The Things They Cannot Say (8 page)

For the other 96 percent of us, our ability to kill may simply be enabled by our shadow self, but its consequences are borne by our other half. For some, that burden is permanently debilitating, regardless of the circumstances. For others, it may be compartmentalized or shuffled somewhere in the folds of the mind, where it's contained and does not interfere daily with an otherwise normal life. And it may be this group in which the early experiences of one's life profoundly affect that person's ability to reabsorb their shadow self into its interstitial space and keep it fully in check when not at war.

A
uton, I realize, lives in that place where bullets and background intersect. The hard realities of rural poverty he experienced as a child and that he learned to contain, rather than let them define him, prepared him quite thoroughly, it seems, for the things he would have to do in war.

“To be honest with you—this sounds weird or hard to understand—you just put it behind you,” Auton tells me during a telephone call. “You can't live in the past; you have to live in the present.”

Far from judging him, I have great respect for his reasoning and his ability to steady himself in the face of powerfully destabilizing experiences. I envy the inner strength and resolve by which he has “soldiered” on, while I, who have taken a life by the confused incompetence of inaction rather than pulling a trigger, sometimes have had difficulty in finding both meaning and worth for my own life in the aftermath of the incident.

And for Auton, living in the present is certainly preferable, considering how he grew up in rural Lenoir, North Carolina, bordering the Pisgah National Forest, sixty miles northwest of Charlotte. Auton was the third youngest of four siblings, an older brother and sister and a younger brother.

“I grew up in a very poor family. I remember days where I would heat water on a kerosene heater in order to have hot water for a bath,” says Auton. “I always knew what I would have for dinner when I got home from school because it was always cabbage and potatoes.”

Auton's parents were divorced and he says his mother focused more on other men than her children.

“My sister and I were always close to each other and she is still the only one I speak to this day out of my family. My sister and I came home from school one day and found a note on the kitchen table with some money, I think around three hundred dollars. I was around ten years old if I remember right. The note said, ‘Here is the next two months' rent, I hope you can find a place to live.' ” He says his mother left with a man she had known for a few weeks.

His sister, Elizabeth, was fifteen at the time and had an older boyfriend whose family took them both in and raised them, Auton says, like they “were their own children,” for the next eight years of his life.

But by his senior year in high school he became rebellious and moved in with some other friends, hitting the streets at night, drinking and getting into a little bit of trouble. He says he struggled through his senior year of high school but kept it together just enough to graduate. His sister married the same man she was with when their mother left them. But Auton says he has no idea where his mother or brothers are. He broke off relations with his father when he refused to take them in after they were abandoned. He says because he was abandoned by his parents a lot of people looked at him as a lowlife, a “bottom-feeder.” That motivated him to prove them wrong and do something with his life. That's when he decided to join the Army.

To Auton, the Army became the family he felt he never had. It seemed to give him all the basic things his own did not: food, shelter, clothing, money and, perhaps equally important, people to share the challenges and successes of life with. But while the Army helped him to feel like he was part of a community, Auton's past taught him not to invest too deeply in emotions. Being able to contain the hardships and unhappiness of his childhood allowed him to “move on,” as he said, and live in the present. He would use the same skills, successfully, to push past the darkness and trauma of war.

It wasn't always easy. When Auton became a leader in the Army, he became responsible for the health and well-being of his men, which required a closeness that made him more vulnerable, though as always he did his best to contain that as well. When Auton was deployed again to Iraq in 2006, his unit was focused on helping to clear insurgents out of Ramadi in the Sunni-dominated al-Anbar Province. A well-liked twenty-two-year-old sergeant named Edward Schaeffer was part of Auton's squad. Auton says Schaeffer was so smart, they nicknamed him “the Brain.” But that November, while on patrol, the lead vehicle of Auton's convoy hit an improvised explosive device and the Bradley burst into flames. The driver was Schaeffer. He was blown out of the hatch and landed ten feet away in a ball of flames. Another soldier put him out with a fire extinguisher. His burns were so severe, he later died from them. Auton admits the death affected him.

“I don't think I was sad. I was angry more than anything,” Auton says. “He was such a young guy. It motivates you to be there even more and to find them [the attacker]. I don't know if we got the exact one, but we got plenty of them. We cordoned off the area, did raids for the next three hours—it wasn't knocking, it was hard raids.”

While Auton can be stirred by the loss of one of his men, his mostly unemotional nature sometimes gives him the leverage to understand things his more emotionally charged comrades can't. When Auton does his job, killing the enemy, he doesn't feel the need to hate or dehumanize them. If they're a threat to him and his men they're dead. But since he doesn't choose to see them as anything less than himself, as anything other than warriors doing their jobs, he can also offer them the same respect when they prove particularly worthy and tenacious adversaries, as did one he encountered during that same tour, in a city on the western border of Iraq.

After searching a barn in a nearby village and finding explosives and suicide vests buried in the hay, Auton moved his fireteam to the house next door to continue the search. They cleared the house floor by floor, from bottom to top. But when they reached the final floor of the house it appeared to be completely empty. They all relaxed for a moment . . . until they heard the unmistakable sound of metal on concrete. Their eyes opened wide as an olive-green Russian-made grenade came rolling across the floor toward them. “Grenade,” one of the soldiers yelled, and they all dove for cover as the small powerful explosion cratered the floor and forced shards of metal into the concrete walls on all sides. They were so surprised by the attack that they felt whoever had tossed the grenade might as well have been invisible.

“We know we cleared the room,” says Auton, “so we figured the guy had to actually be inside the wall somewhere.” That's when they called in the EOD unit, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, the same kind of specialists depicted in the Oscar-winning film
The Hurt Locker
. The EOD team planted C4 plastic explosives around the walls and leveled half the building. Once the dust cleared, Auton saw a vent duct above the stairwell. If the attacker had been in the vent, he had to be dead now. But that thought disappeared as soon as his team began taking fire from the vent. They returned fire, pumping more than a thousand rounds into the hole, but according to accounts from the soldiers, the stubborn sniper continued to fire back.

“I personally threw five grenades into the hole and the guy wouldn't go down,” Auton says with a laugh. After a few hours of exchanging fire with the sniper, EOD planted C4 in what was left of the remaining walls and turned the entire building into rubble with a huge explosion. When the dust and smoke cleared, they saw the sniper lying in a pile of broken cinder blocks and concrete. But Auton and his men were astounded by what happened next. Like one of the machines out of the Terminator films, the Iraqi seemed almost impossible to kill.

“The dude sat up with his AK-47 from the rubble, turned and looked at us—he had to be on adrenaline or something,” says Auton. Another sergeant tossed a grenade at him, finally ending the five-hour standoff.

“You rarely encounter someone like that. This guy gave his position up. He could've hid and we wouldn't have known he was there. You give respect for something like that, for bravery or whatever else. I can clearly picture him, skinny, five foot nine, clean-shaven face, black hair, black T-shirt, pair of jeans, and his whole body full of holes after the grenade.”

As Auton prepares for his third deployment, this one to Afghanistan, he's now engaged to a German woman but uncertain if they'll be able to work out their differences. She wants to stay in Germany, which Auton says he also loves, but he will have to go wherever the Army decides to send him. He will not abandon the family that he believes has given him his true place in this world. He already knows this will be his career no matter how many times he gets deployed. Somehow, despite what he's had to do, this work has filled the empty spaces in him and given him both stability and a sense of calm and purpose. He tells me so in an e-mail.

“The army is the simplest job you can have. All you have to do is be where you are supposed to be on time and do what you are told,” says Auton. “The higher the rank you get the better the job. I am at the point in my career where now I issue the orders and teach the soldiers, this I love to do! I can retire at 39 yrs old. Where else in the civilian life could I do that? Also, everything is paid for. The only worry I have is the loss of my life or a soldier's life, and I have come to peace with both of these.”

Postscript

In March 2012, I got an e-mail from Auton telling me that he got married in October 2011 in a small German town called Wetzlar. He told me that he also passed the Army's twenty-four-day Special Forces assessment and selection process at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, less than two hundred miles from where he grew up. In the fall he would attend the five-phase qualification course. If successful, Auton would wear the dagger-and-crossed-arrow flash of one of the most elite, highly trained and legendary units of the American military, the Green Berets.

Part II: The Wounds of War

What's It Like to Be Shot, Bombed or Burned in Combat?

The brightest best thing in my life was the war and there won't be anything better. And the blackest lousiest thing in my life was also the war, and there won't be anything worse. So my life has been lived.

—Arkady Babchenko, Russian soldier, journalist

From
One Soldier's War
, Arkady Babchenko, translated by Nick Allen (Grove Press, 2008).

Babchenko was a conscript for the first Chechnya campaign in 1995 and volunteered for the second in 1999.

Lance Corporal James Sperry, U.S.M.C.

3rd Battalion, 1st Marines

The War in Iraq (2004)

Chapter 3: Survivor's Guilt

I am only twenty-four and have lived a life I wish on no one.

R
edemption can come from the most unlikely places. Mine is a present from a war-damaged twenty-four-year-old in Lebanon, Illinois, who e-mailed these words to me.

Dear Mr. Sites

You were imbedded
[sic]
with 3rd Bn/ 1st Mar. Div. during operation phantom fury. I was the Marine that you helped care me to saftey after i was shot by a sniper. I want to say thank you very much for helping me out. I was wondering if you had taken any photos of me during that time of injury and any of my fallen friends. i have lost twenty friends in this war and would like to get as many pictures as I can. I will pay what ever you want for the pictures. Thank you again from the bottom of my heart for all you did for me. i now have a three year old child that would nevr of came if was for your help. I will for ever be in your debit. Thanks

James Sperry

0311/USMC/RET.
*

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 survive 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.