Purple Heart (6 page)

“S
OMETHING BAD HAPPENED,” HE SAID.
I
N THE STILLNESS OF
the early morning, the tiny room felt deserted, hushed, like a church before Mass. “Something really bad.”

She nodded.

“I keep seeing it in my head. Or parts of it, anyhow.” He wiped his hands on his pant legs, not looking up.

“That’s not unusual,” she said. “A lot of soldiers have flashbacks, disturbing memories, nightmares….”

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said, his voice cracking. “I keep seeing him.”

“Who?”

“This street kid,” Matt said, toying with his plastic hospital wristband.

She waited.

“His parents were killed and he lives with his sister. Inside a giant drainage pipe. One of those things we brought over to rebuild the place. Except we never did.”

He paused.

“He’s a really good artist. And he runs circles around us on the soccer field. He can score a goal from twenty yards out.” Matt glanced up at her for a moment. “He’s like Itchy, this cat we adopted. Like our mascot.”

Meaghan Finnerty furrowed her brow. “I don’t understand.”

Matt hung his head. “Me neither.”

The room was absolutely still. Matt could hear the hands on the wall clock advancing, second by second.

He took a deep breath, then spoke so quietly, he wasn’t sure he’d said it out loud. “I think I killed him.”

M
EAGHAN
F
INNERTY DIDN’T BLINK.
S
HE JUST LEANED
forward in her chair, and a slender beam of light snuck out from underneath the shade behind her.

Matt looked away, at the exit sign above her door, its Arabic and English letters glowing red in the weak morning light.

“He’s…I…he’s one of those kids who’s always hanging around, asking for candy. He’s so skinny….” Matt’s voice trailed off.

He stopped and gazed out the window for a moment. It was oddly quiet, still, as if the whole city were asleep. He took in the sight of Meaghan Finnerty studying him.

“I was in this alley…” he said finally. “I was crouched behind a car, taking fire. And there was this dog. He trots across the street. In the middle of a fucking firefight.” He
paused, then shook his head. “Up at the other end of the alley, I see this kid ducking in and out of a doorway. And…”

The
ping
of the elevator bell drifted in from the hallway. Then came the clatter of metal wheels and the aroma of bacon—an orderly bringing the breakfast cart—and then the deep-timbred laughter of a pair of male voices right outside the door. The loudspeaker crackled and a voice came on reading the day’s announcements, including a lecture at 1800 hours on the importance of proper hydration. The hospital was coming, suddenly and loudly, to life. And whatever feeling of intimacy there’d been in the hushed, predawn hallway vanished.

“After that…” Matt sighed. “I don’t really know what happened.”

M
ATT HAD ONLY GONE A FEW DOZEN YARDS FROM
M
EAGHAN
Finnerty’s office when he had to stop and sit down. He saw a chair outside another office and sunk heavily into it.

He was exhausted, having been up half the night, replaying the scene from the alley in his head, but he was also wound up, jumpy, the way Francis was after he’d
taken a couple capsules of Ripped Fuel.

Meaghan Finnerty had said she’d work on helping Matt remember more about the incident—she called it that, too, just like Kwong had—at their afternoon appointment.

But Matt couldn’t wait. He pulled the notebook out of his pocket and looked at the puppies on the front cover, tumbling over one another. He flipped past the page of baseball trivia and turned to a fresh page. “The Incident,” he labeled it. He numbered each entry and wrote down what happened just the way Justin had described it.

1. taxi runs the southern checkpoint
   
2. Justin and I pursue the vehicle
   
3. we turn down a side road, past the bootleg store
   
4. we get out of the Humvee to give chase down an alley
   
5. we take fire
   
6. we go into a house
   
7. Justin picks off the shooter from an upstairs window
   
8. we leave the building, RPG hits wall
   

Matt looked at his careful, precise handwriting. In high school his writing was so sloppy, he could hardly read
it himself sometimes. But after his drill sergeant had yelled at him, saying unreadable coordinates on a battlefield could cost lives—Matt had taught himself to print according to SOP. Standard operating procedure.

SOP. It was also standard operating procedure to keep the squad together, to always have the other guys in sight if possible. If not in sight, at least in touch by radio. But McNally and Wolf and the others weren’t there during the chase. Justin said they’d gotten separated.

Matt closed his eyes. And saw the dog again. It was weird the way it trotted across the alley, right in the middle of the firefight. Matt couldn’t get it out of his mind. But Justin hadn’t seen the dog. Which didn’t make sense.

Unless Matt had been alone in the alley.

T
HE CAFETERIA HAD A GREASY, FAST-FOOD SMELL, A HUMID,
tropical climate all its own. Matt walked in slowly, edging his way along the wall, watching people swarm by. It was his first attempt to venture into the mess hall since Dr. Kwong had given him permission to leave the ward for meals.

“Your X-rays came back fine. No skull fracture.
No neck or spinal instability,” the doctor had said. “Have any vomiting? Any dizziness? Problems with coordination? Any, uh, emotional agitation or any other, uh, problems?”

Matt’s right leg was still weak and out of sync with his left, and he still found himself on the verge of tears half the time. “Nope,” he said. “I’m all good.”

“Well, that’s what they like to hear,” he’d said.

“Who?” Matt said. “Who likes to hear?”

“CPA.”

There were so many initials in the army. IED, MRE, RPG. It took him a minute to remember what CPA was. Central Provisional Authority.

“They like us to get you fellas patched up and back out there as soon as possible,” Kwong had said. “A young, healthy kid like you ought to be back with your unit in a couple of days.”

There was a slight hint of sarcasm in Kwong’s voice, and Matt wondered if Kwong was under pressure to get soldiers back in the field more quickly than he would like. But all Matt really heard was the part about rejoining his unit soon.

“Meanwhile,” Kwong had said, “let’s see if we can’t bulk you up a little.”

The sour aroma of overcooked coffee drifted by, and a pair of officers in neatly pressed pants appeared,
carrying trays of steaming food. There were a handful of men in uniform, but almost everyone in the room was dressed in scrubs. Matt felt foolish in his T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, almost as naked as if he were in a hospital gown. But he took a deep breath and stepped away from the wall, aware that his right leg was dragging, and he felt himself be pulled into the tide of people heading toward the chow line.

He shuffled through the line mechanically and watched as men in white knit Muslim skullcaps doled out eggs and bacon with stoic, expressionless faces. Then he found himself suddenly back out among the chairs and tables, holding a heaping tray of food. Matt felt his knees begin to give out and he sat down abruptly at the nearest table.

The guy next to him, a burly man with a faux-hawk, poured ketchup onto his grits and talked loudly in Spanish to another soldier across the table. The only words Matt could make out were “Paris Hilton.”

He looked down at the grease around his eggs congealing on his plate and pushed his hash browns around with a fork. He pictured Ali going up to take Communion, his brown, bloated belly and the way he gobbled up the Host. He shoved his tray away, then got up and allowed himself to be pulled into the tide of people bringing their plates to the dish room.

O
N HIS WAY BACK TO THE WARD HE SAW AN ORDERLY COMING
toward him, pushing a gurney. There was no patient on the cart but, rather, something oddly familiar, something large and black, plastic and weirdly lumpy. A body bag.

Matt stopped, stood at attention, his eyes locked onto an imaginary point on the wall as he approached.

He meant to hold his gaze steady, at a respectful distance from the body bag itself, but something about it caught his eye. It was, it seemed, strangely deflated. Instead of the unmistakable outline of a corpse, which was usually visible through the plastic, only one end of the bag seemed full.

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.

M
ATT 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.”

“S
MALL
T
OWN” WAS PLAYING ON
F
REEDOM
R
ADIO 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 paused 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.

“Y
OU 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.”