Purple Heart (8 page)

“…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.

M
ATT 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.

M
ATT’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.

I
T WAS MIDDAY WHEN
M
ATT SHOWED UP OUTSIDE
M
EAGHAN
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?”

Meaghan Finnerty folded her arms across her chest. “I think it means exactly that.”

He just looked at her.

“You
can’t
be sure,” she said. “You’ve said so yourself.
That things don’t add up. That you can only remember bits and pieces. Fuchs is right. You can’t be sure.”

Matt didn’t hesitate. “I need to be sure,” he said.

Meaghan sighed. “Matt, terrible things happen out there,” she said, gesturing to the invisible world beyond the Green Zone. “I can’t tell you how many men come into this office and can’t remember what happened to them. And then there are the ones who can’t forget. Either way, it’s torture.”

“Please.” He clasped his hands together, almost as if he were praying. “Help me.”

She stood up and turned away from him. A few minutes passed. Then she turned around. “I’ll try, Matt,” she said. “But it’s possible that your own mind might be your biggest enemy.”

He cocked his head sideways.

“Your mind may be protecting you,” she said. “Blocking out things it can’t process.”

Matt thought about this for a minute. “Then why do I keep seeing…things?”

“Why don’t you tell me about these things?”

Matt looked at the clock. His five minutes were up five minutes ago. “Right now?”

“Right now.”

He swallowed. “You won’t tell anyone?”

She shook her head.

He looked away, scanned the walls of her tiny office, then fixed his gaze on a blank spot on the wall. “I was in this alley,” he said slowly. “There was an abandoned car. And a candy wrapper snagged on a piece of razor wire. And shots,” he said. “They ricocheted off the pavement. Then they got closer and I remember plaster falling down on my helmet. And this dog walking right through the whole thing.”

He paused.

“All of a sudden, Ali’s there. He’s up at the other end of the alley where the shots are coming from. It’s like one of those dreams where a person shows up somewhere they can’t possibly be and yet in the dream it makes sense?”

She nodded.

“And then,” he said, “there’s a flash and it’s like the light lifts him up. It’s real slow and kind of beautiful in a way, the way he floats up into the light. And he looks happy at first. And then…then he starts waving his arms….”

He couldn’t finish. The sounds of the city drifted in—the rumble of traffic, kids shouting as they chased one another around the yard. Matt swallowed and went on.

“But I don’t remember shooting my weapon.” Matt covered his face with his hands. “I can remember
other parts,” he said. “What I can’t remember is, you know…”

“Matt,” she said gently.

He uncovered his eyes.

Meaghan leaned forward in her chair. “When something is too painful to process,” she said gently, “your mind has a way of burying it.”

Neither of them could say what “it” was. Shooting a child. Aiming, pulling the trigger, and killing a little boy.

A
T CHURCH BACK HOME,
M
ATT USED TO LOVE SLIPPING INSIDE
the confessional booth—a cool, dark box where he knelt in silence waiting for the faint shushing sound that meant the priest had opened the screen between them.

“Please bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he would whisper.

He loved the honesty of those few words. As far as he was concerned, that
was
confession. Everything that followed—a recitation of sins, a penance of five Hail Marys or six Our Fathers—was predictable. But that first phrase—please bless me, Father, for I have sinned—was so humbling and so total, Matt always felt a kind of
absolution as soon as he said it.

Confessions in Iraq were different, an impromptu talk with a battlefield chaplain or, more often, a late-night conversation with a buddy. But those conversations, where the inky black Iraqi night was lit by the embers of a pair of cigarettes, were somehow more sacred than anything he’d ever experienced in a church back home.

Secrets were confessed, not in the formal words prescribed by the Catholic Church but in combat slang:
I dropped a guy today. I lit up a house.
Or just
I did some sick shit today.

Here at the hospital, there was no confessional: just a pair of metal folding chairs face-to-face in a hospital supply closet that had been commandeered for an hour. Matt sat down in the chair opposite Father Brennan and waited for a signal to begin. Meanwhile, the priest sat, his Oakland A’s hat pulled low on his brow, his eyes intentionally fixed on the floor, as if to re-create the kind of anonymity of a real confessional.

“Please bless me, Father,” Matt said, finally. “For I have sinned.”

He didn’t feel anything. No relief. Nothing. He didn’t know what to say next. Back home, he would confess to swearing, to taking a soda from the vending machine at work, to being disrespectful to his mom. How did you confess to killing someone?

Matt wiped his hands on the front of his pants. He took a deep breath. He looked over his shoulder to make sure the closet door was closed, that no one was outside listening in.

He started all over again. “Please bless me, Father…” He couldn’t finish.

He closed his eyes and tried to summon up every detail—to punish himself, to get it all out. He imagined the alley, blinding in the midday sun. But the rest—the dog, the sparks hitting the pavement, the overturned car—wouldn’t come.

Meanwhile, his brain was besieged by random, maddening thoughts: Fuchs saying “You just can’t be sure.” Caroline asking if he wanted On the Go packets of Crystal Light. The year the World Series was postponed because of an earthquake. Was it 1998? Or 1989?

He opened his eyes. Father Brennan was still there, still bent forward, his eyes fixed on the floor.

Matt sighed. “I’m sorry, Father,” he said. “I can’t. I just can’t…” His voice trailed off.

He stood up and paced around the tiny space. He took in the neatly folded piles of sheets and towels, the suture kits in their sterile bags, the bandages and bedpans. Then he looked at the pale, vulnerable skin at the base of Father Brennan’s neck where his tan stopped, as he sat—resolutely, respectfully—staring at the floor.

Finally, the priest looked up. He took off his baseball hat and began twisting it between his hands. There was a sadness in his bright blue eyes but no judgment, no impatience.

“I’ll be here,” he said. “When you’re ready.”

M
ATT WALKED OUT OF THE SUPPLY ROOM AND TOOK A FEW
steps. He stopped, considered turning around to try again, then continued on. He still had twenty minutes before his appointment with Lieutenant Brody, so he stepped outside into the courtyard and sat on the low wall where he and Pete sometimes met for a smoke.

He got out his notebook and turned to the page where he’d written a new version of what had happened, a version that included what he now knew.

1. taxi runs the 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 get separated
   
6. I start taking fire in the alley
   
7. I return fire
   
8. Justin picks off the shooter from an upstairs window
   
9. RPG hits wall, Justin drags me to safety
   

He didn’t write about what happened when he returned fire. He couldn’t.

He thought about what Meaghan had said about his brain protecting him from the truth. She’d also said something when he was leaving about how all soldiers struggle with their conscience when they do things in war that they’d never do otherwise.

All soldiers? Matt wondered. He and Wolf had had long conversations, often late into the night when neither of them could sleep, about what they’d seen and done in Iraq. But some of the other guys in the squad seemed untroubled by it all.

Figueroa, who had a wife and a kid he sang some Spanish lullaby to when he called home, had no qualms about it. “When you point your gun at someone and pull the trigger,” he said, “shit happens. It’s not a surprise. It’s not pretty, but it’s not something I necessarily want to talk about.”

Justin just said he tried not to think about it too much. “When the bullets are whizzing by and it’s all
fucking chaos and noise, you don’t think about morals or politics or anything. You
stop
thinking. And just fight. Because, just for those few seconds, it’s simple: If you don’t kill the other guy, he’s going to kill you.”

But Wolf was the one who surprised Matt the most. “I hate it, you know. I hate this shit. I hate how we came over here to help these people and instead we’re killing them. But you know what else? I also sorta love it, man. When you’re out there with your M16 and your night-vision goggles, you feel like you’re ten feet tall and bulletproof. You are Superman. It’s this primal thing. I love it. And I hate it.”

Matt missed them, even Charlene, but he especially missed the guys. Their stupid “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” jokes. Their insults. He even missed the way the guys sat around burping and scratching their balls and just being gross. What he missed most, though, was the bravado, the cocky swagger they all adopted when they were shooting the breeze together. It might have been an act half the time, especially when they were heading into a dicey situation, but it was contagious.

And it was something he could use. Especially since he was due at Brody’s office in five minutes.