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

I wanted to serve my country.

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

I wanted the pay I will earn.

Typically, young people considering enlisting for military service experience some concerns or barriers to this decision. How significant were these concerns to your decision to enlist?

Religious or moral beliefs: Very unimportant.

Put education plans on hold: Very unimportant.

Loss of personal freedom: Very unimportant.

Fear of injury or death: Very unimportant.

Fear of basic training: Very unimportant.

Family obligations: Somewhat important.

Who was the LEAST supportive of your decision to join the ARMY? (Mark only one)

( ) Mother/stepmother. ( ) Father/stepfather. ( ) Athletic Coach. ( ) Teacher. ( ) Husband/wife. ( ) Boyfriend or girlfriend. ( ) Friend. ( ) Clergy member. (X) School Guidance Counselor. ( ) Sister/brother or stepsister/stepbrother. ( ) Extended family (i.e. grandparent, uncle/aunt, cousin).

I wasn’t at Alex’s farewell party. I was caught up in my own life, reading research papers on complexity theory in Berkeley, California, and spending my nights playing accordion with a group of grad school friends in the basement of our Oakland rental. Norm showed me a few pictures: Anna looking shell-shocked on the patio, Sam and Carly playing some kind of board game on the trampoline. It was incredible how young everyone was. Alex looked happy and playful, horsing around in the yard, throwing his arm over his buddies’ shoulders, holding a glass of water proudly up toward the camera. Norm had permitted the other graduates a beer or two from the garage refrigerator, but Alex was sticking to his training diet.

“He had a great personality,” Norm summed up with a shrug at the end of our lunch. “He was fun to be around. Just a gregarious kid.”

Even then, the blandness of his language unsettled me. It reminded me somehow of that flat suburban sunlight that suffused so many of my childhood memories. Who was my younger cousin really? What darkness, if any, lay under the cheerful smile of the boy in these photographs?

The culture of the Blum family is a patchwork affair. In hacking off his Jewish roots, Al Senior endowed his descendants with the opportunity and the onus of making their own myths. Some of us have found them in sports, others in science, others in war, but there are times when it seems to me that some vestigial connection to an unconscious substrate of Jewish lore must remain. The best model I have found for the way the extended Blum family came to interpret what happened to Alex is the ancient Jewish legend of the golem.

According to Talmudic lore, the first one was Adam himself, who spent an hour as gathered dust, an hour as form, and an hour as golem, Hebrew for “unshaped mass,” before God infused him with a soul. Later golems, constructed by mere rabbis, never got that far. The best known is the sixteenth-century Golem of Prague, sculpted from river clay by Rabbi Judah Loew to guard the Jewish quarter from attack. The legend is told in different ways. Sometimes the name of God is written on paper and slipped into the golem’s mouth. Sometimes the Hebrew word emet, or “truth,” is carved onto its forehead. Regardless, language is what fills the golem with its mute, unquestioning half-life. Like Frankenstein, Skynet, or the Predator and Reaper drones that now buzz over conflict zones around the world, the golem represents action without agency, force without conscience, a lurch and a boom and no one there to blame. Inevitably it goes astray. In the end the rabbi manages to pull the slip of paper from its mouth or to erase the first character of the word from its forehead, turning emet, “truth,” into met, “dead,” and the golem collapses into a pile of inanimate mud.

Our own golem was dissolved by an other-than-honorable discharge from the U.S. Army in early 2007, while Alex was still in prison. What unsettled us most was that buried somewhere in whatever mud pile remained was the little blond kid who still grinned at us from old family photographs, next to younger versions of ourselves with whom we felt no discontinuity. Like the medieval rabbi Maimonides, whose “negative theology” held that God could not be described in positive terms but only in opposition to whatever was imperfect and human, we began talking about that Alex mostly in banalities and negations: loyal, dutiful, patriotic; not experienced, not skeptical, not capable of questioning, not aware. After a while it began to seem as if all we had left of him was a luminous emptiness defined against the shape of what was to come, a sculpture in negative space.

There was one more negation, of course, the most important of all, so well understood in our family that no one had to say it out loud: not guilty.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_3380623a-5996-52e2-acb3-09b451997b10)

BASIC (#ulink_3380623a-5996-52e2-acb3-09b451997b10)

In America we thank our veterans at every opportunity, but we do not presume to understand what they have gone through. The military experience is sacrosanct, tarnished by any effort to assess it with civilian touchstones. The moment the infantry recruit walks down the cinder-block path from his childhood home at 0430 hours and enters a recruiting sergeant’s car via the passenger-side door, he crosses over to a new plane of existence. But in Alex’s case we had a few glimpses, transmissions from beyond.

As Norm told it, the change came on in strobe. First Alex was sent home five weeks into basic for a surprise convalescent leave. Because he didn’t tell anyone he was coming, he found the house locked and empty, the family gone to San Diego on vacation. Norm bought Alex a ticket to join them, then watched him stare for days at seagulls swooping through the mist above the waves, distracted and remote, dog tags dangling against his bare chest. Three months later Alex graduated from basic in a grid of other eighteen-year-olds, then flew home for another short leave. At first his efforts at military posturing—the crisp walk, the flat eyes, the gunmetal tone, all this set against the sprinklers and novelty mailboxes of Greenwood Village—seemed a little silly. He posed for photographs in the backyard wearing his dress uniform with his older brother Max’s AR-15 clapped to his chest, lips pinched into a line as crisp and proud as the fold of his beret, then flew back to Fort Benning for the Ranger Indoctrination Program. Norm looked up Georgia temperatures on the Internet whenever he knew Alex would be in the woods all night on field drills. It was often near freezing, sometimes below. In the rare phone calls Alex was permitted home, his voice was so thick and confused that it was hard to understand him. On his next visit, his affectations had stiffened. This was no act.

It wasn’t until months after Alex’s arrest that Norm finally learned what had been happening on the other end of those phone calls. Alex spent a total of sixteen months confined at SeaTac Federal Detention Center before being released on bail in November 2007. In that time he experienced a profound transformation in his mind. Norm, who visited him there every single weekend, described it to us as a long, painful, halting emergence from his military identity. In the beginning Alex could not seem to hold on to the thought that the crime had in fact been real. He did hundreds of push-ups every day in his cell to keep in shape for the day when the misunderstanding was cleared up and he could rejoin his battalion on deployment. It was only eight or nine months into his imprisonment, after Norm gave him an award-winning science book called Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by a British neuroscientist named Kathleen Taylor, that Alex woke up to what had happened to him. He spent the next month composing a 23,000-word manuscript reconsidering everything he had gone through in his training. When he was finished, Norm typed it up and emailed it to the entire extended Blum family.

I still lived in Seattle then, collaborating with a University of Washington biochemist on my dissertation research. I was sitting at my lab workstation in the UW Medical Center when Norm’s email arrived. The dedication page that opened the file was an uncanny glimpse of the Alex we all used to know: cheerful, insouciant, warm. He thanked Norm, Anna, and everyone in the family for their love and support, Paris Hilton “for making prison ‘hot,’” and his little brother Sam “for giving me the idea of figuring out, as he put it, ‘how you turned into such a jerk’!”

The writing that followed was far more reflective than I was expecting from an indifferent student two months out of his teens. I had never guessed there was anything inside that crewcut blond head except sports clichés and wisecracks.

BREAKING POINT:TEACHING AMERICA’S YOUTH TO KILLby Alex Blum

Growing up I always saw epic T.V. commercials of marines climbing plateau faces and soldiers rising as one out of concealment in an open field. I picked up a book about Viet Nam when I was five and stared transfixed at pictures of American soldiers patrolling in rice paddies. By the time I turned seven I knew that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be the All-American kid who grew up and fought against an evil enemy that threatened this country. I fell in love with Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers and was awed by the incredible sacrifice in Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. I saw the events in these books and many more like them as challenges and wondered if I could have made a difference if I’d been there. I read about the mental strength and physical struggles that Special OPS groups like SEALs, Rangers and Delta Force went through and wanted to see if I could make it. I wanted to be a part of the military as the country rallied behind its armed forces. I wanted to come back from war, hug my family and say, “I’m home.” I got lost in this fantasy often, not realizing it was just that: a fantasy. The United States doesn’t have an identifiable enemy anymore. It isn’t fighting a nation led by a mustached tyrant or a communist oppressor. The country certainly doesn’t rally behind its boys like in World War II and no soldier ever comes home from the violence and just moves on with his life, but that’s all hindsight.

I grew up in a stable, loving family and lived in a community completely devoid of violence. I had neither the drive nor the mental capacity to kill. So how does the Army turn a kid like that into a killer? It’s a process; a long, painful, mind-numbing, perverse process. It is a necessary process but something that I had never read about in detail and never objectively looked at until I was far away from it.

My experience comes from a small percentage of the Army, small but crucial. I was an infantryman, or 11 Bravo in military terms. Our indoctrination is unique to the rest of the Army. It is unique because ours is the only profession within the Army community that is sent directly to kill people. The rest of the Army’s recruits go through two schools: a modified Basic Training which is nine weeks and Advanced Individual Training or AIT which varies in length depending on the job. During the modified Basic they learn just that: the very basics of Army life. They learn how to march, how to handle a rifle and other aspects of life in uniform like rank structure and military time. When they graduate from Basic they are sent to AIT and learn in a college-like environment where the Drill Sergeants teach job skills and continue to mentor them. They work days and get nights and weekends off and when they graduate they are sent to a unit where they perform their job. After their training they are a part of the Army but in a sense they are just disciplined civilians. They are not killers. They wouldn’t raid a house and put two rounds into each person’s chest inside the structure or let loose with a .50 caliber machine gun into a group of people. So why would I? How is the rest of the Army still able to act and think like the people they were as civilians and 11 Bravos come out of Basic Training like a pack of pit bulls? Why is it that a soldier like Jessica Lynch would surrender and be taken prisoner and I would fight to the death? Aren’t both of us part of an Army of One? Isn’t it our most basic instinct to survive? Aren’t we both from a country where as children we were taught to respect and cherish life? It’s not because of sex or bravery that our outcomes would have differed. It is because my induction into the Army was completely different from hers.

As sunlight glittered in from Puget Sound across the monitors and glassware of the lab, the dark world opening out behind my laptop’s screen made all the molecular twiddling I had been doing for the past year in this room seem suddenly very paltry. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were dying on our behalf, and killing in far greater numbers on our behalf, and none of us so much as argued about it over lunch.

Our three Drill Sergeants silently paced us from inside the red lines or Kill Zone as it became known. “All right you fucking shit bags” one of them said. “This is my god damn Bay; I own everything in here including you, so if you fucking piss me off I’m going to make your goddamn lives miserable!” He yelled as he looked at one of the recruit’s foot position, “You are standing in my goddamn Kill Zone! Get your goddamn duffel bags! Hurry the fuck up!” We scrambled to our lockers and quickly returned to the line. “Lift the fucking bags above your heads!” He turned to the Private whose toe had made contact with the red Kill Zone line and yelled “See what happens when you piss me off you fucking piece of shit, you fuck everybody!” By this time another Drill Sergeant had joined in; “You little fuck, your bitch of a fucking mom should have done the world a favor and swallowed your useless ass!” The first Drill Sergeant was now inches from the kids face yelling, “You’re going to get everybody here killed, you stupid shit! When you go to Iraq I hope you get blown up by a fucking IED so no one else has to suffer from your stupidity!” The third Drill Sergeant was walking around making sure the rest of us kept our arms locked and bags above our heads. I looked around the Bay at my comrades and thought “what the fuck did I sign up for?”

Alex’s drill sergeants were vets. Many had just come back from Iraq, where Zarqawi’s singularly brutal branch of al-Qaeda was doing all it could to spark a civil war between Sunni and Shia. Terrorists and insurgents were gunning down patrols, suicide-bombing markets, and firing mortars at coalition Humvees and fortifications by the day. May 2005 was the bloodiest month since the invasion, with 80 U.S. soldiers and over 700 Iraqi civilians dead. Now it was July, and the action showed no sign of slowing. New privates would be launching into a firestorm. The army wanted them hard enough to survive it. The walls of the bay where Alex slept were decorated with large glossy photographs of IEDs disguised as Coke cans, rocks, and teddy bears. In the stairwell was a wanted poster for a recruit who’d gone AWOL.

As recently as the Vietnam War, soldiers would spend the week doing push-ups and bayonet drills and then go into town on weekends to catch movies and blow off steam. Nowadays no steam is blown off. The lid comes down at the beginning of “Red Phase,” in which drill sergeants exercise total control over every aspect of recruits’ lives in order to initiate the “soldierization process,” and does not come up again for three weeks. As far as the family is concerned, the recruit simply vanishes off the face of the earth. Though drill sergeants are forbidden to strike recruits without provocation, Alex’s account made it clear that they had plenty of techniques for inflicting pain at their disposal. They seemed to take particular pleasure in forcing recruits into Catch-22s whose inevitable outcome was “getting smoked,” the army phrase for punitive physical exercise.

On Friday we were eating lunch chow and our Drill Sergeant was entertaining himself by placing contraband ice cream sandwiches on recruit’s plates and telling them to eat it. When they finished the Drill Sergeant would yell “You fucking shit head! You’re not allowed to eat sweets, you fucking cunt! Go run until I get tired!” The Private would sprint out to the track and run under the supervision of another Drill Sergeant. The Private was told to run until he began vomiting. Our Drill Sergeant gave an ice cream sandwich to one Private who said “I’m not allowed to eat that Drill Sergeant.” “Sure you are fucker, I said you could.” “I don’t want to get in trouble Drill Sergeant.” “You won’t get in trouble shit bird!” The Drill Sergeant said playfully. “Go ahead, eat it.” “I’m not allowed to Drill Sergeant.” The Drill Sergeant’s face grew hard and he screamed “everybody out of the god damn chow hall right fucking now!” We scrambled to put our trays away and tore out of the chow hall to our common area where we waited in formation at parade rest. “Jumping Jacks you stupid fucking pricks! No, you stay out in front. Come here fucker!” The Private who refused to eat the ice cream sandwich was pulled out of formation and made to watch as we paid for his “mistake”. “See fuckers, when you don’t listen everybody suffers! All of you are undisciplined little shits. God damnit! I hate this fucking Platoon!” He turned to the Private who was watching us and handed him a box of ice cream sandwiches. “As soon as you finish this box I’ll stop smoking these mother fuckers!” he said. The Private crammed ice cream sandwiches into his mouth and finished them as soon as he could. Our Drill Sergeant yelled at him “You little fucking pig! You’re not allowed to eat sweets, and your fucking fat ass eats a whole god damn box of ice cream!? Holy fuck Shit head! That’s all right, we’ll pay for that!” The Drill Sergeant sent the Private to the track and continued to smoke us. When the Private came back he was covered in puke and gasping for air. “Push with the rest of the fucking Platoon! You fuckers are gonna get fat from all these sweets. So I’m gonna have to help you burn those calories!” He quickly added the calories in his head and told us that each bar contained 20,000 calories. After smoking us for what felt like four hours, he said we had only burned 1000 calories and that we would pay for the rest later.

For more than 13,000 words, basic training went on and on and on. Belongings dumped in a field, bayonets jammed into straw dummies, teargas pumped into a sealed chamber of trembling recruits, profound and accumulating sleep deprivation, getting smoked, getting tricked, getting insulted, getting threatened, weeping, puking, getting smoked for weeping and puking. What makes the grass grow?Blood, Drill Sergeant! As I continued reading, I kept glancing around at my lab mates with that self-conscious lack of expression you see on the faces of people reading pornographic novels on public transportation.

This non-stop, continuous negative reinforcement erases any and all self confidence you once had. You firmly believe that you can’t do anything right. At the time, you can’t see that they are intentionally and methodically breaking you down, removing all of your self esteem. You just believe that you are incompetent and unworthy of anything. You operate under complete and total fear and try to do anything to avoid more pain, embarrassment and humiliation.

Was all this a surprise? Not exactly. I’d seen Saving Private Ryan. I’d seen Full Metal Jacket. I was familiar, on a basic cultural-memory level, with the archetypes at play. There was the fat Private Pyle type, so chronically out of shape that he didn’t understand that the most he had ever exerted himself in his life was about one third of the baseline he needed to sustain here. There was the Joker type, who could not bring himself to accept the authority of the drill sergeants as legitimate and had to swallow his laughter down to a bitter, festering place whenever they bellowed in his face on the theme of his mother’s genitalia. And of course there were the screaming, stomping, cursing, toiletry-scattering drill sergeants themselves, who appeared to have watched all the same movies I had and strip-mined them for material. What I hadn’t seen before was a portrait of the interior life of the guys who only ever appeared as extras in these movies, for the obvious reason that they were of zero narrative interest: the ones who bought it. Who respected the drill sergeants as heroes whom they desperately wanted to please and live up to. Who overloaded their rucksacks by thirty pounds on marches and met secretly in stairwells on “rest days” for extracurricular physical-training sessions to prepare them for the Ranger Indoctrination Program, which they knew was going to be a whole lot worse. Who viewed the breakdown of their own bodies under all this strain as a shameful mark of weakness. Who wanted to be ready for Iraq.

In the seventh week of basic, after sleeping outdoors through a pounding storm that ended with cottonmouth snakes flopping in puddles in the recruits’ tents—weeks later they would learn that this had been Hurricane Katrina—Alex’s right leg started to hurt.

The following morning we had a five mile run for PT. Afterwards we marched to breakfast chow and I was in so much pain with my leg that I fell out of formation and was on the verge of blacking out. A Drill Sergeant came up to me and screamed “Get up you fucking pussy!” “Roger, Drill Sergeant,” I said and painfully tried to catch up with my Platoon. When I couldn’t keep up the Drill Sergeant dropped my buddies to do push-ups and made me stand in front of them and watch. “This little pussy thought the run was too hard and thinks he’s better than all of you! He thinks he’s allowed to rest while the platoon continues to march!” I was overwhelmed with guilt and when I tried to join them I was told to stand and watch. My leg progressively got worse as the week went on and by the weekend I was fighting back tears every time I put pressure on it.

The next week was the beginning of “White Phase”: weapons instruction. By the time the privates were finally let loose on the long-awaited machine-gun range—they were taught to count off six- to nine-round bursts on the M240 by saying “Die, Iraqi, die”—Alex had chewed a hole in his lower lip to manage the pain. Then came the grenade range.

After practicing with dummy rounds, we marched down to the live range to throw real explosives. We waited under a tin roof and heard debris land above us each time a grenade went off. When it was my turn to throw, I limped to my assigned bunker and listened to a Drill Sergeant review the prep and throw process. When he finished he handed me a grenade and we squatted as I prepped the explosive. I held the spoon with my right thumb, took off the safety and pulled the pin. I stood up and got into my throwing stance. When I put weight on my right leg I felt a POP! and fought through the pain to stay conscious. I managed to throw the grenade before I fell and heard the dim sound of the explosion while on my back. The Drill Sergeant grabbed me by my body armor and shouted “Holy fuck, Cletus! You almost killed me, you stupid piece of shit!” He eased up when he saw the pain in my face and told two of my buddies to help me to the ambulance. I hung on to their necks and struggled to the Humvee at the top of the hill.

For two days Alex stood around on crutches watching his buddies march and flutter-kick, begging to be allowed to join back in, mocked by the drill sergeants for his weakness. It was only when x-rays showing a cracked tibia came back that they sent him home. Two months later, when he rejoined another training company, his closest friends, Roman and Kane, the remaining two thirds of the “Battle Bastards” fellowship that had met for extra PT in the stairwell, had already graduated. Alex missed swapping intel with them about surviving RIP (hot tips from those who had made it before included squirting Tabasco sauce in your eyes, snorting chewing tobacco, and bayoneting your earlobes to stay awake and focused), but he made the most of it, getting into the swing of things as training zeroed in on the fine points of the infantryman’s arsenal. When he graduated at last, Alex refused to let anyone in the family fly out for the ceremony. This one didn’t matter. Next up was Jump School, where he would earn the pin that put the “Airborne” in “Airborne Ranger,” a pair of wings on either side of a bulbous parachute.

It turned out to be a cakewalk.

There were no shouting Drill Sergeants or the constant threat of being smoked. Jump School was just that, a school! The Instructors were called Black Hats and its students consisted of privates all the way up to majors, from cooks to infantrymen. The environment was friendly and everyone joked and talked to one another except for the Infantrymen. We stayed together and only talked to each other. We shared a strong dislike towards everyone else and viewed them as inferior in every way. While all the other MOS’s (Military Operational Specialty’s) complained about the difficulty of the school we viewed it as a vacation and breezed through PT (Physical Training) and our daily classes. The first two weeks we spent practicing exiting the mock Aircraft and landing. We rarely got smoked and tried to piss off the Black Hats to get them to drop us to the ground as often as possible so we could laugh at all the other pussies as they struggled with the pain. This was our first interaction with the rest of the Army and it showed us just how different Infantrymen were from EVERYONE else in the Army.

Alex graduated from Airborne School at Fort Benning in December 2005. I remember that Christmas clearly. At the traditional Blum family gathering, while Anna hovered nervously alongside him, Alex secured a position leaning against the banister that divided Aunt Judy’s house in two and commenced squinting around with the facial expression that zombie-slaughtering action heroes must hide behind their aviator shades.

Like everyone else, I tried to talk army with him. He responded with monosyllables and grunts. Only long after he left the army would I learn how much I had been pissing him off. All our blithe, ignorant questions about what guns he’d shot and whether basic had sucked implied that his new life still had some place within the civilian universe of job applications, gas mileage, and adult-league sports where we piddled away our own lives. This was a fundamental error of category. He and his infantry buddies were the shining knights of freedom. For months they had been experiencing levels of physical unpleasantness beyond what any of us could conceive of, learning every day how true all the marching cadences were that said the only ones you could rely on were fellow DICKs—Dedicated Infantry Combat Killers.

Basic is in fact a carefully calibrated process. Recruits are both habituated to violence and acculturated into a new family with radically different standards of behavior. Drill sergeants are not sadists—at least not entirely. They are also there to teach, correct, motivate. A faint paternal air suffuses the brutality, a sardonic kind of lovingness expressed through torment. From moments of wryness in Alex’s manuscript—“Basic is very ‘fucking’ and ‘holy shit,’” he summed up at one point—it was clear that he was aware of it too. Ultimately the drill sergeants wanted everyone to succeed, qualify, graduate. The war needed soldiers.

The Rangers did not need soldiers. They genuinely wanted candidates to quit. At times they actually seemed to want to kill them.

The final section of Breaking Point was broken out from the rest and titled “Ranger Indoctrination Program.” The 10,000 words that followed were a scary read. The rigid formal bounds that had contained the violence of basic, from the synchronization of drill and ceremony on the parade ground to the absolute stricture against drill sergeants striking recruits, no longer appeared to apply. The atmosphere was chaotic, alive with threat. Ranger instructors did not yell “Holy shit!” Often they did not yell at all. They darted through the pages like musclebound velociraptors, creeping up behind candidates and saying “cunt” into their ears in intimate, terrifying voices. Smoke sessions in basic had been guided by cadences. “One two three,” the drill sergeant would count off. “One!” the recruits would yell back, completing a rep. “One two three,” the drill sergeant would count off. “Two!” the recruits would yell back. Ranger instructors would simply bark out, “Beat your faces, cunts,” and then the only sound would be the syncopated thumps and grunts of fifty chests hitting the concrete as fast as they could.