Medal Winning
by Suzanne Cope
"Now you know what it's like to see someone die."
My stepbrother, Matt, has just shown me a seven-second video clip in which a
close-up of a man I assume to be an Iraqi insurgent crouches down with the kind
of gun that requires bracing against his shoulder. The small screen is filled
with long robes that drape around him like a serpent on the sand-colored street
as he aims at an unseen target off-camera. An invisible bullet hits him and knocks
him to the ground. He struggles to right himself, still clutching his weapon,
and is flicked once more by an unseen hand. This time he remains on the dusty
ground with his arms outstretched, his robes draped around him, completely still.
"Wow," is all I can manage. I struggle to find words that would not
sound critical without betraying my own feelings of shock and horror. I would
never want him to feel guilty for living the life he had for the last ten
months.
Matt, an Army Sergeant, has just returned from his first tour in Iraq. He is
miraculously sitting with me on our parents' Berber rug in the house we used
to share, showing me pictures and videos on his laptop. A series of photos depicting
a herd of camels is followed by one of a spectacular orange sunset rising over
gracefully drifting sand dunes, taken, Matt tells me, a few minutes after a storm.
Next he shows me a picture of an abandoned, charred truck. It is luck and timing
that he is with me at this moment and not escorting a convoy from Baghdad to
Tikrit. He was sent home two months early, an unexpected benefit to re-enlisting
with his unit.
I marvel at the paths our lives have taken. I will be returning to mine in another
day, where I will resume pouring perfect pints of pale ale for students at Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government and other customers. Patrons in expensive leather
oxfords will drunkenly ask me about my graduate studies, the small town in which
I grew up.
Matt has a few more days at home before he must go back to Fort Bragg to pack
for his next assignment in Alaska. He has received the Bronze Star and other
citations during his tour in Iraq for acts of bravery he neglects to recount
in detail, and he has since been promoted to leader of his own squadron. He and
his soldiers will be training to be dropped in enemy territory with a Humvee
to complete unspecified missions. He will likely be sent back to Iraq.
"This is a video some guys in another squad made about their time in Iraq,” he
says.
He double-clicks another file on his desktop. Rock music accompanies a beautiful
sunrise over the desert. The sound of machine-gun fire fades in as the camera
pans down to the street where insurgents duck in and out of doorways with their
guns. The cameraman pulls back to show his immediate surroundings, atop a sand-colored
building with his squadron, in the advantage position where they had likely been
hiding since nightfall.
The music changes to the theme song from the movie Top Gun and the same soldiers
are shown ransacking a house, in search of some other, unseen enemy. The camera
follows a soldier who startles at his image looking back at him from a full-length
mirror. He smashes chest-level with the butt of his rifle, his reflection falling
to the ground in so many shards of ruined glass.
"Did he break the mirror so that no one could see him coming around the
corner?" I think I’ve hit upon a tenet they had been taught in
training. It seems like the kind of thing that the hero would do in an action
movie.
"No." Matt says. "You just destroy things because, well, you can." He
speaks not with remorse or pride or detachment. Actually, I cannot tell what
he is thinking, unlike our high school years, not that long before, when I could
read his mischievous smile or the first flare of his quick temper in a glance.
Instead his thoughts are swallowed up like one of the sandstorms he says will
come out of nowhere and surround him and his platoon. I don’t think
either of us knows in what direction we are heading.
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