Don't tell mom, they agreed. It would only worry her.
Within days of arriving in Iraq, Bryan "Nick" Spry had been shot in the flak jacket during a firefight, and then the Humvee he was riding in was rocked by a roadside bomb. The first person he called was his big brother, Mike.
Nick, an Army private, was shaken and scared but not injured. There was no way he was going to die in Iraq now, he told his brother, not after he had survived all that.
But Mike was worried. Nick's war had just begun.
"Alright, but don't get cocky," Mike said that day in January 2004. "Keep your head about you, and do your job. Don't think you're invincible."
They had always been close, growing up together on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Nick was about 7 when he started slipping into his brother's bedroom at night. Carrying his He-Man blanket, he would mutter something about nightmares or not being able to sleep, and Mike would scoot over in bed to make room.
From time to time, "I'd call him a baby, and he'd go sleep in his room," said Mike, now 23. "But he'd always come back."
In kindergarten, Nick would even sneak out to visit Mike down the hall in his fourth-grade class. Their parents had divorced when they were young, and Mike was the only one who knew how jarring it could be to shuttle between homes every other weekend.
An inseparable childhood
For their much of their childhood in Chestertown, the Spry boys were inseparable. And for a while they were certain their futures would be just as entwined. They would join the Army together, to watch each others' backs, just as they had done when they played soldier in the woods behind their home.
Then Mike entered high school and discovered what he could do with a baseball bat. As he grew, the towering home runs carried farther and farther until they won him a scholarship to Shepherd College in West Virginia. Soon, Mike was on a different trajectory, one that took him away from home, away childhood dreams of becoming a soldier.
Nick tried to follow. But his baseball swing was nowhere near as sweet, and by high school his childhood fantasy of joining the military had hardened into inevitability.
He looked like a soldier even as a young teenager, with a square jaw and broad shoulders made strong by summers laying bricks for his father's masonry business. In the military, he told people, he'd become a scout, or a sniper. He certainly could shoot a gun. When his stepfather took him to the rifle range, Nick would take the scope off his rifle and still knock down the metallic rabbits.
Mike was away at college when Nick started eating lunch with the Army recruiters who hung out in the high school cafeteria. He wasn't interested in joining up for college money. He was going to fight in the Iraq war that began in the spring of his senior year.
Nick believed in the recruiting slogans on the posters he pinned to his bedroom wall, and said he wanted to fight with the best. Which is how he convinced his parents to sign the consent form allowing him to enlist at 17. The earlier he signed up, the recruiter said, the better his chances of joining the 82nd Airborne, the elite paratroopers who jumped into Normandy on D-Day.
"We tried to convince him to wait until he was 18 years old," said his mother, Beverly Fabri. " . . . It was the first time I ever saw him with a real passion for something."
Two weeks after his high school graduation, Nick left for basic training in Fort Benning, Ga.
"I am now becoming a warrior in a class that most will not understand," he wrote in his journal. "Blood, sweat, tears, the brotherhood. . . . The integrity, the pride the patriotism, the honor. . . . All are real and all are part of being an American soldier."
An 'unspeakable' pain
While Nick prepared for war, Mike aimed for the big leagues. He had set hitting records on the baseball team at Shepherd, and the summer Nick left home, he signed a minor league contract with the River City Rascals in O'Fallon, Mo. At the end of his first season, the San Diego Padres invited him to a winter tryout.
Leaving home for Iraq was harder than Nick had imagined. Saying goodbye to his girlfriend "was a new kind of hurt," he wrote in his journal.
"Leaving Mike was unspeakable."
The war was harrowing from the start. The bullet that hit his flak jacket ripped off his name tag. Three days later, the roadside bomb went off, cracking his helmet with shrapnel.
"God, I am so tired," he wrote a couple weeks later from Baghdad. " . . . The missions just keep stacking up. Haven't had much sleep. I don't know how to cope with things. I have talked to God and I feel at peace, but still every time I leave the wire, it gets worse. You are scared (expletive), not knowing where the next bomb is or where they will pop out at you."
On the 34th day of his tour, a bridge gave way and the Humvee Nick, 19, was driving plunged into a canal. The other passengers made it out safely, the military told his family, but his chin strap was caught on the truck's turn signal as it the truck filled with water.
His body was flown home for burial in a Chestertown field, under a tombstone that reads: "Soldier to the End. Brother to the End."
The funeral fell on the same day as Mike's Padres tryout, which of course he missed.
It has been more than a year since Nick died. Spring and baseball season are here again. As he spent the winter working out three to four hours a day in the hopes of another tryout, Mike heard the low murmur of a persistent thought: maybe he should join the Army instead.
But what stops him is this: he doesn't want his mother to worry about another son at war.
