Later that afternoon, Barbara appears and hands Jack a small plastic handled mirror that she pulls out from the pocket of her scrubs. Out of respect, she lowers her eyes as Jack brings the mirror up to his face.
He lifts his finger and traces all the new valleys and bumps of skin on what was once his cheek and forehead. The left side of his face is enlarged and red, the topography of his pain and trauma read like braille. The hairline is irregular with the front portion of his black curls now completely gone. There is still a considerable amount of swelling where his left eyelid once was, and he looks like one of the villains heused to read about in comic books as a little kid, like Two-Face fromBatman, or worse, an ogre from a Grimms’ fairy tale.
“Fucking hell,” he utters. “I don’t even look human.”
On the afternoon he is to be discharged, Barbara Starr tells him something special is planned for his departure.
“I don’t want anything,” he tells her. The very thought of some sort of farewell gesture makes him feel uncomfortable.
“You deservesomething,” she says gently. “Please, Jack. It’s all been arranged.”
An hour later, after he’s been examined one last time by his doctor, five marines in their dress blue uniforms enter his room. Each one of them with their hat tucked beneath their arm.
“Lance Corporal Jack Grady,” the honor guard announces. “On behalf of a grateful nation, we are here to present you with this Purple Heart.…” He begins to read from a citation letter describing Jack’s injury and his service to his country.
While serving as a radio man, Lance Corporal Grady was engaging the enemy in Quang Tri Province and was severely wounded on November 27, 1969.… The entire nation is indebted for his service.…
The Gunnery Sergeant opens up a small brown box to reveal a purple ribbon with the gilding metal heart attached, the image of George Washington in its center.
With no family members to witness the Purple Heart presentation ceremony, three of his nurses and two of his doctors instead crowd the back of Jack’s small hospital room. But it is Nurse Starr who is crying as the honor guard salutes her patient and pins the medal on his chest.
When he moves into a small apartment not far from the hospital, Jack puts the medal in a cardboard box on the top of his closet shelf, along with the Vietnam Campaign ribbon, the Marine Corps Combat Actionribbon, and his Presidential Unit Citation. For him, they mean nothing. A ribbon can’t bring any of his friends back. A medal can’t resurrect a life or heal his wounds.
He hears Walter Cronkite on the television reporting about the strengthening tides of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. These men were nothing like the hippie who’d thrown a drink on him at the airport. Rather, they were guys like him who’d been in country and knew firsthand the insanity of it all—the lack of any clear directive or cogent reason to be there. With so much anger inside him, Jack wished he could join them. He’d lost everything. His friends. His future. And half his face. But how could he go out and raise a fist into the air, join their protesting? The cameramen would have a field day zooming in on his scars. Jack knew they’d make him the poster child of the goddamn war.
For the next ten months, he lives on his disability payments. He buries the thoughts of Becky along with the memories of the friends he left back on the battlefield.
He curses the doctors and nurses who neglected to ever inform him how painful scar tissue and the excision surgeries to remove it would be. He rages when he remembers one of the grunts asking an officer just before they shipped off, “What are we fighting for?” and the major revealing the hollowness of it all: “We’ve lost too many good men to turn back now.”
The anger boils.
There will be nights when he has consumed too much whiskey that he picks up the phone to call Becky. But he counts the months she’s been studying for her teacher’s degree and realizes she would have graduated the month before.
But one afternoon, after he has numbed himself with two glasses of Jack Daniels, he calls her number, only to find it has been disconnected.
He then calls information and receives three different possible numbers for a Rebecca Dougherty in western Pennsylvania. Finally, he hears her voice on the other side, and its very sweetness causes his heart to constrict painfully in his chest.
“Becky?” The tenor of his voice sounds as fragile as glass.
Silence engulfs the line.
“It’s me … Jack.”
Again, there is only silence, and Jack’s entire body grows rigid in the stinging quiet.
Becky’s stomach is in the back of her throat. “I thought you were …” Her voice cracks, but after a few seconds, she has regained a stoic sense of composure. “Jack, I thought you were dead. I tried everywhere to get more information, but no one would tell me anything.”
He has concocted an excuse, practiced in his mind over the course of several nights, one where he can test the waters before committing himself to the pain of her seeing him with his disfigurement.
“I’m at a hospital in Texas, I have a friend with me whose face is so badly damaged. Jeez, it’s just the worst thing to see.” He sucks in his breath and closes his eyes.
“He’s being discharged in a few days, and he’s got no family, Becky. That’s why I went missing. I had to stay with him.” He adjusts the receiver to his ear. “My buddy doesn’t have a place to go, and I was wondering … I know it’s been a long time since I saw you, and it was really shitty I stopped writing to you. But do you think we could come over, and the two of us could hang at your place a while?” He takes a hard swallow. “You gotta know how much I missed you.…”
A few seconds of silence swim between them. She is so overwhelmed. She has waited for him and wondered what had happened for nearly fourteen months and spent countless nights lying in her bed crying for someone she didn’t know was dead or alive. She more than missed him … she had grieved for him.
“Can I just see you alone first, Jack? Let me see you and then we can talk about your friend. I haven’t seen you or that beautiful face of yours in so long.…”
He doesn’t hear any of her words except “that beautiful face.”
