Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime

After months of army talk and job commiseration and, more recently, exultation at the conquering prowess of the five-year-olds he had been granted permission to coach at the rink despite his lack of a license, Alex and I seemed to our mutual surprise to have entered the ranks of each other’s closest friends. His loyalty, I had discovered, was hard-won but immense. He called regularly, kept up with the details of my life, told me stupid jokes when I seemed down, even grew a beard to match my own. But for all his efforts to explain how he could have believed the robbery was a training exercise, I still kept getting hung up on small details. In his lawn chair he was sunk into a very different slouch from the kind in the squad room years ago, his hat pulled low over his eyes, his lips popping on and off the mouth of his beer bottle to hide his nervousness. He had only recently begun trusting me with the more difficult details of his story.

“But,” I said, “I mean … you know what that means. You guys have talked about the bank.”

Alex made a pained noise through his teeth. “Well … I think he didn’t specifically say it, so it was kind of like—and I think that’s where the mind-set goes, where it was like—and I, like I said, I … You’re always under the impression that he wouldn’t do something wrong.”

Within a few months, after driving Alex to frustration by repeating the same questions over and over, after asking as many other people as I could think of, after reading thousands of pages of court documents, I would begin to see all the arguments about what Alex “knew” at each stage as serving mainly to illustrate that our conventional sense of “knowing” one thing or another was absurdly insufficient as a representation of the humongous junk wad of partially contradictory beliefs tangled in layers of self-justification and denial that constituted a mental state.

Law, I realized, had to file these wads into bins labeled with categories of knowledge and intent on an industrial scale that forbid unlimited attention to each one. I began almost to envy those who could just call Alex guilty and stop thinking about it. For them, arguments about his state of mind were pointless quibbles. What really mattered was what his nineteen-year-old Ranger incarnation now did: flip the phone closed, shove himself into the couch for the spring-launch to vertical, walk through the empty hall with flip-flops smacking his bare soles, and jog down the stairs—mad at the specialist, even more certain now that he would miss his flight, but outwardly unprotesting.

PFC Blum pushed through the stairwell door to the parking lot behind Charlie Company. The asphalt wavered in the heat of the August sun. PFC Palmer was already in the back of the Audi with the two Canadians. Blum climbed into the driver’s seat, next to Sommer.

It was a beautiful Pacific Northwest afternoon. Thin clouds pushed into the satiny blue sky as if through slits from another world. The road from battalion took them past the Stryker brigade barracks, the PX, the commissary, to the line of departing cars at the main gate. After the wave-through by the MPs, they were off Fort Lewis grounds. The freeway ran along the barbed-wire perimeter fence before leaving the forest that obscured the base interior. Barns and small trading posts drifted by on either side. Traffic thickened and slowed. Every minute that passed Blum counted against his chances of making his flight.

Sommer too was growing impatient. “Exit here,” he said abruptly.

The Audi swung off the freeway into a maze of side streets.

It was hard to keep up with all the specialist’s sudden orders to turn at approaching stoplights. PFC Blum worked at the clutch with his sandaled foot as he hunted with the stick for the invisible slots between gears. He feared stalling. Palmer and the Canadians were doing things in the backseat that he was too busy to pay attention to, even as he caught glimpses while whipping his head around to check blind spots and palming the wheel to cut across lanes.

“Most of the time,” Alex said as the first raindrops rattled my mother’s balcony’s pine boards, “people are like, why didn’t you notice what was going on in the back? But A, I didn’t know my way around Tacoma. B, there was a ton of traffic. C, I’d only been driving a stick shift for five months and was still learning. D, we were going on back roads to a place where I was absolutely lost. I was with someone who I totally respected and didn’t want to get lost with, so that’s another factor.”

“When you say people are always asking, what kind of people do you mean?”

“FBI guys, prosecutors.”

“What was going on in the back?”

“See, I don’t really know.”

In South Tacoma they hit a patch of construction that backed them up half a block. This neighborhood looked a lot like Denver: box stores, grassy medians, strip malls with dirty stucco walls. Hot wind blew through the open windows. Long-armed balloon men bowed and waved outside a string of car dealerships festooned with plastic flags. Road crews in orange vests ushered cars through one by one. Finally they emerged onto a clear stretch of frontage road. Beside them on the freeway, tankers lurched and braked above a glimmering ribbon of cars. Specialist Sommer directed Blum to cut left under the big green highway signs giving miles to Seattle and Portland. A block of warehouses and loading docks went by before the neighborhood turned residential. Telephone lines splayed overhead in the blue. Sommer thought he recognized a church he had flagged earlier as a landmark, realized he was mistaken, then recognized the right one.

Was it really possible that PFC Blum never noticed what was going on behind him?

As Alex talked, I found myself grasping for the kinds of analogical scientific explanations that had always served for me as reflexive responses to mystery. Rather than young men inside that silver Audi A4, maybe it was better to imagine five entangled waveforms, three struggling to pull on bulletproof vests and hooded sweatshirts below the sight of people in adjacent vehicles, one yelling commands, one stomping frantically at the clutch in flip-flops and flower-print shorts. Maybe it was only when the humongous junk wads of quantum probability inside their heads were measured, again and again, by prosecutors and judges and psychologists and cruelly adamant cousins, that they collapsed into the simplistic points that endured. Measurement changes what it measures; questions commit us to the answers we give. But maybe this was just a complicated way of saying that all Alex remembered, or all he could admit to himself that he remembered, was that he never saw the guns.

“There’s the alley,” Sommer said, pointing to a strange blue shed with a gabled roof and no windows. “Right up there.”

Gravel pinged under the wheels. On the left was a chain-link fence woven through with beige vinyl. On the right was a series of lean-to garages. Blum and Sommer stared through the windshield at the bank’s rear parking lot. The time was 5:11 p.m.

“That’s a lot of people,” observed Specialist Sommer.

Even now, Alex told me, whatever part of his mind did more than follow dumbly along had halfway managed to convince itself the game ended here.

Of course he’s not really going to do this. Sommer would never do this.

“What do you think?” Sommer said to the space behind Blum’s head.

“Maybe we should take a lap around the block and get a better idea of things,” came a voice from the back—PFC Palmer’s.

“Yeah,” added the voice of one of the Canadians. “We could look through the windows. See how many people are inside.”

In the parking lot, a steady trickle of civilians walked out to their cars, pushed buttons on keyless entries, climbed in. The bank was probably closing. Nothing, Blum felt certain now, was going to happen. He could go home and see his girlfriend. He could sleep in his own bed. He shifted the car into reverse.

PFC Blum did not know that all four of the others had stayed out late the night before practicing dry runs by flashlight on Noble Hill.

“Fuck it,” said a new voice from the back. “If we don’t do it now, we never will.”

There came the sound of a door unlatching, a small melodious chime.

PFC Blum’s gaze was directed toward Specialist Sommer, so his first glimpse into the strange new world pouring like gas through the opening rear door was of Sommer’s expressionless face. The specialist’s hands fumbled in the front pocket of his sweatshirt to pull out a laser-sighted pistol, then something black and flexible: a ski mask. Past him, through the right passenger window, the unmistakable barrel and wood stock of an AK-47 assault rifle accelerated into view, followed by a dark-clad body. Specialist Sommer pulled the mask down over his eyes. There was a flurry of shouting and movement. Doors slammed open, doors slammed shut. Blum was alone with the luxuriant hum of the still-running Audi.

Say your father takes you deep into a dangerous foreign country, then abandons you there with no means of getting out. Everything you believed is wrong. The sun does not rise. Jesus Christ robs a bank.

“When you were little,” Alex asked me, “did you ever get lost in the mall?”

The specialist was no longer beside PFC Blum to assure him that this was all okay. The specialist had crossed over into someplace else. Four figures in sweats and ski masks ran down the alley in ragged formation, empty duffels flapping, two with AK-47s held across their chests and two with dangling pistols. The last of them—Luke Elliott Sommer, soon to be distinguished on security-camera footage by his gray shirt—waved at an approaching pickup truck before running on. The truck braked hard. Behind the steering wheel, the terrified eyes and mouth of a middle-aged woman shrank away down the alley as the truck wove off wildly in reverse, bright red in the afternoon sun.

It was then that PFC Blum realized that he was in the strange position of deciding for himself what to do next. The sob of helpless remorse called up in him by the sight of this unfamiliar woman’s fear had triggered one thought I recognized as coming from the guy I knew: This is all wrong. I have to get out of here.

CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_15ee87d8-b261-5de6-8e86-39d15a459f75)

THOSE WHO ARE VERSED IN THE SCIENCES (#ulink_15ee87d8-b261-5de6-8e86-39d15a459f75)

Alex and I don’t much resemble family. As a kid I was skinny, angular, and odd, a classic math nerd. Alex was lantern-jawed, fit, and popular, a classic hockey jock. The more we talked about his story, though, the more we discovered unexpected affinities between us. It began to seem that at the far extremes of nerd and jock there was some kind of strange convergence. After a lifetime of pursuing our childhood dreams with single-minded focus, he and I had both ended up as naive tools of forces far beyond our ken, two very different kinds of muscle.

Growing up, I had always been so daunted by the complexity I saw laid out in the face whose voice I was listening to—twitching nostrils, forced smile, tongue folding back over withheld laughter, secrets and simplifications and lies—that eye contact felt like two live wires touching. Math was safer. Massive shapes interlocked in the darkness with comforting impersonality. Evangelicals like to offer up the intricacy of the eyeball as evidence of intelligent design. For me, mathematical order so far surpassed the haphazard mess of the body that biological typologies struck me as arbitrary, ugly, absurd. Math was simply true. Like antennae poking out of a fogbank, surface facts always suggested deeper purposes, buried cities. Diving for their hidden interconnections was as much a form of prayer as anything I’ve heard my religious friends describe. But unlike religious faith, mathematical faith was rewarded with concrete affirmation: after plunging for hours through the gloom, going so deep your breath ran out over and over, forcing you to retreat back to the light gasping and confused, you would suddenly see it—perfect, glorious, gigantically indifferent to the mind that had stumbled on it. Paul Erdös, the itinerant, speed-addicted Hungarian who pioneered modern combinatorics, said of particularly pretty proofs, “That’s one from the book.” He meant the book of God.

Adults reacted to my talent as if I had a fabulous occult power. Soon I too was seduced. I’d peer down from the Mile High Stadium bleachers at 70,000 Broncos fans dropping off in murmuring tiers, or squeeze into the mall escalator’s infinite extrusion of perfumed blouses and curls, or cut between skiers under pine trees fat with oblong pads of snow, and out of nowhere glory would fill my whole throat: a web of field lines and force vectors shimmered out through everything, and no one could see it but me. “Statistically speaking,” I would think, “I am probably the smartest person here.”

Whenever Alex told me about his preparations in high school for basic training, I recognized the loneliness and glory of my own childhood self-absorption. Like me, he perplexed those closest to him. Like me, he sustained himself with fantasies of a world that would celebrate his idiosyncrasies—in his case, Ranger Battalion, where he was sure he would finally encounter true believers like himself who stood ready to give up their lives for the people and the country they loved. The culture he encountered there may have frightened him at first with its frank, relentless focus on killing, but it also gratified and expanded his sense of myth. He is lucky never to have faced the reality of war, which I imagine does for military idealism approximately what grad school does for the pure love of knowledge as an end in itself.

The most important mathematical results of the twentieth century concerned the limits of mathematical knowledge. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem showed that not all true theorems could be proved; the Church-Turing thesis led to the understanding that not all problems could be solved algorithmically. The rest of the world shrugged—of course there were some things you couldn’t do with math. One look at the spacey, stuttering basket cases who were good at it suggested that interpersonal communication, fashion, and hygiene were among them. But for mathematicians and scientists of all stripes, the blow to their faith in the descriptive power of their language was shocking. The relation of scientists and nonscientists to the inexplicable is very different. What Keats called negative capability, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” is a daily necessity for social beings. We won’t ever understand why people make the crazy choices they make, love the awful music they love, believe in astrology or baseball or God, but having good manners entails accepting these mysteries. Art entails producing them. Scientists are often bad at both. After leaving the University of Colorado for an abortive two-and-a-half-year effort at a normal high school experience, I started at Stanford as a shy seventeen-year-old with a suitcase full of Nine Inch Nails T-shirts and combat boots and a schedule full of graduate seminars, utterly baffled by actual human beings, utterly confident in my ability to model them algorithmically.

I wasn’t the first to overestimate myself in this way. After the wild enthusiasm of the field’s early years in the 1950s—the efforts at representation of the world’s entire store of knowledge in logical form, the gradual comprehension that logical propositions were too rigid and inflexible to have much predictive use, the blind alley of “fuzzy logic,” the probabilistic models of belief that grew to dominate the field—artificial intelligence researchers came to understand that the big problems of memory, reasoning, language, and consciousness were much more complex than they had imagined. By the time I went knocking on those researchers’ doors, breaking naive undergraduates of their hazy dreams of programming themselves a computer friend had become a distasteful but necessary part of the job. The fundable problems were the kinds you could get traction on: recognition of handwritten zip codes on envelopes, the parsing of Internet search queries, automated flight control of helicopters. The first major project I was invited to participate in sought to compute Nash equilibria in structured strategic scenarios. Funding came from the Department of Defense.

It was an exciting time to be in Silicon Valley. Google’s first server, scaffolded on rainbow-colored Legos, rested in a display case in the Gates Building basement. Movies and magazines were awash in romanticized hacker imagery. We few undergrads who had bulled our way into research were a club every bit as proud, in our way, as the Rangers. When we put together presentation slides for the yearly funding meeting with a stodgy, uncomprehending naval officer and a few of his staff, we all laughed together at how shamelessly we were using clip-art icons of tanks and soldiers instead of the usual abstract blue circles as nodes in our directed acyclic graphs. The joke was on the military: we were a bunch of apolitical nerds funneling away their bomb money to do awesome mathematics, all of which was far too theoretical—practically aesthetic in its aims—to have any chance of military application.

Eight months into the war in Afghanistan, when the legendary Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a $1 million prize for the winning robotic vehicle in an unmanned race across the California desert, I watched hundreds of casually pacifist nerds like me in computer science departments around the country leap into an excited spasm of whiteboard sketching, number crunching, and microcontroller programming. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t even bothered, aside from feeling a jealous pang or two at how much cooler their projects were than my own. If you have ever done technical research, you know just how right