by Kevin Sites
“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.
Sperry’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.
“The thing that got me through,” says Sperry, “is that I wanted my parents to see that I could do something on my own. I didn’t want to live inside the bubble of Illinois. I wanted to be a Marine too much to not finish. I knew there would be life after boot camp.”
And there was. Being a bit bigger and taller than some of the other Marines, Sperry was trained as a SAW gunner, tasked with carrying the Belgium-made M249, a gas-powered, air-cooled, $4,000, 15-pound rifle capable of delivering 750–1,000 rounds per minute. The M249 fired 5.56 x 45 NATO rounds with the accuracy of a regular rifle bu
t with the rapid rate of fire of a machine gun. It was the center of gravity for a four-man Marine fireteam, which was built around maneuvering, protecting and utilizing its awesome firepower. The weapon provided the kind of head-bending covering fire that could keep a unit alive until they were reinforced or extricated. Despite its weight, with an added 6 pounds from a 200-round ammo box, Sperry was proud to carry it.
After boot camp, Sperry was part of one of the last waves of new Marines to join the platoon he would deploy with to Iraq within two short months, the 3rd Platoon, India Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment. When Sperry finished basic and joined his platoon at another part of Camp Pendleton, the unit cohesion was already in full and ridiculous force. Guys, Sperry recalls, were strutting down a makeshift catwalk wearing boxers and body armor, one wearing nothing but camouflage paint and a canteen. It was typical Marine behavior. Despite being just weeks away from deployment to Iraq, the platoon was holding a combat fashion show, laughing in the face of the danger the entire battalion would soon face. This was, Sperry felt, exactly where he belonged.
A week before Operation Phantom Fury was set to begin, Sperry’s platoon moved to an abandoned house inside the perimeter of Camp Abu Ghraib, where the rest of 3/1 was based.
Here they began an endless cycle of combat drills: entering and clearing houses, the most efficient way to remove glass from a window frame using the muzzle of an M16, how to retrieve a wounded comrade from an area with no protective cover. And then there was the checking and rechecking of gear. When someone in the platoon misplaced a thermal scope, their sergeant kept them up all night looking for it even though they were slated to move to their fighting positions just outside Fallujah the next day. It was during this countdown to the battle, Sperry says, when some Marines started suffering from unusual injuries as possible excuses to get out of fighting, like the lance corporal who accidentally shot himself in the foot with the SAW three times. Another in the unit had a sudden attack of “amnesia” after a roadside bomb incident that left him physically intact. “Where am I? Is this a gun in my hand?” Sperry imitates the Marine, shaking his head disapprovingly. There was a small respite during this period of intense training and prep for the big push when Kilo Company commandeered a passing meat truck while on patrol. It yielded enough steaks and ribs to feed hundreds of young Marines tired of T-rats and hungry for fresh meat.[13]
“It felt like the Last Supper,” says Sperry, recalling the moment in a somewhat wistful way. Indeed, he had reason to be. At just nineteen years old he had already killed nine people in combat, lost one of his best friends and was about to go into the biggest fight of his life.
Before any battle, U.S. forces receive from the commanders the ROE orders, or rules of engagement. In this case they were given, according to Sperry, in what would be considered an unorthodox way, by a junior officer, a lieutenant from headquarters. A person none of the men recognized.
“We were basically told it was a free-fire zone,” Sperry tells me. “If anything moved you were allowed to shoot it.” These orders, if true, are likely the reason that Marines, during at least three reported incidents (including the execution I witnessed), killed the prisoners they had captured, a violation of rules for prisoner treatment outlined in the Geneva Conventions.
Sperry also remembers an assembly before the battle where three-star lieutenant general James Mattis, the hard-charging, sometimes profane Marine Expeditionary Force commander, told his men that this was going to be the biggest U.S. urban military battle since the Marines fought house-to-house to dislodge five thousand North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops from Hue City during the 1968 Tet Offensive.
“What we’re doing now,” he remembers Mattis saying, “will be written in your child’s textbooks.”
Some Marines used the final hours before pushing out to write letters to their families, instructing their comrades to retrieve them under their flak jackets if they were to fall. Sperry was not one of them. “I didn’t even want to think about that or talk about it,” he says.
At the company level the battle plan was for Kilo Company to push the insurgents south and for India Company to flank them in a pincer movement and simply kill them. It would, like Hue City, be house-to-house fighting with plans, Sperry was told, to clear every single house. In reality, the Marines would not go into a house until they had contact, meaning someone was shooting at them. At three A.M. on November 8, 2004, India Company moved to its fighting position north of the Fallujah railway station. They were “welcomed” to the area with an insurgent round fired from an RPG, which hit one of the trucks but didn’t explode.
The men dug protective trenches around their vehicles and slept, exhausted, for much of the next day and night as jets and artillery began softening up the city for the ground assault to come.
When the order finally came to move, Sperry was surprised at how empty the city was. It seemed to him like a ghost town. At first, as the Marines entered, they found no insurgents but fully loaded weapons staged behind walls and other tactical locations. Sperry picked up an AK-47 lying on the ground, stripped off its banana clip and ejected the 7.62 round already in the chamber before dropping it back down. “Dumbass,” someone yelled at him, “that coulda been booby-trapped.”
While the Marines of Sperry’s 3rd Platoon still couldn’t see them, the insurgents let them know they hadn’t completely left town. Lance Corporal Jody Perrite got hit with a sniper round in his right arm, which entered right below his Marine bulldog tattoo and exited on the other side. Other Marines started getting picked off too. The insurgents were prepared and knew the terrain. They used low-tech improvisational tactics to safeguard their firing positions, like scattering shards of broken lightbulbs on the concrete stairways leading to the rooftops where they were hiding. That way when the Marines moved in they’d hear them coming. The confusion and uncertainty of combat also gave way to comic moments. As Sperry and his squad moved up the stairway of one house, the squad lined up outside a closed door made from corrugated aluminum. Believing there were insurgents on the rooftop, the Marine in front, carrying a shotgun, wound up and stomp-kicked the door, center-mass. Instead of caving in, it reverberated like a cymbal back on the kicker in a loud twang. The Marines laughed, knowing that any element of surprise was just lost with their clumsy entrance. The rooftop was clear, but the Marines started taking fire from the roof of another location. They ducked behind the parapet. A Marine in the squad put his Kevlar helmet on the muzzle of his M16 and poked it high enough to draw fire from the snipers. When they saw where the shots were coming from, the fireteam leader fired a 40 mm grenade from the M203 grenade launcher slung under his rifle. After the explosion, the rooftop went silent. But the calm didn’t last very long. The snipers were just the trigger for an insurgent trap in the normally busy market area known as Jolan Park. Once the Marines entered the maze of narrow alleyways, they got boxed in by sniper fire in front of them and RPG rounds to the rear. And now that they had the Marines where they wanted them, insurgents began hanging mortar rounds right on top of them. The illusion of an abandoned Fallujah had just gone to shit. The trapped Marines called up the heavy guns.
Abrams M1A1 tanks rumbled down the wider passageways, rotating their turrets to the left or the right like iron elephants deciding whether to charge. Once the turret swiveled in the direction of a target, a car parked in an alleyway or even a suspicious container, it wasn’t long before the tank’s main gun punched a high-explosive round into it, turning the target into a ball of flame.
Sperry was told by his team leader to move up the street and get in front and to the right of one of the tanks to provide security. “Fuck no,” he remembers telling him. There wasn’t any cover up there. But Sperry said he soon relented and within moments of taking his position, he found himself swirling down the rabbit hole that would change his life forever.
“The next thing I know I’m smelling gunpowder. I didn’t hear anything but remember the sensation of me being thrown
on my back,” says Sperry. “Then I black out and when I wake up, Doc Jacoby is working on me. ‘Holy shit, look at his Kevlar,’ I remember somebody saying. Then Sergeant Love said to me, ‘Hold on, Sperry, for your wife. You’re going to be okay.’ Then I looked up and remember seeing you taking pictures of me and then I blacked out again.”
Sitting in his home, seated around this table with him and his wife, I’m fascinated, finally hearing the details I never knew from our encounter so many years ago in Fallujah. For me, Sperry was the first American casualty I saw during the fight for Fallujah. I remember following a group of Marines carrying him into the cover of an alleyway after he was wounded, Hannon’s rosary dangling from his belt loop. Several men propped him up while the Navy corpsman bandaged his head. “I remember being stretchered out,” he says. “I wake up again, on the chopper, puking blood straight up, and it was falling down on my face. I turn to my left and there are body bags in the middle of the Chinook.[14] The doc [a medic] wipes blood off my eyes. Then I don’t remember anything until being at Balad in a tent and some guys were checking me out.[15] A female nurse, a brunette, asks me how I’m doing. My head hurts. I’m taken for scan. I black out again. The most I can remember from Balad is that brunette nurse taking care of me.”
After his flight to Germany, Sperry woke up in a hospital room filled with three wounded officers all on life support. When a nurse came in and called him Captain Sperry, even given his head injuries he still realized there had been a mix-up in admissions. It didn’t take long for him to be moved to the enlisted ranks area of the hospital. But the confusion didn’t end there. Sperry had been reported KIA, or killed in action, by someone from his battalion. Fortunately for his family, that information never reached them. Sperry was able to call his father and stepmother from the hospital. They weren’t at home at the time, but he was able to leave a voice mail letting them know he had been injured but was still alive and in Germany. Cathy, however, was still at Camp Lejeune, in generator-repair school, and learned of his injury from my report before anyone officially notified her. The combat images I transmitted from my laptop and satellite modem from the battlefield were grainy and dark, but Cathy says she knew with one look and without any doubt that the wounded Marine whose head was being bandaged in front of my camera was her husband, James.