“I remember it started out normal,” says Sperry. “I’m not sure what triggered it, but I think I had a flashback. I was thinking how I lost so many friends and was missing them so much.” And the alcohol only made things worse. That morning, in the garage of his house on base, Sperry threw a rope over the end of one of the support beams just as a gunnery sergeant neighbor, also back from Iraq, had done down the street only a few weeks earlier. At that moment nothing good was getting through a brain damaged by shrapnel, muddled by alcohol and wracked by survivor’s guilt. Sperry doesn’t know how long he stood there wondering if making the noose would be his point of no return. Is this how he wanted to go out? Dangling at the end of a rope in his garage where his wife would find him and never be able to erase the image from her mind? Sperry stopped. He yanked the rope back down, got into his car and drove to the VA (Veterans Affairs) outreach center on the base. When he arrived, he says, there were three men ahead of him. He sat in his car in the parking lot, staring ahead and blasting the stereo until someone came out to talk with him.
They said he “sounded like a robot,” Sperry says, when he answered questions from the counselor who came out to check on him. The counselor realized Sperry was suicidal. He called a police escort and Sperry was taken to the VA’s mental health facility in San Diego. He spent the next few hours in a padded room talking to a psychiatrist, who decided to commit him for his own safety. They stripped him of all his clothes and belongings, anything with which he could hurt himself, and moved him into the facility for the next two weeks.
While Sperry pulled himself back from the brink, hundreds of others who served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did not. In fact, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs secretary Eric Shinseki announced that out of the thirty thousand suicides in America each year, a full 20 percent are committed by veterans. The Department of Defense’s Suicide Event Report, a compilation of suicide information and analysis across all branches of the military, notes that eleven hundred service members killed themselves in the four years from 2005–2009, or one suicide every thirty-six hours.
During my research, psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Shay told me that suicide was a commonplace thought amongst the mostly Vietnam-era veterans he worked with as staff psychiatrist in the VA outpatient clinic in Boston. “Almost everyone thinks daily of suicide,” he said. “It seems to sustain them as a bottom line of human freedom and dignity. Having touched that talisman every day, they continue to struggle.”
But during his time in the VA mental health facility in San Diego two things happened for Sperry: first, he had some time to detox from all the alcohol he had been drowning himself in for the last two years, and second, he was exposed to Vietnam War veterans who provided both positive and negative reinforcements toward reshaping his life. He could see within the VA hospital how self-medicating, mostly with alcohol, had utterly destroyed so many of these men. The memories of their war had ravaged them so completely that they spent the rest of their days toasting to their own demise. They were little more than carcasses now, men who most likely would’ve preferred to die during their deployments, rather than the slow postwar attrition that killed them from the inside out. The Vietnam vets who had kicked the booze told him as much, that being sober was the only way he was likely to survive.
He could see their point and realized that at the very least, he had to cut back on the drinking or he could really end up swinging from the roof beam of his own garage. But giving up drinking without something to replace it wasn’t an option Sperry was ready to try. So the memories that he had once tried to wash away he was now determined to blow up in smoke.
But he also knew he needed to make other changes. Camp Pendleton had become a neighborhood of bad influences, where other damaged Marines, returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, pursued self-destructive trajectories. Sperry had to break away from that to truly heal. Home sounded safe, and being in a safe place was becoming critically important to him. In October 2007, Sperry, Cathy and Hannah moved back to his father’s house in Illinois. They stayed for six months and things seemed to improve. In April 2008 they rented their own home, and that’s where things turned dark again. That sense of safety, of being around family, someone watching your back, evaporated in their new surroundings. Sperry never slept. His nights and days began to blend together, punctuated only by the anger and restlessness that had him punching holes in the walls. Despite the fragile physical condition of his skull, where any kind of blow had the potential to cause permanent brain damage or kill him, Sperry found his anger spilling over to human targets. A small provocation led him to pounce on a young man in the parking lot of a Walmart.
And he tells me about the night in which he nearly killed a man. Unable to sleep, Sperry had been sitting up watching television when he heard something slam into his house. When he went to investigate he saw a man walking up to his door. Sperry immediately sprang toward the man, tackled him and held the knife he always carried over the man’s heart.
“I could’ve plunged it in him at any moment,” Sperry says, recalling the incident. But then the guy pointed toward a black cylinder in the yard. His tire. He had been making a turn on Sperry’s street when it came off the rim and rolled against the door of Sperry’s house. He had simply come to retrieve it. What he found instead was an enraged ex-Marine intent on keeping his security perimeter from being breached.
Sperry released his grip on the man’s shirt and sat back on the grass. The man grabbed the tire and sped off into the night on three tires and a rim shedding sparks. Sperry sat there—he can’t remember how long, maybe a few minutes or maybe a few hours—wondering what had happened to him, how every noise and movement had become a threat to him and his family.
Now, back here in this place, Sperry gets up from the dining room table, goes to the cupboard and gets the ingredients he needs to make Hannah a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He does this while telling me all the drugs he still has in his medicine cabinet, the stuff he needs to take daily just to function. Cathy sits quietly, uncomfortable. It took a long time for all of us to get here, to be sitting around his kitchen table talking. Tracking him down was a perpetual challenge. Then he would pop up on my e-mail or in a text message. There was always some kind of crazy excuse that told me he was still struggling: a car accident where he got T-boned and the phone was destroyed, the dog chewed the phone charger, and then he texted me one day to say he couldn’t make our telephone interview that day because his mother had died. That was true, as true as any of the other excuses may have been as well. His mother, with whom he always had a strained relationship, with a few exceptions, had contracted flulike symptoms and within a few days was dead. Sperry explained it to me later as “some kind of complications from the swine flu.” I asked if there were drugs or alcohol involved and he said he didn’t think so, but that she had had a hard life and he wanted to leave it at that. He said that he had forgiven her in the end and that she had learned from her child-rearing mistakes with him and his sisters and had given his younger half brother a wonderful childhood, filling him with goals and aspirations. During that time after his mother died, he understandably disappeared for nearly a month before we talked again.
As we sit at the Sperrys’ kitchen table, there are moments when the conversation is fluid and we laugh and moments when I feel I’m providing some value to both of them, closing some time or informational gaps by showing them the video of his injury in battle. But there are other moments when I feel I am just a reminder of the beginning of his fall, just an annoyance that everyone, even the dog, wishes would leave.
But everything we talked about, all the ponderings of the past, seems to have led up to this one powerful and uncomfortable truth: Sperry says he no longer feels love, not for his wife, nor—as he looks at Hannah pressing Play-Doh into the table—his beautiful blond-haired daughter.
Whether it was the small piece of metal that pierced his skull, slicing into his left frontal lobe and excising the very bit we insist makes us human, or the cumulative toll of all he had to see and do in his war, James Sperry says he cannot feel love.
“I felt love before,” he says insistently, “but now I just feel numb.”
He said as much to the local newspapers when they asked him about his injuries when he first came home. “I don’t love my wife,” he told them, though he didn’t mean for it to sound as cold as it did. She wasn’t at all happy about that, he admits. Cathy looks at him as though she’s considered these words so many times before and has come to peace with them.
“He’s going to need therapy to feel those emotions,” she says with a shrug. “I’d like to see him do more therapy,” she says. “When he actually seems happy it’s just stoned happy, it’s not real happiness.” But Sperry has resisted counseling, feeling that nothing more can be done.
“I can tell them how much I miss my friends and cry like it’s a confessional,” Sperry says, defending himself. “But I feel there’s nothing a doctor can tell me that’s going to reboot that part of my brain.”
I point to Hannah. “But do you feel the way other fathers feel about their daughters? Do you love her?”
