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Purple Heart

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It is quite a shock to be in a war zone one moment and to wake up in a hospital bed the next, barely able to move.

Matt Duffy, a private in the U.S. Army who is serving in the Iraq War, opens his eyes to a doctor poking his feet with a sharp object, testing his nervous system. He is having flashbacks from the attack, a strange sequence of events that seems to culminate in a child being shot and an explosion right next to him. Matt doesn't remember exactly what happened, just a series of bizarre details from the alley: a stray dog sifting through garbage, a candy wrapper caught on a coil of razor wire, and the resonation of a muezzin call for the mosque. Then a man speaks to him "on behalf of the President of the United States and the citizens of a grateful nation," and he is awarded the Purple Heart for wounds sustained in combat. The man goes on to tell Matt, "Your mission now, son, is to get better." But such an order is easier said than done.

Matt has to relearn to walk and think. He has constant headaches and is medicated for them. One of his legs drags, a permanent injury. The Army doctor assesses him regularly to determine if his other injuries will be permanent as well. His buddy, Justin, comes to visit him in the hospital, and he tells Matt, "You're fine. You've got a black eye, but to tell you the truth," Justin jokes, "it's actually an improvement." Matt discovers that Justin, while under heavy fire, carried him out of the attack zone --- he saved Matt's life. And Justin tells him what he remembers of the attack:

"We got separated...So we end up in an alley...and the bastards jump out of their car and disappear inside a house at the far end of the street. So we jump out of the Humvee and take off on foot. As soon as we do, we start taking fire...So we duck inside this house across the street...We find an upstairs window. We rip down the curtains and we see, across the street, at the other end, this one haji...leaning out the window to get a head on our location...And so I light him up. Bam! He goes down like a ton of bricks." But Matt unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately) can't remember any of the events that Justin recounts to him.

The effects of Matt's traumatic brain injury eventually begin to clear, but he still only remembers bits and pieces of the events surrounding the attack. He sees an Army psychiatrist who tells him that, as a coping mechanism, the mind often blocks out what it can't handle. After a few days in the hospital, Matt is escorted to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Fuchs, the same officer who awarded him the Purple Heart. Fuchs tells him that a child Matt knows was killed in the attack and that he will have to report on what happened in a criminal inquiry, an attempt to determine if Matt or members of his squad broke the Rules of Engagement. Under these rules, it is stated that civilian casualties come with a prison sentence if the situation could have been avoided. Fuchs warns Matt to weigh his words carefully and dismisses him, only to call him back shortly after to file his official report.

PURPLE HEART is one of the best books I have read in years. I ended up reading it straight through in only a few hours. It's an incredible --- and yes, very sad --- story about the realities of war and its effects on real people. One of the most refreshing things about the book is that it doesn't hash out old politics or the news, and it doesn't seem to be written with either a strongly liberal or conservative mindset --- it's really just a story about people. To write the book, Patricia McCormick interviewed soldiers from across the United States, and the effects of her efforts are clear because the story feels like a realistic representation of a war zone. It's not surprising that McCormick is a former reporter or that she has been a National Book Award Finalist; she's quite a gifted writer who gets right to the heart of people.

--- Reviewed by Melanie Smith

I picked this up from my shelves to read recently mainly because I'd been reading a LOT of more light-hearted novels and so felt I needed something more serious to kind of balance it all out. I've also read a tiny bit of McCormick before ("Cut" and her story in "Up All Night") and was excited to read this new book of hers. This is a great book and is written so well. It's told in third person but mainly focuses on Matt and his story is so compelling. There's a bit of a mystery to it as Matt is trying to put the pieces back together of just what exactly happened to give him the head injury. The first half of the book details his recovery and the second half deals with him getting back out into the war. I don't think I've read a story about a soldier in a war, especially one still going on, and it hits you emotionally, reading about what these soldiers go through. This book opened my eyes and gave me a new-found appreciation for soldiers going into war. The relationships between everyone are clearly defined and the interactions are written realistically. This is definitely a book that needs to be read by everyone, no matter what age.

Going to war wasn't a first choice for Matt Duffy, but it seemed like the most sensible. He hadn't done that great in school, so college for him didn't really make sense. On the other hand, his little sister was a good student, and joining the Army would provide the necessary funds to send her to college when the time came.

Whatever his reason for joining up, Matt found himself in the middle of Iraq doing the patriotic thing for his country. Even though they warned the young soldiers during basic training, he was surprised by the heat, the noise, and the people. There were slow days with routine missions; welcome days after some of the scary attacks Matt had witnessed. Recently, they'd lost their squad leader, a fellow named Benson.

Amazing that this fact is one of the few things Matt can remember as he wakes up and finds himself in a hospital, answering questions from a man in scrubs standing at the foot of his bed.

When Matt begins to ask questions of his own, he learns that when he and his partner, Justin, followed an insurgent into a dead-end alley, there was an explosion and he suffered a TBI (traumatic brain injury). With the exception of a weakened right leg, everything else seems to be in working order. Doctors are prescribing rest and saying he'll be back with his unit in no time.

With time to think, Matt is trying to remember just exactly what happened. As events of the attack begin to come back to him, he realizes he may have been responsible for something terrible. How can he bring back the memories - and does he really want to remember?

Patricia McCormick shares the life of an American soldier in Iraq. YA novels dealing with the Iraq War are beginning to appear on bookstore shelves, and PURPLE HEART offers readers a chance to experience the war through the eyes of a young soldier trying to make sense of why he is fighting and whose lives he is effecting in this controversial war.

McCormick reveals not only the point-of-view and mindset of American troops, but also a glimpse of the life of the regular Iraqi citizen trying to cope in a country at war. Teens thinking about military service, teens that have family and friends stationed in Iraq, or teens just curious about the distant place they hear about on the news will all benefit from and appreciate the service and story of Matt Duffy.

Reviewed by: Sally Kruger, aka "Readingjunky"

Patricia McCormick went through great lengths to develop a realistic, fictional storyline about modern-day combat in Iraq. She focused on a small group of individual soldiers, emphasizing the perspective of Matt, a soldier wounded during a combat operation that he cannot fully remember. The book recounts several days of his recovery in a military hospital, including his efforts to understand what happened during the incident when he sustained the wounds.

Even for a book that appears to be targeted towards teen readers, the plot is simplistic and predictable. While the details and interactions are generally accurate and make the book very readable, that attention to detail is what held the book together, not the storyline itself.

In the "Acknowledgements," McCormick recognizes a fact checker who I believe did a commendable job. The only oversight I found was on pages 172-173 when Matt referred to his Squad Leader as both "Sarge" and "Sir." Contrary to the uneventful dialog in the book, a professional Army noncommissioned officer (NCO) supervising Matt would not have allowed either reference to slide without an on-the-spot correction.

For what comes off as a mostly balanced work of fiction, two sentences on page 123 are stunningly out of place. "Brody had called Ali an enemy sympathizer. But that's what they [Army officers] always said when a civilian got killed." It is very unlikely that a junior enlisted soldier would have that perspective given the highly publicized (to the troops in Iraq and the global media) investigations into civilian deaths in Iraq. These two lines did more damage to the political balance or neutrality of the book than any other references.

McCormick deserves great credit for interviewing the families of five soldiers who died in Iraq. She also met with Vets Journey Home, the staff of a veterans hospital and the American Friends Service Committee to learn about returning Iraqi vets, traumatic stress and brain injury and Iraqi civilian causalities, respectively. As a veteran, I would question her choice to conduct research with Veterans Against the War without also talking to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Veterans of Foreign Wars, or The American Legion. I think that the book's credibility as non-political and the depth of the content would have been greatly enhanced by these perspectives.

While the book is very readable, if you plan on reading only one work of fiction about combat in Iraq, I would not recommend this one.

I'm disappointed with this young adult novel; the plot is simply too predictable. This book, however, is valuable in another way. It clearly illustrates how warriors with a brain injury are often sent back to the field of battle prematurely. Like a good soldier, our protagonist Matt is anxious to return to his outfit. He under-reports the severity of some of his symptoms. Patricia McCormick makes it clear that Matt is still suffering from considerable impairment when he is judged fit for duty. His fellow soldiers quickly recognize that Matt is not quite "right." In this condition, Matt is a liability to himself and his comrades. It's good to know that the Department of Defense is studying the possibility of bio-markers that will indicate the presence and severity of a brain injury, thereby preventing warriors like Matt from prematurely reentering the battle.

I loved this book totally. It had a very interesting plot and you really got to know the characters and what they were feeling as they are risking their lives in Iraq, how their unit became their family. I would have given this book 5 stars but I gave it 4 because it made me cry in the end. Even with that sad ending, overall it was a great book. Well done Patricia McCormick! =D

"Matt thought about his squad, about Justin, about Wolf and Figueroa, about their new squad leader, Sergeant McNally. The first thought that came to mind wasn't a firefight or a door-to-door search.

"It was the time Wolf's mom sent him a bunch of cans of Silly String. The whole squad ran around the barracks, hiding and ambushing one another, spraying neon green Silly String everywhere, imitating the ack-ack sound of an M16 each time their fired. They were playing war, Matt remembered thinking, while a real one was raging outside.

"As he watched Wolf squirt Silly String down the back of Figueroa's shirt, he remembered thinking, This is what war is about. It wasn't about fighting the enemy. It wasn't about politics or oil or even about terrorists. It was about your buddies; it was about fighting for the guy next to you. And knowing he was fighting for you."

I dream of a world in which ambushes are regularly conducted with Silly String. I applaud my President for willingly shaking hands with foreign leaders who have been critical -- as I have been -- of American foreign policy as practiced by George W. Bush. I want our disagreements with Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and everywhere else to be solved with words, not with our armed eighteen-year-olds and their armed eighteen-year-olds. Not with my own precious, soon-to-graduate eighteen-year-old

I hope we continue to rid our government of those responsible for using billions of our tax dollars to send hundreds of thousands of teenage Americans into harm's way in an unnecessary war in Iraq.

Sorry, but stories about the Iraq War get me really upset. I find it hard to say, Hey, this is a great book! It's about the Iraq War!...even when it is a great book...which this one is.

For me, the reality check in Patricia McCormick's PURPLE HEART is when narrator Private Matt Duffy gets a letter from his girlfriend Caroline, who is complaining about her high school biology teacher and an imminent pop quiz. As they'd say back when I was their age (during a different war), Can you dig it? We're talking about a young soldier who was sitting in Homeroom just last year, waiting to meet up between classes with his sweetie at her locker; a young man who is now sitting in a hospital in the Green Zone with a Traumatic Brain Injury that is sure to color the rest of his life, a life that might not be all that long given that the medical staff are under orders to get him and those like him back to their units for more action ASAP.

"'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."

It was a while back that 60 Minutes broadcast a piece on what the true price of the Iraq War will be. It was a report about the long-term future costs of caring for young people like Matt Duffy who serve their country and come back with missing pieces or scrambled brains.

Sitting around the hospital, gauging his own recuperation by the number of steps from his bed that he can manage, Matt is trying hard to remember what exactly happened during the pursuit that led to his being injured. Somehow, he and Justin got split off from their squad and ended up in a narrow alley filled with rubble, coils of razor wire, an overturned vehicle, and a scavenging dog. It is there that Matt suffered a close encounter with a rocket-propelled grenade. It is also there that the young Iraqi boy Matt knows was shot and killed. Amidst the chaos, for as much as Matt can recall, he might well have been the child's killer.

From what truths might his damaged brain be protecting him?

PURPLE HEART really is a great book that makes me wish for Silly String offensives and for our doing a far better job of teaching "Use Your Words."

From the perspective of a sixteen year-old, this is a very good book - its intense, coherent plot structure drives forward a story that will bring tears to your eyes as well as instill a sense of respect for those overseas.

PROS -
Throughout the book, McCormick does an excellent job at alluding back to earlier moments; almost a Christopher-Nolan-esque feel to it.

CONS -
A small gripe I had with the Purple Heart was that the character development felt rushed and didn't serve those justice to the potential of the plot.

You know, I didn't know what to expect going into this. Is it going to be a glorification of war? Is it going to be starkly anti-war? Is it going to carry some kind of agenda? I really didn't know and the blurb is a little ambiguous. But when I started reading, I just didn't want to stop. But if I didn't limit my reading, my computer screen would have made me blind so I had to. If this were a tangible book, I could have easily read this in the span of two hours. Maybe less. And not just because it was a decent-sized font with wide margins. I wanted to find out what happened to Matt in that alley as much as he did.

This book doesn't glorify war. It isn't far to the left against it either. It's real. It's as real as a war story as I think a war story could get. There's one small anti-Bush mention. If I remember correctly, it was a poster with the joke, "W put the 'duh' in dumb." Something like that. Other than that, it could have very well been the journal of a soldier suffering from PTSD. There's no leaning. There's just doing your job and staying alive.

Matt is compelling from the first second of the story. Absolutely. You're kept sitting right on his shoulders. You know just as much about what's going on as he does and because of that you develop the same mad drive to figure out what happened in that alley that Matt does. You have to know. You need to know. You have to know why everything's different. Why your buddies are so strange. How the hell you ended up in the hospital to begin with. Why your superior officers are giving you memories that you're pretty convinced aren't your own.

This is a very cut and dry plot. Point A to Point B. Matt wakes up in the hospital to Matt finds out what happened in the alley. It really is that simple. But there's so much else going on that while the walk from A to B might be cut and dry, it doesn't mean you're not getting splashed on the way to B.

What this book also opens up is just what is real. What could be real. Are soldiers really returned to their units with TBIs, motor skill issues and physical impairments? Considering how hard up we are for soldiers over there, I wouldn't doubt it. Do commanding officers take liberties with situations in order to avoid real messes? Really don't doubt that.

This book is so reminiscent for me of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. There's no bias to one side or another, just the perception of the soldier. A ringing motif in Purple Heart is the little boy Ali being killed and how Matt remembers him dying. He remembers the boy flying up off his feet, floating, looking almost happy, and then his arms and legs start to flap and he goes down. It rings so close to home of Ted Lavender in Things. A running motif in that book is that Ted died by sunlight. That's how the MC remembers seeing it. The man stepped on a land mine and just before his body exploded all over the foliage, the sun's rays were coming in from behind him and he looked almost peaceful, as if the sunlight was gently putting him to rest. I just couldn't help but make comparisons between the two books.

The real kicker with this book for me was that this 18-year-old boy, BOY, because you are not a man at 18, I don't care how many of them think they are, is having to endure all of this death and destruction and confusion. Even Matt mentions the insanity of it all when he gets a letter from his girlfriend where she talks about such inconsequential things like tests in school while he reads it in a battlefield. The juxtaposition of those two elements bring the severity of Matt's situation into focus. Here's a boy whom we tell isn't old enough to handle the responsibility of drinking all the while dressing him in full body Kevlar and arming him with rocket launchers, hand grenades and assault rifles. What it going on here?

What I got from Purple Heart is that this isn't a book about war. Not about fighting it but about interpreting it. How is it seen through the eyes of a soldier? Through Matt's, thanks to his TBI (traumatic brain injury, in case you weren't sure what that meant), it's damn near indecipherable. And here he is with a gun in his hands.

I cried reading this because it can be true and it probably is. This book could very well be many soldiers' realities in war. If a book in which a soldier, our epitome of a man, collapses into a fetal position and weeps because three of his buddies just got blown up and he just had to sort through their belongings, doesn't make you cry, I don't know what will.

It's about perception and this is the perspective that the news doesn't give us and the soldiers themselves are wont to talk about. Read this book. Read it now. And while you're at it pick up The Things They Carried too. You'll see the similarities that I'm talking about. And I can guarantee you won't want to put either of them down.

I read the book "Purple Heart" by Patricia McCormick. In this book the main character was Matt and he was serving in the army. During a mission he takes cover in a building, takes out a sniper and then RPG hits the building that he is in and his friend Justin pulls him out badly injured. Matt finds out that he has TBI, traumatic brain injury, and he is trying to figure out what had happened before the accident.

What I liked about this book is that it was an army book. It had some action in it but was mostly about Matt finding out what had happened before the RPG had hit the building that he was in. I didn't like a lot of things about this book but since it was an army book I read it was just ok.

What I didn't like about this book was that there wasn't as much action with the army as I thought that there would be. I like army books a lot and thats the only reason why I picked up this book was because I thought there was going to be a lot of action but there wasn't. All this book was really about was that Matt got injured and had some memory problems and he was trying to figure out what had happened after the accident.

I thought that this book was ok but it wasn't really a book that I would like a lot because there wasn't enough action. If you like books that have some action in them but are more about reliving the character's daily events then this book is for you.