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.
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.[16] 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.
“We went about our separate ways,” says Cathy of those times. “He would go with Phil drinking day and night. It was a losing battle for me so I just gave in to him.” And while Cathy gave in to him, Sperry gave in to a recklessness that defied his own mortality, manifesting itself in a series of “crotch rocket” high-performance motorcycles.
Sperry, wasted on tequila sunrises, would take his bikes out riding around, popping wheelies at seventy miles per hour. On one occasion, he says he took his Italian Aprilia out on the freeway and pushed it to a hundred and sixty miles per hour while completely drunk. He took a deep breath afterward and realized exactly how close he had come to crossing that line between obliviousness and oblivion. He sold the bike two weeks later to keep himself from doing it again. The sale, however, did not stop his drinking.
“I didn’t cry for two years,” Sperry says. “I drank all my sorrows away.” Or he tried to. It became a choice between the pain, the splitting migraines from the physical and emotional trauma of his combat experiences, and the puking and massive hangovers from his daily drinking. The strains on his marriage were becoming intractable.
“It was kind of a blur,” Cathy says of the time. “I was so young, I didn’t know how to help him.”
“I wanted her to understand what I was going through.” Sperry says, nodding, as we continue talking around the table. “She couldn’t see it.”
The strain did not prevent Cathy from becoming pregnant and on July 12, 2006, their daughter, Hannah, was born. Sperry named her after his best friend killed in Iraq, Fernando Hannon. Although Hannah’s birth provided some sense of hope for him, it was not enough to lift the darkness that surrounded him. The gravity of the deaths of nearly two dozen of his Marine friends in Iraq was crushing him. He saw their faces every day, remembered how they messed with each other but how when it came down to the fighting, they always had each other’s backs. The band-of-brothers cliche was true, he knew it, but what was also true was that in combat you had so little control. No matter how hard you look, how do you see a roadside bomb before it blows? How do you stop a sniper’s bullet before it hits? Even as your brothers watch out for you and you watch out for them, these things are beyond your control, especially when you’re fighting phantoms like the insurgents who rarely show themselves in Iraq. While he drank to forget, the booze wasn’t enough. It couldn’t dull, let alone blot out, the physical and emotional pain he endured every day, the migraines, the backaches, the insomnia. On September 6, 2006, nearly two years after he was wounded in Fallujah, it all became too much.
