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.”
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
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.
Chapter 3: Survivor’s Guilt
Redemption 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
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
