private Duffy?” the other one said. “We’d like you to come with us.” He was a beefy guy, Hispanic-looking, and he held his arms rigidly at his sides.

  Matt swallowed. “Where?” was all he could say.

  “With us,” the skinny one said. Then he extended his arm out toward Matt at an angle that made it look like he was offering to walk him down a wedding aisle. Matt didn’t know if he was supposed to take the guy’s arm or what, so he shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Fuchs’s office,” the beefy one said. “They have some questions for you.”

  Matt glanced over toward Francis’s bed. It was empty. Maybe Francis was in trouble for his black-market business. Maybe that was what this was about.

  A sickening sensation in his gut told him otherwise. He felt for his notebook in his back pocket. “Okay,” he said.

  THE MPS ESCORTED MATT THROUGH THE HOSPITAL, DOWN to a lobby of some kind where there was a giant mural of Saddam that someone had tried to cover with an American flag, and then held the door open and led him outside. A ferocious gust of hot air blew in, and Matt had to struggle to push his way through it.

  As they stepped out into the sudden sunlight, his eyes went weak and achy; for a minute he was unable to see where he was going.

  The skinny one kept his hand on Matt’s shoulder as they crossed some kind of courtyard that seemed to be full of Americans in khaki pants walking purposefully this way and that. The two MPs mainly ignored him, grousing about their mosquito bites and debating whether cigar smoke kept the bugs away at night.

  After a little while, the skinny one let go of his shoulder and Matt found himself trailing along behind them. He couldn’t be the one in trouble, he told himself, or they’d keep him firmly between them, constantly in their sights the way soldiers on patrol did when they took an Iraqi into custody.

  A moment later, they stepped inside what seemed like a large, ornate building, and Matt found himself barely able to see in the sudden dark. After his eyes adjusted, he saw that the halls were made of marble and the walls adorned with Arabic words in fancy gold lettering.

  “Used to be Saddam’s palace,” one of them, the beefy one, said to Matt.

  Another good sign. They wouldn’t be so friendly if he was in trouble.

  A moment later, he heard the percussive thump of hip-hop coming from a boom box. They rounded a corner and he found himself inside a vast room of some kind, where soldiers were painting a mural of the Twin Towers on the wall. One soldier was holding a bag of Doritos as he worked.

  The room, which was practically as big as a football field, had marble floors, marble walls, a balcony around the top, and a gigantic crystal chandelier. In the middle of the floor were rows of metal-frame canvas cots, each one topped with mosquito netting; around the edge of the room were a dozen Porta Potties. The whole place looked like some kind of weird, palatial summer camp. As Matt and the MPs walked by, the soldier holding the bag of Doritos looked over at Matt and gave him a wry, better-you-than-me look.

  Finally they crossed through a giant rotunda with a turquoise dome and came to a hallway with a long row of heavy doors. The skinny one pointed to an ornate wrought-iron bench and told Matt to sit down and wait until someone came for him. Then they left.

  MATT COULD HEAR THE RUMBLE OF MALE VOICES FROM THE other side of the door but couldn’t make out what anyone was saying. His knee was bouncing up and down and his heart was pounding the way it used to when it was his turn in Public Speaking class.

  A few minutes later, the door behind him opened and out walked a pair of Iraqi men, each of them wearing a long, flowing tunic, the Iraqi clothing Justin called a “mandress.” They were grumbling and talking to each other and hardly noticed Matt.

  “Hello,” he said in Arabic. “Al Salaam a’alaykum.” It was a reflex, a habit from months of street patrols. He’d nearly flunked Spanish sophomore year, but Matt had picked up a good bit of Arabic, a skill that had helped defuse more than one tense situation. Even Charlene had had to grudgingly ask for his help when she wanted to buy a scarf at the bazaar.

  The elder of the men—the one wearing a Western jacket over his mandress—stopped, bowed, and greeted Matt in return.

  Then the men left. He could still make out the sound of voices from behind the door, but the tenor was different, lighter, more conversational. Then, plain as day, came the sound of a television. The door opened and a first lieutenant, a balding, thickset man, stepped out. Lieutenant Brody, according to his name tag.

  “Private Duffy?” he said.

  Matt jumped to his feet and saluted.

  “At ease, soldier,” he said. “Please come in.”

  Matt noticed two things about the room the minute he stepped inside: a TV showing a college basketball game and an officer, a lieutenant colonel with a regulation crew cut, seated behind a large wooden desk. It was the officer who’d given Matt his Purple Heart, Lieutenant Colonel Fuchs. Matt stood at attention and saluted.

  “Private Duffy,” Fuchs said, getting up from behind his desk and walking across a thick Persian carpet. “Last time I saw you, son, you didn’t look so hot.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said, still holding his salute. “No, sir, I mean. I didn’t.” He didn’t look so hot right now, either, Matt thought, standing there in his shorts and flip-flops.

  “Well, son, it is my great pleasure to meet you, to see you looking like a soldier again and to thank you for your service.” He extended his hand.

  No one had said anything in basic training about what to do when an officer wants to shake your hand. But Matt lowered his salute and offered his hand in return, slowly becoming aware that it was part of the unspoken code of the army. Normally a guy this high-ranking would treat him like he was invisible. But if you were injured, you were a hero. Matt knew it was supposed to make him feel good, but it just made him more nervous.

  “You’re welcome, sir,” Matt said.

  The room was quiet except for the hushed tone of the sportscaster narrating the game, and Matt found he had to make a real effort not to look at the basketball game on the screen behind Lieutenant Colonel Fuchs, where a point guard with cornrows was walking the ball up the court.

  “Son,” Fuchs said, turning to face the screen, “I want you to watch this boy. Number twelve. He has one hell of a jump shot.”

  The three of them stood there—in Saddam Hussein’s old palace, watching a kid in the United States take a jump shot. This, Matt thought, was a war story no one would believe.

  “Blast!” Fuchs said, when the ball bounced off the rim. Then he walked over to the TV and switched the channel to FOX News. “Well, everyone’s allowed to fuck up once,” he said, gesturing to an upholstered chair in front of the desk. “Take a load off, Private.”

 
Matt eased himself into a stiff upholstered chair.

  “So, Private Duffy,” the balding one, Brody, was talking now. “They’ve got you under observation. TBI, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said, focusing his gaze on a spot in the middle distance: SOP when dealing with a senior officer.

  “Son,” Fuchs said, “you can relax. You’re among friends here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said, still rigid in his seat.

  “At ease, Private,” said Fuchs. “And that’s an order.”

  “Okay.” Matt shifted a bit in an effort to look relaxed, but he ended up in an awkward rearrangement of his limbs that made him feel even more uncomfortable. “Sir.”

  Brody cleared his throat. “Private, as we said, we’re happy to see you making a full recovery and expect you’ll be as pleased as we will be to get you back into uniform.”

  Matt looked down at his flip-flops. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I…uh…miss my buddies, sir.”

  “Good,” he said. “We just have one matter to deal with first.” He picked up a file folder from the edge of the desk. “A bit of unpleasantness with the locals,” he said. “You understand?”

  Matt swallowed.

  “Good,” he said again, as if Matt had said yes. “They’ve made some claims about a recent incident.”

  Matt’s head was pounding and he could feel his lunch churning in his gut.

  “They claim that one of the casualties, a child, was killed intentionally.” He opened the folder. “Ayyad Mahmud Aladdin Kimadi is the name.”

  Matt went numb. It was like the time his squad’s convoy was hit by an IED. He’d seen a bright flash up ahead, then a cloud of dust. He actually felt the Humvee go up in the air and come back down. The force of the blast blew his door into the bushes, but Matt just unbuckled his seat belt, walked away, and started firing.

  “Ali.” Matt’s voice cracked as he said the boy’s name.

  The two senior officers studied him intently.

  When Ali had first told him his full, mile-long name, Matt replied, in slow, halting Arabic, “I’m going to call you Ali.” And Ali had thumped his skinny chest with his fist and replied with his favorite bit of English slang: “Word.”

  Fuchs coughed. “You knew the boy?” he said.

  Matt struggled to regain his composure. He cleared his throat, coughed, cleared his throat again. “Yes, sir.”

  The other officer, Brody, went on as if Matt hadn’t said a thing. “We had the body brought up from the morgue here when they called the incident to our attention,” he said. “No one had come to claim it.”

  “His sister,” Matt said. “They live in…They’re homeless.”

  “Well, of course, we’ve given the…tribal elders the standard death gratuity.”

  Matt had heard about the death gratuity; it was about the equivalent of 2,500 U.S. dollars.

  Brody went on. “And our condolences, of course.”

  He kept saying “of course,” as if this were routine procedure. And somehow Matt found himself nodding as if it were routine to him, too. As if they were acting out lines from a TV show. The actual TV, the one behind Lieutenant Colonel Fuchs, was showing a clip of a soldier in Iraq patrolling a street in Baghdad. It was surreal, Matt thought, and he forced himself to look away, to pay attention to what Brody was saying.

  “…an investigation, then we’ll write up a report.” He seemed to have finished speaking.

  Matt wiped his palms on his shorts. “I, uh…” He swallowed. “I…”

  It would be a relief, somehow, to admit it. To explain about the flashbacks and the memory lapses. To confess the whole thing.

  “Now, son,” Fuchs said, getting up from his desk and turning off the TV behind him. “You don’t have to say anything in here. You don’t want to say something you might rethink later.”

  Rethink? What did that mean?

  “There’s a lot of chaos out there, a lot of confusion about who exactly the enemy is,” Fuchs said, sitting back down behind his desk. “They hide behind civilians and they use civilians. There are kids out there throwing grenades, old men burying IEDs.” He shook his head and went on.

  “Hell,” he said. “There was a woman with a baby signaling to some insurgents up on the roof with a grenade launcher. So the squad leader gives the order to take her out.” He sighed. “We couldn’t even tell if it was a baby or a sack of potatoes she was holding, because another woman came out and grabbed it when the first one got hit.”

  Matt studied the officer’s face. It was deeply tanned and wrinkled, and despite his neatly trimmed hair, he had bushy gray Santa Claus eyebrows. He was probably someone’s father, Matt thought.

  “You just can’t be sure,” Fuchs said slowly, with gravity. “Do you know what I’m saying, son?”

  Matt looked directly into his eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  It was the briefest and most routine of replies, the kind of thing a soldier says a hundred times a day. But Matt hoped that Fuchs could hear in it what he was trying to convey: that he wasn’t sure. About anything. He wasn’t even sure he understood what Fuchs was saying. Was he telling him to lie?

  “Good,” said Brody. “Glad to hear it.”

  Fuchs tapped the file on the corner of his desk. “You take some time to think this over,” he said. “When you’re feeling a little stronger, Lieutenant Brody will want to ask you some questions.” He tipped his chin in Brody’s direction. Then he glanced at his watch, picked up an already neat sheaf of papers sitting on his desk, and stacked them even more neatly into shape.

  The signal to leave. Matt stood up and saluted. Fuchs nodded. He didn’t offer a handshake this time. And the next thing Matt knew, he was back outside in the hallway.

  MATT WALKED MECHANICALLY IN THE DIRECTION FROM which he’d come. Then stopped at the juncture of two hallways. His head was killing him and he had no idea which way to go. There were signs in Arabic but no English subtitles and his sense of direction utterly failed him. He looked for landmarks—a potted plant, a clock, something he’d passed on the way to Fuchs’s office—but he saw nothing except miles of thickly veined marble stretching in either direction.

  He turned right, walked for a while, then stopped, turned around and went back the way he’d come. When he got to the intersection of the hallway that Fuchs’s office was on, he stopped again, then decided to continue down that hallway in the opposite direction.

  Finally, he heard the faint thump of the boom box and knew he was getting close to the soldiers painting the World Trade Center mural. He rounded a corner and saw the soldier who’d given him the better-you-than-me look. It seemed to Matt like he’d been wandering the halls for hours, but there was the same guy, eating the same bag of Doritos.

  The guy nudged one of his buddies and said something to the group. The others dropped their tools and stood at attention, their hands held in a rigid salute, their gaze fixed on something outside the window. As Matt drew closer he saw what they were looking at: a black body bag being lifted into a transport.

  Matt stopped, brought his hand to his brow, and watched. A sickening sensation came over him. The half-full body bag he’d seen earlier: It was Ali’s.

  MATT’S HEAD WAS ACHING AND HIS LEG WAS DRAGGING WORSE than ever as he trudged down the hall. When he walked into the ward, he saw Francis stuffing his belongings into a duffel bag. “What are you doing?” Matt asked.

  “They’re sending me back out,” Francis said, jamming a pair of socks into the bag.

  “I don’t get it,” Matt said.

  Francis glanced around the room. “They say they’ve got some shit on me,” he said. “Controlled substances, you know what I mean? They say I’m a wack job. That no one’s going to believe me because of, you know…” He picked up an orange prescription bottle and gave it a shake. “I think I know who ratted on me: that prick with the yo-yo.”

  Matt looked over at Clarence. He was sound asleep.

  And then Francis was gone, without a
word of goodbye, Miss Piggy peeking out from the top of his duffel.

  IT WAS MIDDAY WHEN MATT SHOWED UP OUTSIDE MEAGHAN Finnerty’s office. She was just packing up to go to lunch.

  “Can we…” he started. “I really need to…can you talk for a couple minutes?”

  “Five minutes,” she said. “I’ve got five minutes. Then I have to be somewhere.”

  He closed the door, then sat across from her, watching the second hand on the clock inch forward. Before he knew it, he’d already wasted one of his five minutes.

  “What we say in here, it’s confidential, right?” he said finally.

  She nodded.

  He waited another thirty seconds. “I could be in big trouble,” he said at last. Then he hurried on to the next sentence. “But I also think maybe I might not be in trouble at all.”

  She furrowed her brow.

  “Ali,” he said. “They know about it.”

  “They?”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Fuchs and Lieutenant Brody.” He waited a moment to see if her expression gave anything away. If she nodded, it would mean she’d been talking with Fuchs and Brody about him. If she looked surprised, it would mean she’d kept their conversations private like she’d said she would. But she didn’t do either. She just waited for him to go on. Matt got up and started pacing.

  “Some of the locals came to see them,” he said. “They told them Ali was dead.”

  He stopped. He’d just said it out loud. It was real now. He felt his stomach seize up again.

  “You okay?” Meaghan Finnerty said.

  Matt nodded.

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning. Tell me what happened today.”

  He sat down and explained about being called into Fuchs’s office. “Fuchs said they were going to question me, that there’d be an investigation,” Matt said. “But then he told me to ‘rethink’ things. He said, ‘You just can’t be sure.’ What does that mean?”