Father remembers Joseph Perry

RIPON - Surrounded by the faded patches, plaques and badges accumulated over his long Army career, Everett "Butch" Perry leans over a table and studies photos of his son, Sgt. Joseph Perry.

"I told him once that he'd seen more in one tour than I had seen in 22 years of service," he said with a chuckle.

The two Perrys, father and son, both joined the Army right out of high school. Both spent their first few months in the Army at the same post, Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., where they learned to march, polish boots, handle weapons and follow orders.

But after this, the stock footage of any soldier's story, their paths diverged.

Joseph Perry, 23, a military policeman with the Army's 18th Airborne Corps, was riding in the turret of a Humvee when he was shot and killed by a sniper in Baghdad on Oct. 2. Two months away from the end of his second, and probably last, combat tour, he was one of the first casualties in what would become one of the deadliest months of the war. He had been in the Army less than five years.

Soldiering in a different era, the closest his father ever came to combat in his 22-year Army career was in 1991, during the Persian Gulf War. Everett Perry's unit prepared for deployment but never left.

"We never hit the ground, because it was over too fast," he said, with just a hint of regret.

Growing up in Del Norte County, in the extreme northwestern area of California, Everett Perry, 47, had vague plans of attending college, but he just didn't have the grades.

So in 1976, rather than take a job in Del Norte's troubled timber industry, he joined the Army when he was 17 years old. Retiring in 1998 as a sergeant first class, he came to Ripon and established himself as a Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps instructor at Ripon High School, where he has remained since.

Most of Perry's stint in the Army occurred between the end of the Vietnam War, which raised the threshold for deployment of U.S. forces overseas, and the Persian Gulf War, in which the U.S. suffered relatively few casualties.

"Almost my entire career was during peacetime," he said. "We were worried about (the Soviets) coming across the border, but they never did."

His son's circumstances, both before and after his enlistment, were the opposite.

Remembered by Matthew Davis, an English teacher at Granite Hills High School in El Cajon, as a good student who was "very serious," Joseph Perry somehow didn't seem suited for a quiet life.

"Baseball was too slow for him, football was too slow for him, but then he found hockey," his father says, smiling faintly at the memory of his son floating over the ice to body-check opponents. "He loved action."

So in 2002, when Joseph Perry decided to follow his father into the Army, he went where the action would be.

"He called me and said he wanted to be an airborne military policeman," his father recalls. "He understood he'd be deployed often; that's what he wanted."

And Joseph Perry was good at soldiering. Just five days into his most recent deployment to Iraq, his squad and a unit of Iraqi police were ambushed by insurgents. According to a letter sent to Everett Perry and military documents, eyewitness accounts of the incident report Joseph Perry broke from cover to get a better angle on the ambushers. In doing so, he shot and killed an insurgent aiming a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher at his squad leader and the platoon's medic.

His company commander, Cpt. Stephanie Bagley, later said Perry had saved their lives. For that, he was awarded a Bronze Star with V for Valor.

Everett Perry's feelings at the time were a muddle of pride and worry, says his wife, Melissa Perry, who is Joseph's stepmother.

"Butch was honored that Joe went into the Army," she said. "But there's always that fear."

The decades Everett Perry spent preparing for a war he never fought left him wondering about his own mettle. Ten years ago, he says, he would have envied his son's exploits.

"But now there's guilt," he said. "Guilt because I wasn't there with him."

Melissa Perry, also a teacher, says when her husband heard the news of his son's death, he showed up at her classroom door, sobbing. She knew immediately what had happened; Nothing else could have cracked his bearing.

"He can put on his game face, but when it's family, he's devastated," she said.

Often, Everett Perry grieves through a professional lens.

He places some of the blame for his son's death on the Army being poorly equipped for fighting an urban insurgency. Humvees are too vulnerable to protect soldiers who sit for hours at checkpoints in the shadow of tall buildings, he says. His son was an obvious target.

"Take out the heavy gunner," he says of the turret-mounted gun Joseph Perry was operating when he was killed. "Everyone pours out of the Humvee to give him aid, and then you pick them off."

Though troubled by the way the war is being fought, Everett Perry says his son's death hasn't shaken his support for it. Nor has he had second thoughts about his involvement in the JROTC, which he says is about self-discipline and success, not recruitment. One thing has changed, however.

"When I taught the kids about the uniform and what it means, I would remind them that there are people coming home to be buried in it," he said. "Now one of those people is my son."

As for his two other sons, Tyler, 15, and Devin, 13, Everett Perry says that if they decide to follow their father and older brother into the military, he won't hold them back. But they would face one obstacle.

"Mom's already said that if they choose to do it, she's grabbing their legs and holding on tight," he said. "Which I think all moms should do."

Joseph Perry took dozens of photos and videos in Iraq - poses of mock bravado, stolen quiet moments and frozen frames of the war he was fighting. From these and from the stories told by his son's fellow soldiers, Everett Perry says, he's learned something about his son and about the man he became.

"My son was a much better soldier than I was. He had to be."

From the Rippon Record

Related Link:
Joseph Perry remembered

Related Link:
Joseph Perry remembered

Related Link:
Comrades honor Joseph Perry at Ft. Bragg memorial service

Related Link:
Joseph Perry slain by sniper