The Things They Cannot Say

by Kevin Sites

  James Sperry

  0311/USMC/RET.[11]

  His note arrives at a time when I’m feeling worthless, when I peer into the mirror in the morning at my tired and puffy face and wonder what right I have to be here at all. I’m struggling to write; I’m struggling with alcohol, drinking a fifth of vodka or whiskey every other day; I’m struggling to find some hope and a sense of purpose outside a war zone. For an elusive moment, James Sperry has given me both.

  But the credit he offers me is undeserved. Though I did pick up an end of his stretcher, along with five Marines, during Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah, Iraq, it was hardly an act that saved his life. Military medics and later surgeons were responsible for that. I was simply an extra hand to help move him from an open flatbed truck to an armored troop carrier for evacuation. While I had been embedded with his unit, I had never seen Sperry until the first day of the ground offensive. He was lying on his back in an alleyway. He looked dazed as his head was bandaged by a Navy corpsman. I remember zooming in, as I videotaped him, on the crimson beads of a rosary hanging out of one of the trouser pockets of his BDUs. I wondered if he still believed in their power now that he was wounded; maybe he believed in them even more. I wouldn’t learn until years later that it wasn’t even his rosary.

  It was strange that Sperry’s note had a consoling effect on me, considering that up until that point my actions had remained in my mind over the years not as an act of kindness on my part, but as a sin of omission. For while I helped carry Sperry to safety, and I’m glad I did, a few hours earlier I had also walked away from an older Iraqi man slowly bleeding to death after being shot in the head by a Marine sniper (detailed in the prologue). Sperry’s note has not absolved me of what I did not do, but in a small way it affirmed what I did, and for now, that has made some difference to me.

  During my Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, Sperry and I begin a series of conversations over Skype. But he’s struggling too. Like me, he’s using alcohol to self-medicate, but also pot and the dozen prescription medications that are part of his daily postwar routine. He sometimes disappears for weeks at a time without picking up for our calls. I plead with him by e-mail but still silence. Eventually he reemerges, but I know it will take meeting face-to-face if I’m ever going to get his complete story. When he finally resurfaces, I convince him to allow me to visit him over Christmas break on a one-day stopover on my way to see my parents in Arizona. He agrees but then disappears again. Just when I’m about to give up on him, he surfaces and confirms my visit, just five days before I’m scheduled to arrive.

  It’s already dark at five thirty P.M. when I pull up to James Sperry’s house on a small, unlighted cul-de-sac in a small southern Illinois town about forty-five minutes east of downtown Saint Louis. It’s two days before Christmas and my flights have been predictably delayed by weather and overbooking this time of year. I was supposed to arrive nearly five hours ago. I double-check the address because there are no cars in the driveway and no lights on in the house. Several of the other houses on the cul-de-sac are wired for the holidays, plastic Santas and candy canes putting off the only illumination on the street. Sperry’s house is bare. I knock on the door and already begin to feel a little strange and intrusive. Though our paths crossed six years ago on the embattled streets of Fallujah, we were strangers then, as well as now.

  Sperry and I have been building trust, over the last two months, trying to peel back the years and details of what happened since we last met. It has been a humbling and trying process beset by the challenges of both his responsibilities, which include a wife and three-year-old daughter, as well as the physical and psychological wounds that require a chef’s salad worth of drugs every day, including clonazepam for anger (Sperry calls it his chill pill), citalopram for adrenaline deficiency (overtaxed during his deployment), hydrocodone for headaches, mirtazapine and Ambien to sleep, prazosin to head off his nightmares and a self-injecting EpiPen-type device like those carried by people allergic to bee stings, which Sperry administers in the case of debilitating migraines that send him quivering into a dark closet with a blanket over his head until he can fall asleep. Sperry, admittedly, also heavily self-medicated with alcohol back at Camp Pendleton for nearly two years after his return from Iraq, drinking with other Iraqi vets from early morning until he passed out at night, filling the days with death-seeking stunts like gunning his Japanese sport motorcycle (a nearly stereotypical impulse buy for many returning vets) down the freeway at over a hundred miles an hour—drunk.

  He said he’d probably be dead already if it hadn’t been for the Vietnam-era veterans he met after being committed to a VA psych ward for a month following a failed suicide attempt. They helped convince him that while alcohol could temporarily numb his feelings, its long-term depressant effect would eventually kill him. Sperry said he had since mostly replaced alcohol with marijuana (the exception, supposedly, is a few beers now and then). While it was actually VA doctors who recommended he start using marijuana medicinally, Sperry said, it was unlawful for them to dispense it. Instead he now buys it from a former high school buddy. “It’s the only thing that has really helped me,” he said.

  Sperry said while the pot leveled him out, it was his daughter Hannah that really gave him any reason to live. He explained the challenges he faced daily in an e-mail before my visit.

  November 2009 (e-mail from Sperry to me)

  I have lost twenty friends and would love to have any photos available. Transition has been extremely difficult. I have nightmares almost nightly and migraine headaches every other day. I don’t have any friends beside my close family because I feel like I can’t relate to anyone. I did try to kill my self three years ago before the birth of my daughter. I spent a month in a mental institution. I have almost no short-term memory. I can’t do school at all I have failed out of every class almost. I use to be smart but since my several traumatic brain injures I can’t do much besides housework and raising my daughter. The only way I sleep is by pills. I take pills for everything my extreme anger, depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. I was way to young to experience the death of all my friends. I don’t want to get close to any one because I don’t want to have anymore hurt in my life. I can’t be away from my family for any long period of time with out having extreme panic attacks and anxiety because I am not there standing guard over the people I have left to love. I am not normal I am in a different reality then the majority of easy going Americans. I wake up every morning hurting in my hips, back, shoulders, and head. I wonder how it is going to be when I am thirty years old. I am only twenty-four and have lived a life I wish on no one. The bright and shining star in my life and the reason I get up and go thru the routines is to watch the innocent of my daughter. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely,

  James Sperry

  Within a few seconds of my knocking, Sperry arrives at the door wearing a T-shirt and jeans and socks but no shoes. He’s accompanied by two dogs, Carly, a newly acquired, rambunctious bull terrier that his daughter, Hannah, named after the popular Nickelodeon program iCarly, and a spaniel–Saint Bernard mix named Everett, who, like Sperry, is shuffling along and showing a bit more age than he has.

  We shake hands. I tell Sperry he looks better than the last time I saw him, through the viewfinder of my camera. He laughs, but Everett backs away. I reach out a hand, palm down, for him to sniff, but he’s wary, moving down the hallway away from me. When I stand upright, he lets out several deep woofs.

  “Wow,” Sperry says, surprised, “that’s really strange. I’ve never seen him bark at anyone… ever.”

  I’m just as surprised. I’ve had dogs for a good portion of my life and understand the techniques for lowering their sense of threat level. But perhaps Everett has absorbed some of Sperry’s postwar hypervigilance, a common symptom, according to psychologists and psychiatrists, of combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is, experts believe, a continuation of the vigilance soldiers had to adopt to su
rvive for prolonged periods in war zones, as well as an effect of their loss of the ability to trust others. Many dog owners learn to trust the instinct of their animals. I hope Sperry doesn’t read too much into it. Despite the pleasantries, I can already see the palpable discomfort my arrival has created for him. A phone call is different than a visit; there’s separation and the ability to control the conversation by ending it whenever one chooses. However, now I’m here in his living room at my own request, to see and talk to him face-to-face about his life after war. And it’s a story, despite his delays, I think he wants to tell.

  Sperry’s wife, “Cathy” (she asked that her real name not be used in this book), joins us at the dining room table. They were sweethearts since freshman year of high school and actually joined the Marines together on an early-enlistment package their junior year.

  She wanted to be a photojournalist but didn’t get the occupation guarantee in writing from the recruiter. She ended up in diesel generator repair instead and worked stateside, never deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan. Sperry wanted infantry, and, of course, got it. I open my computer and play for them the video I shot the day Sperry was wounded. (Watch the video of Lance Corporal James Sperry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7hzC1vEBxU&feature=plcp.) This is the first time he’s ever seen it, but strangely, for Cathy, it’s the second. She first saw it while doing her post–boot camp military occupational specialty (MOS) training as a diesel mechanic at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. She was walking back to her quarters when my NBC News field report from Fallujah began playing on a large-screen TV at an outside courtyard. Though his face was obscured by blood and bandages, Cathy says she knew it was James immediately. Now, all these years later, they are transfixed by the images, watching as my camera zooms in on the maroon-colored plastic rosary hanging out of Sperry’s pants.

  When I first shot the video, I had assumed it was Sperry’s talisman, a lucky charm like the ones many soldiers carried into battle. But one night as we talked on the telephone I learned there was much more to the story. In fact, it was a touchstone to one of several critical events in Iraq that Sperry acknowledges changed him from an earnest and hopeful teenager into a stone-hearted Marine.

  Sperry’s best friend in the Marines was a Mexican-American kid named Fernando Hannon, whom he met during basic training at Camp Pendleton. While Hannon didn’t plan on making the military a career, he did want to follow in the footsteps of his father, Spurgeon, a Vietnam War veteran. At six foot four, Hannon was a gentle giant, Sperry said, a sweet soul who prayed daily that he would never have to kill anyone during his deployment in Iraq. Hannon’s family meant everything to him and when his sister contracted cancer right before their deployment to Iraq, Hannon left Camp Pendleton without permission to see her. Not wanting his friend to get into trouble, Sperry found ways to cover for him until he got back.

  While he wanted to make his father proud by his military service, Hannon’s real dream was to become a chiropractor and marry his high school sweetheart, a girl named Ruth Ponce. Ponce was apparently so smitten with Hannon that she asked him to their senior prom. Hannon, it seems, was just as taken with her. Sperry said that Hannon’s favorite subject was his future wedding with Ponce. To Hannon, a wedding represented the happiest moment in a person’s life and he had been saving up for his, even before he met Ruth. Hannon told Sperry he had already amassed $48,000 for the big day, from the odd jobs and part-time work that he had been doing since he was a child.

  “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.[12]

  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.