Kevin Sites - The Things They Cannot Say

Sperry’s wife, “Cathy” (she asked that her real name not be used in this book), joins us at the dining room table. They were sweethearts since freshman year of high school and actually joined the Marines together on an early-enlistment package their junior year.

She wanted to be a photojournalist but didn’t get the occupation guarantee in writing from the recruiter. She ended up in diesel generator repair instead and worked stateside, never deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan. Sperry wanted infantry, and, of course, got it. I open my computer and play for them the video I shot the day Sperry was wounded. (Watch the video of Lance Corporal James Sperry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7hzC1vEBxU&feature=plcp.) This is the first time he’s ever seen it, but strangely, for Cathy, it’s the second. She first saw it while doing her post–boot camp military occupational specialty (MOS) training as a diesel mechanic at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. She was walking back to her quarters when my NBC News field report from Fallujah began playing on a large-screen TV at an outside courtyard. Though his face was obscured by blood and bandages, Cathy says she knew it was James immediately. Now, all these years later, they are transfixed by the images, watching as my camera zooms in on the maroon-colored plastic rosary hanging out of Sperry’s pants.

When I first shot the video, I had assumed it was Sperry’s talisman, a lucky charm like the ones many soldiers carried into battle. But one night as we talked on the telephone I learned there was much more to the story. In fact, it was a touchstone to one of several critical events in Iraq that Sperry acknowledges changed him from an earnest and hopeful teenager into a stone-hearted Marine.

Sperry’s best friend in the Marines was a Mexican-American kid named Fernando Hannon, whom he met during basic training at Camp Pendleton. While Hannon didn’t plan on making the military a career, he did want to follow in the footsteps of his father, Spurgeon, a Vietnam War veteran. At six foot four, Hannon was a gentle giant, Sperry said, a sweet soul who prayed daily that he would never have to kill anyone during his deployment in Iraq. Hannon’s family meant everything to him and when his sister contracted cancer right before their deployment to Iraq, Hannon left Camp Pendleton without permission to see her. Not wanting his friend to get into trouble, Sperry found ways to cover for him until he got back.

While he wanted to make his father proud by his military service, Hannon’s real dream was to become a chiropractor and marry his high school sweetheart, a girl named Ruth Ponce. Ponce was apparently so smitten with Hannon that she asked him to their senior prom. Hannon, it seems, was just as taken with her. Sperry said that Hannon’s favorite subject was his future wedding with Ponce. To Hannon, a wedding represented the happiest moment in a person’s life and he had been saving up for his, even before he met Ruth. Hannon told Sperry he had already amassed $48,000 for the big day, from the odd jobs and part-time work that he had been doing since he was a child.

“He was like a woman,” Sperry said, remembering their talks with a smile. “He would describe in detail the way the hall would be decorated, what kind of colors, even the type of cake. He said he never played army when he was little. He played prince and princess. That’s what he dreamed about more than anything.”

Unlike Sperry, Hannon was religious, raised Catholic. He prayed frequently and even brought a rosary from home when he deployed to Iraq. Hannon was also adamant about not wanting to kill anyone, so, Sperry said, he did his best to help his friend avoid pulling the trigger. While their company, India, was primarily deployed outside Fallujah in a former schoolhouse in the nearby village of al-Karma, Sperry and Hannon would frequently be ordered to guard traffic control point #8, or what was commonly known as the Cloverleaf, an elevated loop road that provided a passageway both into and out of Fallujah. Late afternoon on August 14, 2004, Sperry and Hannon were both on guard duty at the Cloverleaf. Initially, Hannon was assigned to the more dangerous post, facing into Fallujah, where insurgents were still in control and often sent suicide car bombers to attack the Marine position. Sperry was assigned to the opposite post, facing the road that led to Baghdad. Sperry switched with Hannon that day, as he sometimes had before, taking the inside post knowing it would be more likely to see action. This would spare Hannon from potentially having to take a life. But on this night the violence came from the outside, a suicide car bomber driving from Baghdad toward Fallujah and the very place where Hannon stood guard.

“There was a huge explosion,” Sperry said, “and the entire forward post was gone. I ran over to it after some of the smoke cleared. I saw Hannon on the side of the road. Both arms and legs were broken. He had shrapnel in his chest and one of his eyeballs was gone.”

But even with all his wounds, Hannon asked after another Marine, wondering if he was hurt. Geoffrey Perez, a buddy of Hannon and Sperry since boot camp, was killed in the blast. Hannon would die on the medevac flight to Baghdad, though Sperry wouldn’t learn of his best friend’s death until hours later.

While Hannon was choppered out, Sperry stayed on post at the Cloverleaf through the night. When darkness fell the post came under attack again. Insurgents fired 81 mm mortars all around them. Sperry says the rounds were getting so close that dust was shaking from the building where they were taking cover.

“You never really feel safe, but after a while you feel like you just want to stop running,” he recounted with a weary eloquence.

As the shelling continued, and with Perez’s death and Hannon’s soon-to-be-fatal injuries weighing heavily on him, Sperry began to lose his will to live. He unbuckled the chin strap to his Kevlar helmet and placed it on the 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] “Outside the wire” is an American military term used to denote the defensive perimeter surrounding any type of forward operating base. Inside the wire is considered a protected space, outside the wire unprotected.

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.