Purple Heart

The next time Matt wakes, he talks to an Army chaplain, Father Brennan, who tells him his injury probably isn’t too serious—if it was, the Army would fly him out to Germany. When Father Brennan says a prayer, Matt, who is Catholic, finds himself tearing up, and the chaplain quotes a mantra from Oakland A’s player Barry Zito: “Be still and know that I am in you and I do the work” (8). Father Brennan says that in Iraq, you can’t help but “wonder about God […] [b]ut there’s always baseball” (9).

Later, a nurse tells Matt he’s in the Green Zone, a walled compound inside Baghdad that “fascinated” (11) Matt and his squad—a former home for Saddam Hussein, now occupied by the Central Provisional Authority. The nurse adds that this hospital was reserved for Saddam’s friends, and Matt notices the “curvy, mysterious alphabet of Arabic” everywhere (11).

The doctor who treated Matt earlier, now identified as Dr. Kwong, returns to check on Matt. He explains that Matt’s traumatic brain injury is “like a concussion, only worse” (13) and will probably get better on its own. However, it can result in memory issues and cause Matt to become “agitated” and “emotional” (14). Matt realizes that he can’t recall simple words like “headache,” and when the doctor tells him someone will be by to interview him—a typical practice “under these kinds of circumstances” (15)—Matt finds himself struggling to understand what the doctor means.

Matt’s squad mate Justin comes to visit, and when he kids about getting Matt’s girlfriend’s number, Matt has to put “bits of information together like beads on a string [trying] to understand if Justin was making a joke” (16). Then Justin tucks in Matt’s blanket for him, “the same thing Matt’s mom used to do when he was little” (17), and to his embarrassment, Matt tears up a bit.

Matt reveals that he doesn’t remember what happened and how he ended up in the hospital, so Justin explains they were manning a checkpoint when a taxi burst through the barricade. Justin and Matt chased the taxi in a Humvee—“like Grand Theft Auto, dude” (19),as Justin puts it—until the three men in the taxi disappeared into a house at the end of an alley. Separated from the rest of their squad, Justin and Matt pursued the three men on foot and began taking fire. They took cover in a house, and Justin shot a “haji bastard” (21) who was aiming at them. When they headed back to the Humvee, an RPG—rocket-propelled grenade—sent Matt flying, and Justin had to carry him out.

Matt, who is starting to remember some details, insists there was a dog with a broken tail, and when Justin says he has “no idea what the fuck [he's] talking about” (21), Matt becomes so upset he punches the mattress. A nurse comes over and empties a syringe into his IV tube, and Matt drifts back into sleep as Justin avoids meeting his eyes.

Later, a female officer arrives and asks Matt to call his mom—his next of kin must be notified before the Army can release a statement. Matt’s sister Lizzy answers, and Matt takes a moment to ask if Lizzy’s boyfriend is “treating [her] good” (24). Then Matt talks to his mom, downplaying his injury to “a bump on the head” and insisting he’s “fine” (25). Matt’s dad “split a long time ago” (25), and Matt joined the Army at least partially to get college money for Lizzy. Matt’s mom tells him she sent the colored markers he asked for, “for the little Iraqi boy” (26), and after a few minutes of conversation he ends the call.

Matt watches some Iraqi children playing outside the hospital window and thinks back to when his squad first arrived in Iraq and were asked to “establish contacts within the community” (28). Matt and Justin had organized the local kids into two soccer teams, the Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Shock and Awe. One of the kids on Matt’s team, 10-year-old Ali, stole Matt’s sunglasses the day they met. Later on the same day, Matt watched Ali—who is so malnourished he has a “bloated” belly and “legs like a stork” (29)—pretend to take Communion with the solders so that he could eat the Communion wafer. After the Mass, Matt realized that Ali had surreptitiously given him his sunglasses back, setting them on the ground behind him.

Now, watching the kids outside the hospital, Matt sees Ali in his mind, stepping from a doorway into bright light—and “the image ma[kes] his mouth go dry” (31).

Matt attempts walking and makes it “as far as two cots away” (32), where he talks to a soldier named Francis with a “bad case of CFU […] completely fucked up” (33)—who asks him for Percocet or any kind of painkiller. Francis mentions IEDs—improvised explosive devices—and Matt recalls when their first squad leader, Sergeant Benson, was killed by an IED. Justin had broken protocol by going off on his own, trying to find the person responsible for the IED, and returned with an old Iraqi man who probably wasn’t the culprit. When Justin prepared to kick the “crying” (35), pitiful old man, Matt tackled Justin and stopped him, warning him that eventhough Justin loved Benson, this wasn’t “the time do something stupid” (36). That night, Matt awoke to find Justin covering him with a blanket and lying beside him, and since that incident “they had become inseparable” (36).

Two MPs enter the ward—military police, the authorities capable of “mak[ing] your life a living hell” (38), as Justin puts it. They’ve come to talk to Francis. Later that night, Matt is awoken by the sound of “a man, several beds away, weeping softly” (38).