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A review by jdintr
Purple Heart by Patricia McCormick
3.0
I read this story at the same time I listened to Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds, and it suffered in comparison.
What's at the center of this novel isn't a battle, per se, but the murder of a young, Iraqi boy, an image the McCormick returns to again and again throughout the novel. As details of the murder slowly filter back into the concussed mind of private Matt Duffy, the broader picture of this war becomes fleshed out for the reader.
Matt is the last person to really give up on the dead boy. The commanders in the Green Zone have a falsified version of the attack that they expect Matt to rubber-stamp. Matt's colleague, Justin--the only other witness of the murder--refuses to offer the slightest shred of evidence. Matt's sergeant seems to be on constant look-out for excuses to look the other way instead of punishing insubordination in his unit.
The closest anyone in this book comes to making a value judgement about the murdered boy is in an aborted letter that Matt writers to his high-school-aged girlfriend back home:
This book is a fascinating introduction to the 21st-century American warrior for young readers. I wouldn't recommend it as a source on the Iraq War because the scenes of war are so very limited (urban patrols, a suicide bomb attack). While the scenes of war are more detailed in The Yellow Birds, both books share a disinterest in the reasons for the war and the overall scope of the characters' respective missions.
Of course, these books share a hyper-focus on the individual soldier and an ignorance about the war in general with the American public and the nation's leaders who launched the war and waged it so tragically. THAT book has yet to be written. I only pray that it can be before a future president starts rattling sabers for the next "pre-emptive war."
What's at the center of this novel isn't a battle, per se, but the murder of a young, Iraqi boy, an image the McCormick returns to again and again throughout the novel. As details of the murder slowly filter back into the concussed mind of private Matt Duffy, the broader picture of this war becomes fleshed out for the reader.
Matt is the last person to really give up on the dead boy. The commanders in the Green Zone have a falsified version of the attack that they expect Matt to rubber-stamp. Matt's colleague, Justin--the only other witness of the murder--refuses to offer the slightest shred of evidence. Matt's sergeant seems to be on constant look-out for excuses to look the other way instead of punishing insubordination in his unit.
The closest anyone in this book comes to making a value judgement about the murdered boy is in an aborted letter that Matt writers to his high-school-aged girlfriend back home:
This is a strange place. You think there are rules and there's right and wrong and you think officers are all assholes who only want to make your life miserable. And then you find out that everybody has a different idea of what's right and wrong. And that a lot of people act like they want to know what's going on but that they really don't--because then they might have to do something about it. Like I said, it's strange.
This book is a fascinating introduction to the 21st-century American warrior for young readers. I wouldn't recommend it as a source on the Iraq War because the scenes of war are so very limited (urban patrols, a suicide bomb attack). While the scenes of war are more detailed in The Yellow Birds, both books share a disinterest in the reasons for the war and the overall scope of the characters' respective missions.
Of course, these books share a hyper-focus on the individual soldier and an ignorance about the war in general with the American public and the nation's leaders who launched the war and waged it so tragically. THAT book has yet to be written. I only pray that it can be before a future president starts rattling sabers for the next "pre-emptive war."