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

“I was really interested,” Norm explained to me. “He was in Battle of the Bulge, he was in D-Day plus one or two, a lot of the nastiest shit. He got demoted for punching a superior, because he wasn’t really good with rules. He said, ‘When you’re in a battle, most of these pussies wouldn’t even fire their rifle. Your fighting force of a hundred, it might be a force of twenty or forty, because most guys shied from the fight.’ I guess that’s why Dad was exposed on a fifty-caliber machine gun, because he wasn’t afraid to shoot and get shot at. There were three stories he told me.”

Norm launched them across the table the way his father had, as if daring me to blink.

“He and his best buddy went out for a smoke. It was a pretty active area. They were leaning against this tree, and then all you heard was a machine gun. His buddy got cut in half.” Norm traced a diagonal line across his torso.

“Another one: It was early in the morning, before sunrise. Germans, they carry these lanterns, so if you see a lantern outside the perimeter when you’re on watch, you don’t ask any questions. You shoot. So he saw one, shot, soldier goes down, next morning it turns out it was an African American guy in his own platoon that he had killed.

“Let’s see, the next one was … Oh. You see it in these old World War Two films, where they’ve got this farmhouse surrounded and there’s a bunch of Germans inside. They’re shooting, they’re lobbing mortars, they’re throwing grenades, and the place bursts into flames and these Germans come running out on fire. They’re saying, ‘Mama, mama.’ You just pick one out and you shoot ’em. He went up afterward and checked their papers, and they were twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-year-old Hitler Youths.

“Oh, right,” Norm said, “there was one more. He and another guy, they killed all these Germans. There’s this pit, they’re just going to throw all these bodies in. He said it was a hundred degrees out, it was freaking stinking to high heaven. He said, ‘I got the arms, my buddy’s got the legs. One, two …’” Norm mimed swinging. “Both the guy’s arms pulled off. Dad was sitting there holding two arms.” He dropped the tough-guy act and gave me a look. “How do you relate to that shit?”

To Norm, these stories were yet another wall between himself and a father who had taken the whole family to all of Al Junior’s high school football games but had never attended more than one or two of Norm’s baseball and hockey games. When he passed sanitized versions on to his children years later, it seemed only fitting to burnish them a little, as tribute to the grandfather they would never have a chance to meet. He didn’t expect them to become objects of lasting fascination. But Alex thought they were awesome. He told them to any friend who would listen.

A recruiter first called Alex in December, having gotten his number from Andrew. Over the ensuing months they met about half a dozen times at the recruitment center in the strip mall across from the Family Sports Ice Arena, where Alex had first started skating so many years before. Soon he told his dad the recruiter wanted to meet him too.

“So we went to the recruiter,” Norm recalled, “Sergeant So-and-so, a big studly handsome guy who was Alex’s new hero. I tried to be open-minded. I said, ‘Okay, Alex’s goal is to be a Ranger.’ The guy says, ‘Yeah, everyone’s goal is to be a Ranger.’ I said, ‘Can you tell us some statistics about what the chances are?’ He says, ‘No, that’s classified.’ I said, ‘Well, would you say it’s very unlikely?’ He says, ‘Yeah, it’s very unlikely.’ I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Certainly Alex has asked these questions. Certainly Alex knows that this hill is much taller than most people are going to be able to climb.’”

Norm liked Sergeant So-and-so. He has always respected obvious physical fitness, and he appreciated the sergeant’s hard-assed realism. It did not then occur to him that this was exactly the kind of reverse psychology that kids with hero complexes respond to best.

“I thanked the guy. He was candid. He didn’t pull any punches. I appreciated that. We went outside. Alex says, ‘Dad, are you going to be disappointed if I join the army?’”

At this, something happened in Norm’s face that I had never seen before. He was looking to me for recognition of how crushing it was to hear a son ask if you were disappointed in him, an experience I had not yet come close to having myself.

“I said, ‘Of course not. My concern is just to help you see outside your tunnel vision that this is your calling in life. Maybe you should consider going to school for two years and then joining the army.’ He said, ‘Dad, I really want to do this.’ I said, ‘Okay, buddy, look’—we’re driving home now—I said, ‘I’ll give you twenty thousand bucks and you can travel in Europe for a year or two. Get some worldly experience. Come back and see how you feel about joining the army.’ He said, ‘I have no interest in that.’”

Over the next few weeks the full interrogative weight of Norm’s social world came to bear on Alex. The results are apparent in their letters to Judge Burgess.

Jeff “Bud” Ahbe, Alex’s boss at the hockey camp, where he coached kids between the ages of six to ten: I questioned Alex personally … he said this was what he wanted to do. Richard Bell, family friend: During conversations prior to Alex’s enlistment it became clear he wanted to serve his country … proudly accepted the inherent risks. Becca Casarez, family friend: … long discussion regarding his future … very confident in his decision … proud to be a Ranger. Frank and Barbara Kelley, neighbors whose house Alex tended when they were gone: Visited us just prior to entering the military … determined to become part of the armed forces.

Norm’s final gambit was to arrange for Alex to have lunch with his friend and colleague Bill Hemphill, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army who had commanded an infantry company in Vietnam and gone through Ranger School himself. Hemphill’s greatest point of pride was that despite ample opportunity he had never gotten a single one of his men killed. The plan was for him to play the realist for Alex, as Norm could not do himself.

In about a year and a half, Hemphill too would be writing a letter to Judge Burgess of the District Court of Western Washington.

I pointed out that, as a young man, he would be training with soldiers who were physically and mentally more mature and who might have combat experience. I actually tried to dissuade him—or at least delay him—from Ranger Training. I left the lunch convinced that this young man would make an excellent soldier and would uphold the great traditions of the Rangers. I remarked to my wife that Alex was the type of young man one could feel secure was protecting our country and who would make a difference.

By the time April rolled around, Norm had more or less resigned himself to having a son in the war. He had even begun to feel some pride in Alex’s determination to serve his country. It was a tough, thankless choice, but it was Alex’s to make. When Alex signed the 11X/Airborne Ranger contract the day after his eighteenth birthday, it didn’t come as a surprise.

The other big development that April did: Alex fell in love.

When I first left a voicemail for Anna Dudow, now a nurse at Children’s Hospital Colorado, she texted back a week and a half later to apologize for the delay, explaining that it had taken her some time to get her feelings under control.

She didn’t strike me as someone who often struggled with her feelings when we met at a coffee shop a few days later. Brisk, blond, and very small in stature, Anna struck me instead as a woman who had become wearily expert in convincing professors, coaches, salesmen, doctors, clients, patients, and students not to dismiss her as “cute.” At Littleton High School she had been just as much a jock as Alex, an accomplished gymnast with perfect side and straddle splits who could pull a layout backflip when they tossed her in the air on the varsity cheer squad.

Alex used to love telling the tale of their meeting. One dreary morning in April, he crawled beneath a table in the school library to catch up on all the sleep he had been missing between hockey practices every night and road marches every morning, then woke up to a sandaled foot six inches from his nose. It had been simple interest, a motion requiring no decision at all, to reach out and circle the ankle with his fingers. The foot jerked in his hand. Whoa: it was alive! He bent up each painted toe in sequence. After a few seconds a head peeked down—blond, pretty, shy, quizzical. A flash of a smile and then the head went back up, embarrassed. He began playing with the knob above the heel.

When I asked her about it, Anna remembered it well. “First of all,” she said, laughing, “to catch Alex in the library was, I feel, something very rare. And of course he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing in a library setting. He was sitting underneath my table being just a total … being Alex. I don’t know why I even bothered to acknowledge him. I mean, who sits underneath the table at the library? He was just a total … he was funny.”

At the time, Alex had already asked someone to the prom, just as friends: a deaf classmate named Kathleen who had been assigned as his volleyball and badminton partner in gym class. This was the latest in a series of efforts at teenage good citizenship. The previous summer he had knocked on the front door of a younger kid whom a large group had bullied at a party to apologize to him and his startled parents. In the fall, after discovering an old friend passed out on a toxic blend of alcohol and antianxiety medication in a back bedroom at a hot tub party, he had sucked the vomit from the friend’s throat and saved his life, and he continued to pay him visits and check up on him long after other friends fell away. He considered this the gentlemanly conduct demanded of a soon-to-be Army Ranger—“Gallantly will I show the world that I am a specially selected and well-trained soldier,” reads the Ranger Creed. When Kathleen told him that he should just take his new girlfriend, he wouldn’t hear of it. One of his buddies would take Anna. They would all go together. It would be fun.

“I was like, look, we were just going as friends, I honestly don’t mind if you take Anna instead. I can save my dress for my junior prom,” Kathleen wrote to me a few weeks later over Gmail chat from Dayton, Ohio, where she recently married and works in accounting. “But he insisted. Wanted to show me a good time.”

“Was the night fun at all or just hopelessly awkward?”

“Haha oh gosh. Very awkward. Especially in the limo. I sat next to Alex, and he’s chatting away, casually puts his arm around me, and Anna (of course, in the same prom group!) is just shooting death stares at me. They were this popular senior group of kids that I just saw from afar. They were definitely the cool kids that had a good time and here I was just a goody two-shoes tagging along awkwardly. I thought the dancing might be awkward, but Alex spent a lot of time in the bathroom, so I just danced alone.”

Anna too looks back on that night with humor, but in the moment her feelings were desperate. She and Alex had so little time.

“Our relationship went from zero to a thousand miles an hour in point two seconds,” she told me. “We were psycho for each other. We spent every minute we could together. I don’t think it was him going into the army. I think it would still have gone that fast even if he’d been going away to college at CU.”

Alex’s enlistment was already a fait accompli when they met. After graduation in June, they had only a month until he had to report to basic training. They went for a lot of long drives together in Norm’s black Jeep Cherokee, watched a few movies, but mostly they hung out with Andrew and Jenny and Alex’s guy friends around fire pits in one or another of their backyards. The group had known each other for years and fed perfectly off each other’s energy. Alex was both the most fun and the most responsible, staying sober—he was on a strict no-alcohol, no-sugar diet for basic—and driving everyone home safely from parties. His loyalty to his friends was incredible. Everyone relied on Alex. Anna had dated guys before, but Alex made it obvious she had only ever been playing around. He made her laugh harder than any guy ever had, but he also treated her with more respect than any guy ever had. He was handsome and popular. Up to thirty people from school attended his hockey games; his team was neck-and-neck for top ranking in the state. He had a touchingly close relationship with his family too, especially his father and his little brother and sister.

“It was strange how much my parents trusted him,” Anna said. “I’m still not allowed to have boys sleep over when I’m at my parents’ house, but for some reason he was allowed to stay, and I was allowed to go over there. I think they fell in love with him as fast as I did. They were totally okay with us not being seen for days, because they knew I was in good hands. It was really nice how well he meshed into my life and my family and how well I meshed into his.”

The only hitch was the army. No one in Anna’s world knew anything about it. Alex tried to prepare her for what life would be like once he left: weeks at a time without phone calls, months without visits. To show her the kind of work he would be doing, he screened his favorite movie for her, Black Hawk Down, about a 1993 operation conducted in Mogadishu by Rangers and Delta Force operators. It was obvious how inspired he was by this display of military expertise, the fast-roping and room clearing and hand signals and jargon, all of which he eagerly explained to her as it arose, but when the bodies started to mount, Anna couldn’t help expressing some misgivings. Alex hugged her to him on the couch and told her not to worry. He loved her; he would always come back to her. Though he tried to play it casually, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen, it was the first time either of them had said it. Thrilled, Anna told him she loved him too.

“Everything was so fast and so perfect between us that I just completely ignored everything bad,” she said. “I literally ignored it right up until the moment when they came and picked him up.”

Years passed. Anna graduated from LHS, made the cheer squad at the University of Colorado, pledged at a sorority, and completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She coached cheer at a Denver gym for a while, then went to nursing school and landed the job at Children’s. Through it all, she continued to think about Alex. Her parents did not want her talking to me. She wasn’t so sure it was a good idea either.

“It’s hard not wanting to go back to him,” she explained. “All of my relationships now, I’m always comparing everybody to him. He was amazing. He made me feel … he made me feel. If he’d stayed in the army, I don’t know if we would have made it, because I’m sure that would have been hard too. That kid probably would have done it forever if he’d been able to. I don’t know if I could have handled that. But I might have. So that’s hard. Nothing broke us up. It’s not like we stopped loving each other, or got mad at each other, or something happened between him and me. He treated me like a fucking princess. You know that stupid movie The Notebook? That was our life. We. Were. Perfect.”

Alex spent his final month at home in Greenwood Village giddy with the knowledge that he was army property already, halfway to becoming the man he had always wanted to be. Not only was he about to kick some serious terrorist ass, he was dating the love of his life and planned to marry her. He trained harder than ever for basic, played a last few hockey games, and took advantage of his remaining weeks of freedom to goof off in high style. Many of Littleton High School’s students drove to graduation in the BMWs and Mercedes they had been given as graduation presents; Alex drove his dad’s ride-on lawn mower. At a final party with his teammates for the Littleton Hawks, while the rest of them drank and smoked and played poker, bragging about the junior hockey teams they would be playing for in Canada next year, Alex charged into the kitchen stark naked and dove under the table to call in pretend airstrikes using his fist as a radio.

“We had a barbecue for Alex the day before he left,” Norm recalled near the end of our lunch. “It was sort of a happy/sad deal.”

By some quirk of army scheduling, the day before Alex left happened to be the Fourth of July. “Forty or fifty people came by. Some friends, some coaches, some teachers and administrators from his school who had all just taken to him.” Norm shrugged. “He was an easy kid to like. Anna and two of his best friends stayed up with him afterward. We watched a couple of movies. Four-thirty in the morning, I think it was, two guys in uniform came and got him. As soon as they showed up, Alex was gone within a minute. Maybe ten words exchanged. You know, ‘I’m Alex’s dad.’ ‘We’re here to pick up your son.’ They don’t give a flying fuck.”

It was a rare moment of bitterness from Norm. I asked him how it felt to have Alex gone.

“You know, it’s like anything else in life. So-and-so is going to die, because they’re a hundred years old and they have cancer, and you’re ready for it until it happens, and then you realize there’s no way you could be ready for it. Anna’s crying. His friends are bummed out. Everyone just goes their separate ways.”

I nodded. We chewed in silence for a second. The restaurant was empty now except for us and a few dusty shafts of late-afternoon light.

“How’s that?” Norm asked.

I thought he was asking about his story. The truth was that I was moved and astonished that Norm was talking to me like this, but I tried to answer with manly restraint. “Pretty sad,” I said.

“That calzone,” clarified Norm, looking uncomfortable.

“Oh,” I said. “It’s good.”

“I’ll tell you what, Ben. Of the people who go into the military, Alex was probably as well prepared mentally and physically as anybody ever is. He did his homework. He read voraciously. He knew what he was getting himself into. But”—Norm gave me a meaningful look—“he didn’t know what he was getting himself into.”

At the time of Alex’s enlistment, the army, confronted by the possibility of a longer-than-expected fight with an overstretched volunteer force, was studying the factors that helped and hindered recruitment via the USAREC Survey of New Army Recruits, a pink form that looked a little like an SAT booklet. Alex diligently filled in the bubbles with a number 2 pencil.

I enlisted because: (X) I wanted the adventure I will experience. ( ) I wanted the benefits I will receive. ( ) I wanted the skills I will learn. ( ) I wanted the pay I will earn. ( ) I wanted the money for education. ( ) I wanted the travel I will experience. (X) I wanted to serve my country.

From the statements above, which is the MOST important to you?