The Purple Heart in the School Gym
About the medal
“They took me to a hospital at a place called Long Binh,” I said. “I was there for about five weeks. And one morning an officer came through the ward with a box, and he stopped at my bed, and he pinned this on my pillow.”
I touched the medal on my coat.
“This is called a Purple Heart,” I said. “There is a picture of George Washington on it, because he started the first one. I want to tell you something about it, because some of you may have heard things.”
I did not look up at the bleachers. I made sure not to. I looked at the children in the front rows, the kindergarteners with their paper flags in their laps.
“The Army does not give the Purple Heart to everybody,” I said. “They give it to you for one reason only. You get it if you were wounded by the enemy. That’s the only way. You have to bleed for it.”
“A lot of men got one in Vietnam, that’s true. Because a lot of men got hurt. That doesn’t make it a small thing. It makes it a sad thing. Every one of those medals is a day somebody’s mother got a telegram.”
“And I want to tell you the truest thing I know about it,” I said. “I would give this back today, this minute, if it would bring Jimmy Fisk home to Toledo. I would give it back and never think twice.”
I took a breath. The gym was so quiet I could hear a little girl in the second row sniffing, and somebody’s chair squeaking way up in the bleachers.
“I have a grandson,” I said, “and for ten years the only war story I ever told him was a funny one about a mess sergeant and a can of peaches. That story is true too. Every word of it.”
“Sometimes a grandpa only tells you the funny stories,” I said. “It’s not because the other stories aren’t true. It’s because the other ones are heavy, and he’s been carrying them a long time, and he doesn’t want to hand them to you.”
“But I think maybe I waited too long. So if you have a grandpa or a grandma who served, you can ask them. Ask them nicely. They might not tell you. But they might. Somebody asked me, and here I am.”
I looked down at Ethan. “Thank you for asking me, buddy,” I said, right into the microphone, so the whole school heard it. Then I stepped back from it.