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It’s hard to imagine how a doughboy from World War I might react to an air-conditioned trailer, dinner catered by KBR or a suicide car bomb. Technology, culture and information have changed warfare right along with other aspects of life. Despite the differences between the experiences of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and those in previous conflicts, one thing remains constant: the young — on all sides — endure a disproportionate share of the fighting and suffering. Patricia McCormick’s novel “Purple Heart” promises to tell that story by plunging her readers into the struggle of one 18-year-old American soldier as he wobbles under the weight of his experience.
The novel follows Matt Duffy as he recovers from a brain injury that affected his memory and left him unconscious in an Army hospital in Baghdad. McCormick speeds his recovery, and the reader’s introduction to Iraq, with high-fact, low-dosage packets of information delivered by doctors, other soldiers and fragmented flashbacks. Justin, one of his squadmates, explains that he dragged his friend out of an alleyway after Duffy was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade. Duffy himself can recall only one thing: Ali, a young Iraqi boy, rising into the “crayon-blue sky” after being shot at the end of the alley.
A soldier’s recovery of memory is fertile ground for the big themes of the Iraq war, and McCormick plants plenty of them in the book. Children are both fighters and victims. Conflicting interests distort the many faces of truth and morality. Diverse forces propel people into war, but their initial justifications rarely withstand the experience. To her credit, she is evenhanded and mostly avoids political messages, though she loses something in the balancing act. As Duffy sets out to search for the truth, each new fact compels him to rearrange his account of what happened, but the mission diverts attention from his struggle to reconcile his experiences.
Once back on patrol, Duffy gets a chance to examine the alley where he was wounded. Bullet holes in the wall seem to shift responsibility for Ali’s death to his friend Justin; on the other hand, the boy himself might be implicated. Duffy reels with an epiphany: Maybe Ali had aided the enemy, but he would have been valuable to them only because he was friends with the Americans, and the Americans had befriended him only because they wanted to help. Duffy’s good intentions had put both Ali and his own squad in danger. This staccato self-reflection, delivered at the end of a tidily twisted plot, captures a reality of the Iraq war, but seems to leave the young soldier unaffected.
Floating Duffy along on top of the hefty universals also leaves less room for the kind of small treasures that are the book’s real strength. I was deployed in Iraq in 2003 and 2005, and thought McCormick was at her best on the daily frustrations of the environment. I wanted to read aloud to my mother the perfect renderings of banal phone conversations between the combat zone and the home front, made awkward by delays in the line and the weight of everything that’s inexpressible, to explain why I rarely called. When Duffy’s girlfriend writes to him about an upcoming quiz, “OMG! I hate bio,” he can’t quite muster the sincerity to write back about the alleyway, his injury and the dead boy.
In these moments, when Duffy is left staring across the gulf between his experience and the life at home he volunteered to protect, we catch a glimpse of how war doesn’t so much mature young people as it detaches them from their youth.
Ryan Southerland, a student at StanfordLawSchool, is a former platoon leader in the United States Army.
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The main idea of this Blog is spread the habit of reading. Literature is part of our lives. When enter in the Literature world, we read better and we improve our though and imagination. I want, with this, divide a little of my dreams. Is to give opportunity to people read and know about works produced by ancient and contemporary writers, and mainly, myself to be insert in this wonderful world of the Letters.
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