There were also very beautiful times and great times that we all had together. From group parties to beach days. Not all of it was yelling and fighting there were some great days in there. My anger was extreme I regret that more then anything I am deeply and truly sorry to Cathy for all that I put her threw emotionally. She is a very different person now she is very resourceful and strong willed. But at least in my presence I don’t see the passion she used to have for me or her art or photography. I miss that more then anything she was a very bubbly person around me and I have not seen her truly happy in years. I am sure other people have but not me. She use to love me so much that nothing would have broken it but war did and the way I handled all the pain I have had to endure from weekly migraines and vomiting so much that my teeth are thinning out and decaying, to my hips, shoulders, chest and knee to all the emotional trauma that lost of so many friends. My whole world-view has changed to one of utter disgust of the human kind. Not the people trying to get by, but the hierarchy that rule and exploit the world. I am extremely afraid and depressed of what will be left of this earth for my daughter. I still live in the house you visited. Cathy is living a half hour away. I try and see Hannah three days a week. She is why I’m trying to get better. I am going to go to a in patient treatment center in Georgia called the Shepherd Center. I need to do this for myself. How have you been Kevin? Hannah asks about you everyone once in a while. She still sleeps every night with the panda you got her.
By January, I get a message from Sperry that he has checked himself into the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia, as he said he would. The Shepherd Center is a not-for-profit hospital that specializes in research, treatment and rehabilitation for people with spinal cord and brain injury. Sperry seems a perfect candidate and seems upbeat about the prospects for himself.
A month later, he sends me another note about the center’s holistic approach to treating post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, which seems to mix the healing philosophies of both East and West.
February 2011 (Facebook message from Sperry to me)
The treatment has been great. They work on every aspect of your problems. They educate you on what happens to your brain after TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) and PTSD. Then you have groups on PTSD, adjustment to civilian life, cognitive functions, controlling anger. They have a physical therapist that works on whatever ever hurts and explores why and how to treat or strengthen. They have a warrior life coach that shows you how to change your thought process. Then you have doctors that just work on pain management and general care. They aso do funcitonal life skills, yoga, tai chi, acupuncture—just about everything.
I think about everything that James Sperry has been through and how he first wrote me during the middle of his own debilitating physical pain and mental chaos. Despite his embittered state, his feelings of being damaged, worthless and guilty for just being alive, he was still able to reach out to me with comfort for my own battlefield guilt. He’s also shared with me the real-time narrative of his own healing. For all his wounds and the horrors he’s experienced, I see the warrior still, a man whose humanity abides. Recognizing my small efforts on his behalf years ago, he returned the favor with an offer of redemption, helping protect me from what he knew to be the most unforgiving postwar enemy, ourselves. I smile when I see this self-portrait he posted on Facebook at the end of his treatment. The caption reads simply, “New and improved James.”
James is now a mentor with the Wounded Warrior Regiment and travels around the country helping other veterans to get treatment. After learning of his ordeal, President and Mrs. Obama invited James, Hannah and Cathy for a visit to the White House.
Chapter 4: Someone’s Not Listening
The evidence was mounting, but Marine Sergeant Leonard Shelton still didn’t believe he would actually go to war. He didn’t want to believe it. His unit was already deployed in the baking sands of the Saudi Arabian desert, the first potential combat deployment for the light armored infantry battalion that had just been activated six years earlier in 1985. Their LAV-25s were amphibious, eight-wheeled rapid-transit personnel carriers with a maximum speed of sixty miles per hour and were topped with a 25 mm cannon. They operated with a crew of three and could transport four to six Marines. Even though he was the commander of one of the LAV-25s, Shelton had never been in real combat before and was not prepared for what he was about to encounter.
“We were being kind of lazy in the back of the vehicles, trying to hide from the sun,” he says. “We weren’t taking it seriously. Our behavior showed we weren’t taking it seriously.”
Like all soldiers with time on their hands they would goof on each other mercilessly but then share stories about their homes and families. Shelton, a black kid from Cleveland, Ohio, says he joined the military as a way to escape a personal sense of confusion from events he suffered as a child—sexual abuse, he claimed, by a member of his own extended family. While the Marines weren’t a completely natural fit for him, he found they provided him with purpose and direction. He also found camaraderie and friendship with young men from places he likely would’ve never been exposed to. One of them was a lance corporal named Thomas Jenkins from the historical gold-mining town of Mariposa, California. Jenkins’s family was of pioneer stock. Jenkins himself was trained as an EMT and spent the summers fighting fires for the U.S. Forest Service.
Shelton says that when they were first training on the LAVs he and Jenkins would sometimes race their vehicles against each other when no one was watching. Their shenanigans continued in Saudi Arabia for a time. But then Alpha Company commander Captain Michael Schupp saw what was happening and gathered his men together.
“He put us in a
It wasn’t long before Shelton and his unit got to see the real face of war. It would be the first actual ground engagement of the Gulf War, the culmination of a coalition air campaign that had begun twenty-two days earlier. Shelton’s light armored infantry battalion, operating under the designation Task Force Shepherd, was dug in near the Kuwaiti border. They were miles ahead of the main fighting task force and their role was to be a trip wire of sorts, both an early warning and early challenge to any advancing Iraqi forces. On January 29, 1991, elements of three Iraqi divisions, two infantry and one tank, crossed the border into Saudi Arabia from Kuwait in a large attack designed to draw coalition forces into a ground battle. The movement triggered the American Marine recon teams and LAV units, which scattered along the border.
“This is the first time we were engaging in combat,” says Shelton. “There was lots of confusion, lots of firepower, lots of fog. The first engagement started at dusk when we were fired on by Iraqi tanks.”
The primary fighting took place along a perimeter the coalition forces called Observation Post 4. While Shelton’s LAV could lay down harassing fire, its 25 mm chain gun had little chance of penetrating the hulls of the Iraqi T-55 and T-72 main battle tanks.
