It takes the worst ten minutes of your life — minutes of heat and screaming and the particular smell that I will not describe and have never gotten fully out of my memory — and it presses all of it flat into a bronze cross on a ribbon, something to be pinned on and admired at a ceremony.

The people who admire it are seeing courage.

What I see, when I look at it, is the faces of the two men I could not reach.

Malik I reached.

There were others I did not, and the medal does not distinguish between them; it hangs there for all of it at once, the saving and the failing, the coming home and the not.

That is why it lives in a drawer.