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.
“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
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
