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

The pretense of instructional value that attended activities at RIP was so flimsy as to be a kind of mockery. For the Ranger Combat Water Safety Test, Alex strapped on sixty pounds of gear and climbed up a high-dive ladder, where a sergeant said, “You look like a piece of shit!” and threw him in the pool below. For combat medicine training, he and his fellow candidates were given some cursory instruction, then sent out into a field with hypodermics and saline and instructed to pump the latter through the former into each other’s bodies. None had done this before. The needles kept poking through skin and slithering off into muscle as the recruits tried to keep their hands steady and slide them into veins. After dozens of failed jabs, blood was splashed all over the grass. For their incompetence as medics they were forced to crawl on their bellies through the gore.

But all this was just preamble. The carnival really got going in the middle of week two, at the land navigation course on Cole Range. It was January in Georgia and very cold.

At 5:00 am we were bussed out to the land nav course and were told to run across the field to the wood line a quarter mile away and get wood for the Sergeants’ fire. We sprinted across the field as fast as our legs would take us. We picked up as much as we could hold and sprinted back to our rucks.

As I got closer to the sand bags I noticed a bunch of gear floating in a nearby body of water named “Just Cause Pond.” The Sergeants had been checking our rucks and any that weren’t secured properly were torn open and thrown across the pond. We dropped off our wood and were immediately sent back to the wood line. It was 5:30 am Wednesday and Cole Range had just begun.

The temperature was between 38 and 45 degrees and we were wearing only our cotton BDU’s.

We were sent to the wood line more times that I can remember. We bear crawled, low crawled and buddy carried across the field returning with wood each time. We were given MRE’s

at 12:30 pm and had five minutes to eat our first meal of the day. I ate as much as possible and put a small Tabasco bottle in my pocket. When we finished eating we were smoked for another hour for eating too slow.

We were given coordinates, compasses, maps and were split up into three-man groups and told we had three hours to find our seven points. My group fought through the thick forest to get to our points. Five miles and two and half hours later we had found five points but were too far away from the starting point to risk looking for the rest of them and being late on our return.

My heart sank as we ran up the dirt road to our rucksacks. We saw groups carrying telephone poles and others doing push-ups. I quickly ran to one of the Sergeants and gave him our five points. He looked at my group and said “You idiots only found five points!?” “Roger Sergeant.” He looked at me and yelled “Well do push-ups you fucking faggots! You would have found all of your points if you hadn’t been sleeping! You shits want to sleep out there then you’ll pay for it here!” We joined our buddies and pushed until we were told to do flutter kicks.

After a while we were sent to the wood line and continued to run until 9:00pm. We were given five minutes to eat our MRE’s and after got smoked until midnight. The weather was tolerable until we stopped sweating. It then became evident how cold it was and how quickly we were losing body heat.

We were given more points and told we had three hours to find each of them. We rushed off to plot our points and turned on our red lens flashlights. I was exhausted and poured my bottle of Tabasco sauce into my eyes to keep from falling asleep. We struggled through swamps and rugged terrain for the next three hours. My feet and pants were soaked and I could feel the skin on my thighs and feet rub off with every step I took. By the time we headed back to the starting point my body was racked with pain and discomfort.

As we got close I could see groups pushing. “You fucking cunts only found two points!? Are you fucking kidding me!? Push-ups you faggots!” We were smoked until about 4:30am and then told we could sleep. The ground was covered with a light frost and all we were allowed to sleep under was our paper thin ponchos. I could see my breath hanging in the frigid air and my pants and boots were frozen. My Ranger buddy and I clung to each other trying to share body heat. We would shake each other awake whenever we started shivering uncontrollably.

We managed about five minutes of sleep in our frozen stupor and were woken up and told to stand at parade rest. I saw our Sergeants crowd around their fire and heard one say “Jesus it’s cold out here! Good thing we have this fire but I think we need some more wood!” He turned to us and shouted “Hit the wood line motherfuckers!” We scrambled painfully across the field and returned with more firewood. We were told to line up with our rucks in three circles, one inside the other. We were instructed to run in opposite directions with the inside and outside groups running clockwise and the middle circle moving counter clockwise. We ran with our rifles over our heads and shouted “boots!” every time our left foot hit the ground. This exercise was called “mind erasers.” We were completely exhausted, freezing and sleep deprived. Ten minutes into this exercise I was on a whole new plane. The world moved slow and fast at the same time. My body was beyond exhaustion, my mind was over loaded and I was unable to put a thought together.

After an hour we were told to hit the wood line again and were smoked until noon. We quickly ate our last MRE of Cole Range and were given new points. As we set out my body was seared with pain in every area. My brain was hardly functioning. I could no longer feel the burn of Tabasco when I poured it into my eyes. I was forced to resort to a more extreme measure to stay awake. I took out my can of Copenhagen and snorted the tobacco through my nose. We were no longer able to think coherently. We easily got lost and confused. We constantly had to back track to re-shoot our azimuth. I snorted half a can of chew and cut my earlobe with my knife and still struggled to stay awake.

We returned with four points and got smoked for sleeping. I threw-up water and bits of chew and was soon covered with it. We were instructed to low crawl through “Just Cause Pond” and then hit the wood line. We repeated this until one of our Sergeants said “Alright fuckers! Change into your extra set of BDU’s!” We rushed out of the water and put on dry clothing. As soon as I got into my new clothes I felt energized and refreshed. “Hit the pond you fucking cocksuckers!” our Drill Sergeant yelled when everyone was finished getting dressed. We ran to the pond, crawled through the cold filthy water and hit the wood line again. We got back and did flutter kicks in the pond and watched five Drill Sergeants urinate in the water. We were told to get up and the five biggest students in the class were told to lay in the Sked-co’s the Medic had set out. We secured them to the sleds, picked them up and followed our Sergeant through a stagnant swamp. We fell into the thick mud as we struggled to keep the Sked-co above the surface. It took us two hours to get back to our rucks. When we arrived we were told to drag the Sked-co’s to the wood line.

We were smoked until night fall and rushed into the woods in search of our new points. When we stopped to shoot a new azimuth I put a pinch of Copenhagen into my lip and snorted another pinch. I took off my boots and socks to remove a couple of pebbles. My feet were missing patches of skin and my toes were bleeding. The remaining flesh was snow white and wrinkled. I put my socks and boots on quickly trying to function as best I could. The simplest tasks became challenging and at times overwhelming. I had to think about each step and focus to stay upright.

We returned finding only one point and again were smoked for sleeping. I was delirious. Everything was a blur, my feet felt like cinder blocks and my brain was completely numb. We pushed a Humvee around the field and would crash into the back of it when the Sergeant inside would hit the brakes. When he grew bored with his ride he had us low crawl across the field. My fingernails were torn up as I pulled myself across the grass and rocks with my bloody hands. I soon felt the familiar sting of fire ants and started laughing hysterically.

After a blur of time we ran to the tree line and were sent back and forth over and over. One time while running back I saw my girlfriend and heard her say “I love you baby, I’m right here.” I started crying and struggled to keep running. We were stopped and told to drink from our canteens until they told us to stop. When I had finished three quarters of my two quart canteen we were told to put our foreheads on the muzzle of our rubber duck

and spin until we were told to hit the wood line. I took my head off and immediately fell to the ground. I tried to stand but the world was spinning too fast. I vomited and fell into the pond where I breathed in the stagnant water. I crawled out and threw up again.

When we got back to our rucks we did mind erasers shouting “Airborne Ranger” at the top of our lungs. We were stopped at 2:00am and given a class on how to tie half hitch, clover hitch, and figure eight knots. I was too far gone to even care or laugh at what we were being taught.

When the lesson ended at 3:00am we were told “Get some sleep fuckers! The boss will be here soon!” I was lying under my poncho trying to fight off the unbearable cold holding on to my Ranger Buddy to share warmth. It started to rain. I was shaking from the cold and we began to laugh uncontrollably. The laughter stopped when a Sergeant yelled “Hit the wood line fuckers!” We painfully started running and heard “Low crawl through the fucking pond and then to the tree line goddamnit!” I crawled through the water and felt like a million pins were being pushed into my body. I struggled to breathe and as soon as I got out of the water it began raining harder. My skin continued to feel the pain of imaginary pins. We returned to our ponchos and were told to sleep. The only warmth we would feel during the two hours is when we would urinate on each other.

It was impossible to sleep for all of us. At 6:00am we were told to put our rucks on and practice patrolling across the field that we had crossed so many times. The rain continued. We were told to take a knee and pull security. We were left like that for an hour in the freezing rain. My brain was numb. I didn’t even feel or care when I saw blood pool around my knee. We were still in the field when the bus came and we sprinted towards it. A Sergeant yelled at us as we limped across the field. He came over and began tearing rucks off of Privates’ backs, ripping them open and throwing the contents into the pond. We all scrambled to help retrieve their belongings and we were smoked for taking too long.

We finally left Cole Range and slept on the way to the barracks. Upon arrival we were smoked in the puddles on the basketball court for sleeping. When the Sergeants were done with us we were told to change into PT’s and be back on the basketball courts for some good news. We returned in four minutes and were smoked for taking too long. As we were pushing a Sergeant said “You fucking faggots are gonna get the weekend off so get the fuck out of here and be back by 9:00am Sunday, GO!” We did one more for the Airborne Ranger in the sky and sprinted up to the barracks to change into civilian clothes. We heard a different Sergeant yell “Bullshit fuckers, you’re not going anywhere this weekend! Go shower and be back on the basketball court in PT’s at 5:00pm!”

We disappointedly ran upstairs and crowded into the showers. We stood under the showerheads hugging each other trying to create more warmth as we shivered uncontrollably. For the first 15 minutes I couldn’t feel anything. We stayed under the water for an hour and a half and slowly warmed up. We dressed into PT’s and sat on our bunks for another hour until it was time to go back down. My feet were raw and I was covered with cuts and bruises. We helped one of my buddies clean and wrap his feet in a ripped T-shirt. When he had taken his socks off he cried out in pain. As we turned his socks inside out the soles of his feet lay on the floor completely peeled away.

That was two and a half days. RIP went on for fifteen more, and so did Alex, in excruciating detail. He and a team of six others raised a telephone pole on their shoulders and weren’t allowed to drop it for forty-eight hours, napping two at a time in brief shifts underneath. Afterward Alex found a pair of bumps on his calf. He spent three days ignoring them as the bumps grew wider and began to leak pus, until a sergeant spotted him limping and sent him to the infirmary, where the medic took one startled look and informed Alex that these here brown recluse spider bites were necrotizing fast. This being the Rangers, the medic issued no anesthetic before scraping the dead flesh out with Q-tips, swabbing out the wounds with iodine, strapping on a bandage, and sending Alex back out to be smoked for his laziness.

In the final week those who remained in the drastically thinned class were issued M4s, a shorter version of the M16 which Rangers and other Special Ops units had recently adopted for use in the confined spaces of urban combat. Two hours into the first day of training on this new weapon, a sergeant leaned over a buddy of Alex’s whose mother had recently been killed in a car accident and yelled his intention to do a range of graphic things to her body. The recruit stopped firing for a second, and that was enough excuse for the sergeants to halt all shooting drills and smoke everyone for an hour. For another two days they shot at plastic targets. That was the end of RIP.

Thursday we got the day off to clean and pack our belongings. That afternoon my buddies and I went to Ranger Joe’s. After four weeks of hell, filled with more pain than I could ever imagine, I was allowed to purchase a $7 Beret and $2 Scroll.

The next day my Dad pinned the Second Battalion Scroll on my shoulder and hugged me. I had made it; I was an Airborne Ranger. After four weeks, our starting class of over a hundred graduated only about thirty students from one of the most difficult courses in the Military. My original Company from basic had 60 Ranger Candidates and only 4 of us had made it through the program.

I left Basic Training looking for a challenge and graduated from RIP with the mental capacity to kill. Before I joined the Army I was vibrant, funny, easy going, loving and independent. When I got my Tan Beret I was a shell. I was an angry, testosterone-driven prick. I was no longer me. I only felt comfortable with other Rangers. When I was with childhood friends I was standoffish and unable to hold a real conversation or relate to them. I couldn’t relate to my family and was no longer the fun and pleasant kid they knew me to be.

I had changed dramatically. My thought process was that of a five year old and when I got to Battalion (next assignment after RIP) I had to be raised again. I was brainwashed. When you arrive at Basic Training you are entirely isolated from the world and your entire life becomes the Army. During the first few weeks I would go to sleep terrified of Iraq and try to convince myself that the Army would not send me. Surely they knew that I was “too young to die!” I also could not imagine being put in a position where I had to kill someone. I was still able to think objectively, but over time your mind gets so used to being controlled it is unable to do anything independently.

You are told when and how to do everything, and when the Drill Sergeants see that you’re thinking by yourself or expressing any type of emotion or action associated with free thought or will they punish you severely with the best teacher understood by your brain. They teach you with pain. We got smoked so often I began to doubt every thought and feeling I had. During the fourth week I could literally feel my brain shutting down. I would no longer think “this is unfair” or “I don’t want to do this.” I no longer had an opinion. I was unable to value human life and could no longer weigh pro’s and con’s or right and wrong. I was unable to understand emotions. I would feel scared before jumping and nervous while setting a door charge or waiting to enter a shoot house. I felt these emotions but could not understand why or what they meant.

The only exception to all of this was Anna. Every time I got smoked or would be terrified or felt alone I would escape by thinking about her face and the time I had spent with her. She became my strength and sense of hope. The only feelings I understood were toward her. I would be happy and excited when I was with her and it would make sense. She made me feel safe and I felt like the most important person in the world when I was with her. For that I love her more than I have ever been able to express. I felt that no matter what happened I would always be the kid that loved Anna and the kid that Anna always loved. That love was the only thing that linked me to who I once was.

Basic Training turned me into a mindless follower and RIP confirmed it. I used to think RIP was a way to root out the weak. I have since realized that it is used to root out the ones who are still able to objectively think. When things got out of hand they could say, “I am not going to put up with this BS, I don’t want to do this anymore, I quit!” The guys that make it through to graduate are unable to quit because they feel there is no other choice but to finish. I never had to fight the urge to quit. In my mind there was no option to quit. I would think, “You’ll be dead soon and it will be over. Just go until you die.” I never said anything about my leg wounds for two reasons: I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble and I believed that how I felt was irrelevant. I waited to be told what to do.

There is a quote from Band of Brothers: “There are no bad soldiers, only bad leaders.” This is especially true in Ranger Battalion. Privates are a product of how their superiors raise them. They will do anything their leaders tell them because we are taught to trust and believe them in every way. Kids who join the Infantry don’t join to kill. In fact the Army doesn’t accept people who are already willing to kill. They want young impressionable minds that join for the adventure. They want kids who see the ads on TV and in magazines who think it looks like a fun challenge.

These kids leave home with the morals and teachings of their parents and society. We emerge from Basic Training wiped clean, lacking any type of objective thinking. We are then re-taught the standards of our superiors. We blindly follow and do as told. Our superiors re-teach us right and wrong and we are no longer able to think about pros and cons. The Army doesn’t want us to.

There are no positives or right in what Rangers do as viewed by our society. If we weren’t brainwashed the Rangers wouldn’t exist. It is our superiors’ responsibility to guide us because of our mental state. I was literally unable to understand my emotions and believed everything I was told was the right way to act and think. I had complete faith in my Tabs (superiors at Ranger Battalion) and knew they would never do anything wrong. I was unable to think or question. I was a model Ranger.

There the document ended. I sat back from my laptop. My lab mates had left one by one while I read. I was alone with the hum of centrifuges and agitators in the darkened medical center.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_30a36ba9-59be-50af-ae2f-2e697de49828)

AMURICAN BANK ROBBER (#ulink_30a36ba9-59be-50af-ae2f-2e697de49828)

The modern army is mostly support staff. More than 80 percent of servicemen package foodstuffs, install WiFi hubs, repair helicopters: the shaft, in a favored army metaphor, of the spear that drives into the body of the enemy. The infantry is the blade. The Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment, U.S. Army Special Operations Command, is the razor-sharp tip, two thousand of the best-trained soldiers in the world. On D-Day, Rangers were the first to charge up Omaha Beach and breach the line of bunkered German machine guns cutting troops down by the thousands before they could even get ashore. “Rangers, lead the way!” was the cry that sent them forward. It is now the first of their two regimental mottos, called out by soldiers of the regular infantry as a gesture of respect whenever they salute a Ranger. The reply to this salute is “All the way!”

To earn the legendary Ranger beret, you have to volunteer three times: for the infantry, for airborne certification, and finally for the process formerly known as the Ranger Indoctrination Program. Those dedicated, crazy, or pain-blind enough to pass up the thousand good opportunities to fail or quit along the way have proved themselves worthy of the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment’s second motto: “Sua Sponte,” Latin for “of their own accord.” They will be assigned to one of three battalions: the First and Third, headquartered in Georgia, or the Second, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

“Sua Sponte” has another important meaning to the modern regiment: self-directed initiative in meeting the enemy. Senior Rangers will sometimes joke that an overenthusiastic younger soldier has “Sua Sponte’d it.” The people of Tacoma are well aware of this particular virtue of JBLM’s most famous tenants. In 1989, at the height of the crack cocaine boom that gave Tacoma the short-lived nickname “Compton of Washington,” a Ranger sergeant named Bill Foulk took matters into his own hands when the open drug trade in his Hilltop neighborhood got out of control. After dealers threw rocks and shot BBs at a security camera Foulk had installed over his driveway during a “neighborhood solidarity barbecue,” he called a dozen or so of his Ranger buddies from on post and suggested they come armed. That night Sergeant Foulk and his team fought off an hours-long siege by the Crips with pistols, shotguns, and semiautomatic assault rifles, firing hundreds of rounds into the dark. The “Ash Street Shootout” made Foulk a national cause célèbre for the drug war. No disciplinary action was taken against any of the soldiers involved.

Special Operations soldiers have become increasingly central to the way the army fights, a model for the rest to evolve toward as the monolithic battles of the age of industrial war between great powers give way to the ambiguities of rapidly shifting opponents in complex urban environments. In 2001, army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki issued a surprising army-wide order:

In the United States Army, the beret has become a symbol of excellence of our specialty units. Soldiers of the Special Forces, our airborne units, and the Ranger Regiment have long demonstrated such excellence through their legendary accomplishments and unmatched capabilities. Their deployability, versatility, and agility are due, in part, to their organizational structure and equipment. But more significant is their adaptiveness, which keeps them ready to take on any mission, anytime, anyplace … Effective 14 June 2001, the first Army birthday in the new millennium, … the black beret will become standard wear in The Army.

Shinseki must have thought the Rangers would be honored. Instead they were outraged. Regular infantry was for bumbling slackers. As for soldiers of the noncombat branches, who steamed broccoli and fixed computers at the FOB (Forward Operating Base) while Rangers were out raiding houses and getting blown up, the nicknames were various: “fobbits,” “pogues,” “rear-echelon motherfuckers.” The idea of these clowns wearing the signature black Ranger beret was intolerable. Many Rangers road-marched to Washington, D.C., in protest. When that didn’t work, they changed their berets to tan.

U.S. Special Operations forces have long been divided into Tier I, comprising the experienced commandos of SEAL Team Six and Delta Force, and Tier II, which includes units like the Rangers, which draw directly from pools of young, unpracticed recruits. In 2003, Brigadier General Stanley McChrystal, a former commander of the Ranger Regiment and “110 percent Ranger,” in the words of a close associate, was assigned as commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). During his time leading the Rangers, he had radically transformed training, upping the tempo, concentrating on nighttime operations, and modernizing weaponry. At JSOC, the tier-based hierarchy did not sit well with McChrystal. He immediately went to work raising his beloved Rangers to the stature of the others rather than just the feeder team for Delta, giving them extensive duties on nighttime raids for “high-value targets.” For months at a time during deployment, Rangers slept and lifted weights by day and charged by night into the homes of shocked Iraqi families. Airfield seizures had once been their primary mission, but now that became assaults on homes and small facilities, a skill set McChrystal knew well: at West Point he had once organized a mock assault on a campus building with balled-up socks for grenades and real guns, nearly getting himself shot by campus security.

Alex still has his tan beret—on house arrest, he hung it from a nail over his bed in Norm’s basement—but he will never be permitted to reenlist in any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. An other-than-honorable discharge is the most severe discharge short of a court-martial.

We wrote to each other a few times while he was in custody, after Norm had commenced the long process of wiping out his business and bank accounts by flying to Washington State every weekend for visitation hours. After Alex’s revelatory experience reading Kathleen Taylor’s book Brainwashing and writing his long account of his training, Norm took him a number of other books on topics he thought might help him understand what had happened to him. I first wrote to Alex after reading a few of these myself, with some vague hope that my scientific perspective would be of help. When I asked how he felt about the war in Iraq, his reply showed an earnest moral urgency I would never have predicted from him growing up.

My view on the Army is I still respect the hell out of the men and women who make it what it is but have a much better understanding regarding the machine that it is. As for the infantry and its conduct in Iraq I will say this, Ben the men of the infantry are killers nothing more and nothing less. They are designed to kill people and the transformation their minds go through is amazing and frightening at the same time.

After Alex’s release, it was hard to see his hurt puzzlement at the failure of each successive effort to turn his new life into something he could be proud of. Even meager civilian approximations of his childhood ambitions—emergency medical technician, fireman, policeman—were closed to him now. For a long time he worked fixing three-hundred-pound lengths of steel pipe into ceilings for a fire-sprinkler installation company before landing a job driving a Zamboni at an ice rink on the decommissioned Lowry Air Force Base southeast of Denver. What Alex really hoped to do there was youth coaching, but to do that in any lasting, official capacity, he would need a coaching license, which would require a background check. Instead he drove in endless circuits on the ice, listening for problems in the hiss of blade and steam as the truck scraped off ridges and filled ruts with boiling water.