The Things They Cannot Say (10 page)

“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 but 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.
*

“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.

T
he 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.
*
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.
*
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.

What injured Sperry is still a mystery even now. Fellow Marines suspected it was a bullet ricochet, while his doctors in Germany believe it may have been a tiny fragment of a rocket-propelled grenade that sliced through his Kevlar helmet and into his brain. Whatever it was, it took out a sliver of his frontal lobe, the part of the brain that controls emotions and is also said to be the place where our personality resides. Sperry had a litany of injuries in addition to the mystery trauma to his brain. This includes fractures at the base of his skull and his nose, as well as a broken sternum and four broken ribs caused by the force of shrapnel or bullet rounds blunted by the ceramic plate inserted at the front of his body armor. Doctors pumped him full of steroids to counter the cranial pressure of his brain bleed and stabilized him enough to fly him back to the U.S. While he waited for the transport, Sperry says, he got bored, rolled his wheelchair across the street to a PX and bought a six-pack of Bud Light. Though still on morphine for his pain, he says he savored one of the beers, his first in months, until an orderly took the rest away.

On the flight from Germany to a hospital in California, Sperry's jet stopped at Scott Air Force Base in Saint Louis, where his dad and his stepmother were able to see him during a short layover. He had asked them in an earlier telephone call to find out what had happened to other members of his unit, since he'd had little to no contact with anyone since being flown out of Fallujah. During the Saint Louis layover, his father gave him a sheet of paper. On it was a list of twenty names, all Marines from Sperry's unit who had not made it out of Fallujah alive.
*
Sperry says he dropped the paper and put his face in his hands, wondering how that was even possible.

But after Sperry was admitted to Balboa naval hospital in San Diego, he discovered that he might have lost more than his friends. When his wife, Cathy, first came to see him in his hospital ward, after months of painful separation, something strange happened. For Sperry there was no overwhelming sense of relief to see her again, no joyful reunion. In fact, no feelings at all. Sperry says it was as if he were just seeing any other friend for a night of pizza or bowling. I look at Cathy's face while he says this, but there's no expression. In the time since, perhaps she's come to feel the same about him. I look at them both and wonder if Sperry's head injury has also impacted his capacity to feel.

Sperry and Cathy spent the next two years at Pendleton on a seesaw teetering between hope and despair. Too often, despair seemed to have the greater mass. While Cathy would go to work on base, Sperry spent his days, by his own admission, drinking with another wounded Marine from his unit from sunup to sundown or whenever they passed out.