The Things They Cannot Say (9 page)

“He was like a woman,” Sperry said, remembering their talks with a smile. “He would describe in detail the way the hall would be decorated, what kind of colors, even the type of cake. He said he never played army when he was little. He played prince and princess. That's what he dreamed about more than anything.”

Unlike Sperry, Hannon was religious, raised Catholic. He prayed frequently and even brought a rosary from home when he deployed to Iraq. Hannon was also adamant about not wanting to kill anyone, so, Sperry said, he did his best to help his friend avoid pulling the trigger. While their company, India, was primarily deployed outside Fallujah in a former schoolhouse in the nearby village of al-Karma, Sperry and Hannon would frequently be ordered to guard traffic control point #8, or what was commonly known as the Cloverleaf, an elevated loop road that provided a passageway both into and out of Fallujah. Late afternoon on August 14, 2004, Sperry and Hannon were both on guard duty at the Cloverleaf. Initially, Hannon was assigned to the more dangerous post, facing into Fallujah, where insurgents were still in control and often sent suicide car bombers to attack the Marine position. Sperry was assigned to the opposite post, facing the road that led to Baghdad. Sperry switched with Hannon that day, as he sometimes had before, taking the inside post knowing it would be more likely to see action. This would spare Hannon from potentially having to take a life. But on this night the violence came from the outside, a suicide car bomber driving from Baghdad toward Fallujah and the very place where Hannon stood guard.

“There was a huge explosion,” Sperry said, “and the entire forward post was gone. I ran over to it after some of the smoke cleared. I saw Hannon on the side of the road. Both arms and legs were broken. He had shrapnel in his chest and one of his eyeballs was gone.”

But even with all his wounds, Hannon asked after another Marine, wondering if he was hurt. Geoffrey Perez, a buddy of Hannon and Sperry since boot camp, was killed in the blast. Hannon would die on the medevac flight to Baghdad, though Sperry wouldn't learn of his best friend's death until hours later.

While Hannon was choppered out, Sperry stayed on post at the Cloverleaf through the night. When darkness fell the post came under attack again. Insurgents fired 81 mm mortars all around them. Sperry says the rounds were getting so close that dust was shaking from the building where they were taking cover.

“You never really feel safe, but after a while you feel like you just want to stop running,” he recounted with a weary eloquence.

As the shelling continued, and with Perez's death and Hannon's soon-to-be-fatal injuries weighing heavily on him, Sperry began to lose his will to live. He unbuckled the chin strap to his Kevlar helmet and placed it on the ground next to him. Slowly he pulled at the edges of his body armor until the hook-and-loop fasteners gave way. He lay on his back, his vest open, his most fragile organs exposed, waiting, even hoping, for a round to find him through the darkness. It never did.

When he awoke the next day, still alive, Sperry says he was a different person. He became skeptical of the mission and with each passing day there was a growing sense of dread that his own fate was sealed.

“I told my wife, ‘I'm not coming home, everyone is going down.' I told her I loved her and that was it. We weren't accomplishing anything. She kept saying, ‘Don't say that.' I just had a gut feeling. I mean every time we went out, we got hit. I thought it was just a matter of time before I got killed.”

When he got back to the schoolhouse base in al-Karma and learned of Hannon's death, Sperry says the loss began the process that would soon completely strip him of his innocence and force him to acknowledge that the world was a cruel and ruthless place. In this unforgiving reality, Sperry wanted a reminder of the gentle spirit of his friend, who was willing to die in this war but would not kill. He threaded Hannon's maroon rosary through the front belt loop of his combat fatigues with the cross nesting inside his right pocket and never again went outside the wire without it.
*

Sperry was almost certain he would die in Iraq. There had been so many close calls already, some of them darkly comic. Early in the deployment, without fully armored Humvees, Sperry had to devise his own homemade turret, in which he placed a sheet of plywood over the soft-topped Humvee and then piled sandbags into a ring in which he sat, “Indian-style,” along with his M249 SAW (squad automatic weapon) on an improvised mount.

“Whoever was driving would hit the brakes once in a while and they'd laugh while I'd go rolling off the top of the vehicle,” says Sperry. With nothing to secure him or the sandbags to the roof of the “Hillbilly Humvee,” he was vulnerable and unprotected. One day as they were getting ready to cross a bridge back to their base in al-Karma, everyone in the vehicle flinched at the sound of a loud pop and a puff of smoke next to the vehicle on the side of the road. An Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was called to the site and found three 155 mm artillery rounds daisy-chained together, buried in the palm grove adjoining the road. It was most likely command detonated, meaning someone nearby was watching and tried to explode the roadside bomb as the American forces drove past. The blasting cap fired, making the popping sound, but the artillery shells did not. If they had, everyone agreed that given his precarious position on top, Sperry would've likely been launched from the roof like it was a medieval catapult.

“If it would've gone off we would've been toast,” he says. “We laughed about it later, called it the world's smallest IED.”

On another occasion Sperry and squad mates went to provide security for an EOD team investigating a taxi that insurgents had rigged with a multiple rocket launcher in the trunk. When the device malfunctioned it sent a shower of rockets into the town, one of which impaled a man who just happened to be sitting in his car at the wrong place and the wrong time. As the EOD team moved up to the taxi in the aftermath, it also exploded, launching the two bomb technicians forty feet in the air, killing them.

But sometimes, Sperry says, it was the much less dramatic but seemingly personal moments of violence that would make him come momentarily unhinged. One evening, at the base in al-Karma, Sperry was on lookout duty, perched on the schoolhouse roof, sweeping the green fields in front of him for signs of movement, while the horizon turned the color of burning cigarette ash. There was a flash in the distance and Sperry dropped instinctively to his knees as a tracer round streaked over his head. At that moment for him, it was one bullet too close and one too many.

“I freaked out, after,” Sperry says. “I fell to the ground with tears in my eyes. It might've been the adrenaline rush, I just don't know. Corporal Krueger came up to the roof after seeing what had happened and said to me, ‘You're the luckiest motherfucker ever.' ”

There would be other roadside bombs and nightly mortars, patrol missions and house searches. In another attack at the Cloverleaf after Hannon and Perez were killed, Sperry emptied his SAW into a vehicle barreling toward the outpost. When his team examined the smoldering vehicle and the bullet-riddled bodies afterward, Sperry had killed them all. Fortunately for his state of mind, they had been four armed insurgents and not a panicking family afraid to stop at the checkpoint.

The tempo never seemed to let up, right up to November and preparations for Operation Phantom Fury, the second offensive aimed at pushing insurgents out of Fallujah. There was no time to mourn Hannon or Perez, no time to mourn whatever it was inside him that had died as well.

S
perry's early childhood wasn't a war zone, but it was at times punctuated by violence, mostly at the hands of his troubled mother. His parents were divorced and Sperry spent the first eleven years of his life living with his mom, two older sisters and a younger half brother in a small farming town in Illinois—midway between Springfield and Saint Louis. His mother, Sperry says, had an explosive temper, which she mostly took out on her daughters, but sometimes on him as well.

“I remember one time,” says Sperry, “sitting in the backseat of the car and I upset her by opening up a Happy Meal before we got home to find the toy for my little brother and she just lost it and turned around starting beating me up.”

Sperry says on another occasion, when he was eight or nine, he can't recall why, but his mother locked him out of the house without any clothes on in the middle of winter. He stood outside in the snow banging on the door wearing only his underwear. Money was part of the problem; his mother and her second husband had a hard time supporting the family. Sperry says he remembers his mother making all the kids hide in the basement when creditors came knocking.

By the time he turned eleven, his mother's mood swings became too frequent. Sperry and his two sisters went to live with their father and his new wife in nearby Belleville, Illinois, while James's half brother stayed with his mother and her husband. The change was positive but initially unsettling for Sperry, who says he began acting out like any teenager, wearing his hair long, listening to death metal music, mouthing off to his father and his stepmom. He barely passed his classes, earning only C's and D's in school. But his rebellion lost some of its steam when his stepmother set what Sperry calls strict but fair boundaries. The confrontations tapered off even more once Sperry began seeing a therapist and after his dad introduced him to one of his own passions—golf.

Sperry quickly took to golf, enjoying the chance to bond with his father, but even more so the challenge of an individual sport where your greatest test was against yourself.

“I spent every day on the course,” he says, “trying to make myself perfect.” His intense focus on the sport began having a positive impact on other aspects of his life. He went from just squeaking by in school to earning A's and B's.

He won tournaments, lots of them. His father started to think that James might have had what it took to go pro. But during Sperry's junior year all that changed. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 made him believe that there was something that needed his attention more urgently than a game.

“I felt it was my generation's Pearl Harbor,” Sperry says. “My generation needed to be called on to fight the people who were killing Americans. I need to do something bigger than me.”

For Sperry it was that universal need to belong that J. Glenn Gray described in his book
The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle
: “In most of us there is a genuine longing for community with our human species, and at the same time an awkwardness and helplessness about finding the way to achieve it. Some extreme experience—mortal danger or the theatre of destruction—is necessary to bring us fully together with our comrades or with nature. This is a great pity, for there are surely alternative ways more creative and less dreadful, if men would only seek them out. Until now, war has appealed because we discover some of the mysteries of communal joy in its forbidden depths. Comradeship reaches its peak in battle.”

But Sperry would also learn the cost of this kind of comradeship with the loss of so many friends during battle in Iraq.

While Sperry had an uncle who had been a Marine, his father had been in the National Guard during the Vietnam War but never deployed. He wasn't eager to see his son join up and almost certainly be sent into combat. But Sperry went to the recruiting station every day for six months until his father agreed and gave in. The compromise was he could join with an early enlistment package at seventeen but would have to finish high school before being sent off to boot camp.

There was another part of the package: Sperry's girlfriend Cathy, who would later become his wife, decided she was going to join the Marines too. They signed up the same day, hoping that they would somehow be able to stay together. They went to the same high school and had been sweethearts since freshman year. But Cathy was sent to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island, South Carolina, for boot camp, while Sperry was sent to other side of the country at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California to get ready to go to war.

“I was into playing video war games at the time,” he tells me as we talk, seated around the dining table of their home. “I wanted to kick in doors. My dad was mad about it. He thought I was throwing away a chance at doing something in golf to join the Marines.”

While Sperry had been working out for months prior getting physically ready for Marine boot camp, he conceded he wasn't mentally ready for what the next thirteen weeks would bring. For the first three days of boot camp he felt like he was on his feet the entire time. He stood in line to get his head shaved. That first cut that made everyone the same. Then everything went to overload. The exercises they made him do pushed him beyond the endurance level of anything he had ever done before. When he was finally allowed to sleep for a few hours his body hit his rack like a rag doll, barely moving throughout the night. The mornings were like waking up in hell, the yelling, the racing to the bathrooms with some poor bastards getting too nervous to piss with the impatient lines behind them.

They could never sit; they had to either stand or squat. They would squat while cleaning their weapons until their haunches ached and finally cramped up. But they weren't denied water; in fact it was the cruel opposite. They'd have to drink so much water, chug it right down, sometimes until they puked, then they'd have to drink some more. If you screwed up, Sperry recalled, you'd find yourself doing IT, or intensive training, one-on-one with the drill instructor. This was not where you wanted to be.

After a few weeks in, Sperry felt the shock of boot camp wearing off. He no longer felt lost. He stayed out of the drill instructors' firing lines, pushed himself hard and did what he could to help the others in his training unit. Some guys were beyond help, the mentally unstable who could hold it together through the recruiting process with the assistance of overzealous recruiting officers but quickly unraveled in boot camp. They would be dazed or paralyzed by the orders and shouting. Others would lose it altogether, Sperry said, even try to fight their own drill instructors, which was never a good idea.