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

I began wondering if I might be of use to Alex and the family. His manuscript about basic and RIP had helped precipitate a career crisis of my own. For a long time I had been confounded by how little my growing technical expertise seemed to help me in understanding the forces that shape our lives. After reading Alex’s story, rather than feeding new tasks to the lab’s supercomputer, as I should have, I began spending hours in the university library researching the history of U.S. military training. What I found only dismayed and confused me more. Within a year or so of my arrival in Seattle, I was drinking all night before giving molecular biology talks, doing cocaine in strange apartments, funding a friend’s rap album with money from my National Science Foundation grant—more or less deliberately screwing up, seized by a half-articulate hunch that my lifelong impulse toward abstraction and schematization was perpendicular or worse to the real meaning of life, a long march toward, as the poet Philip Larkin puts it, “the solving emptiness / that lies just under all we do.” I had begun asking questions I had never thought to ask before. Why does this research matter? Whom exactly does this research help? Decades of scrabbling for grant money to improve the efficiency of algorithms to accomplish things I didn’t believe in sounded suddenly unendurable.

In March 2009 Alex was finally sentenced to time served. We first got together to talk about his story nine months later, the day after Christmas, shortly after he started working at the ice rink. He drove us to a Denver sports bar in the same silver Audi he once drove to the bank. After having bared our souls to each other in letters, it still felt a little strange to be hanging out in person. The planes of Alex’s cheekbones and jaw, which in his army days used to resemble the tilted panels of a stealth bomber, were a little worn down from prison, but his physique was still imposing. I could tell he was nervous by how hard he worked to crack me up on the ride over, going into funny voices for the white supremacists and Mexican gangsters he had mediated between in prison gambling disputes, for the Hells Angels enforcer who bestowed upon him the cell-block-wide nickname “Skinny,” for the Gambino crime family boss who bought the burrito bowls he cooked on a stove the guards let him use. “Thees boreeto bowl,” he wheezed in a Don Corleone rasp, holding his thumb to his fingertips, “is the beist I ever had. Skeeny, you are a genios.”

We found a corner table with a small red lamp. After he was done charming our middle-aged waitress, spitting chew into a beer glass, and tilting back his well-rolled baseball cap to ask for a double Jack Daniel’s neat—“Cuz I’m an Amurican,” he said in a fake hick accent whose layers of regret and self-mockery were lost on her—Alex surprised me by lurching into a new, grave register, his blue-gray eyes intent on mine for understanding.

“The way I conveyed it to my mom was, ‘What if Jesus Christ came down and told you to do the same exact thing?’ Look at all these cults. The people in that Jim Jones cult, they weren’t so crazy. They were just at a point in their life where they needed someone to look up to. For Christian people, it’s Jesus Christ. For me it was the Rangers. I never did drugs, I hardly drank, I always kept my body pure, because that’s what Rangers do. Whenever I was at a party I was always the one who looked out for everybody, because that’s what Rangers do. And then finally the one thing happened, and it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, this is wrong.’ It was like, ‘If this is wrong, then everything I believe in is wrong.’”

The one thing happened … Amid his white polo shirt and clear skin, Alex’s new tattoos flashed like false eyes on moth wings: a dotted line with the all-caps instructions CUT HERE across the left wrist, his prison bar code on the belly of the right forearm.

“What’s up with those?” I asked.

Alex explained their meanings with an exaggerated enthusiasm that made me suspect he had been getting some pretty ambivalent reactions. They reminded me of the jokes he had been telling for a year at family gatherings: “Felon coming through! Hide the knives!” When he first got out of prison these jokes had cracked us up. Way to own it, Alex! was the general sentiment. Don’t let some label get you down! By now, with the mounting grimness of his job prospects impossible to ignore, the jokes sounded increasingly off. I worried about the tattoos. I knew how seductive it could be, when your personal heroic narrative broke down, to try on its opposite for size. I had gotten tattooed myself while he was in prison, at a parlor on the second floor of a minimall where I would eventually get a job as a bookstore clerk, having befriended a bunch of musicians, actors, and writers who made careless disregard for the future seem revolutionary and fun. Back then I had seen the tattoo as a promise to myself to stop practicing math professionally. I knew that if I were ever to climb into a hot tub full of world-class researchers at some conference somewhere with this dumb, romanticizing thing on my chest—a twelve-sided polyhedron called a snub disphenoid that I had loved and sort of identified with as a kid—I would never be taken seriously again. Since then my views on it had grown more complex. The flamboyant ex-con persona seemed pretty out of character for Alex, but maybe this was just how character formed: by groping whims we had no choice afterward but to commit to as ourselves.

I asked about his favorite army books. Alex told me he had given them all away, $5000 worth, after he got out of prison.

“I was kind of the weird kid in high school. During off periods I would read the army handbook. I knew all the standard operating procedures before I went to basic. Everybody was proud of their acceptance letters to college, and I carried around my Airborne Ranger contract because I was so proud of that. That’s all I was known for. I mean, it was everything. It was my life. I saved every piece of newspaper on the Iraq war to the point when I joined up. I got all of Opa’s stuff from Oma.”

Opa and Oma were the names we had always used for our grandfather and grandmother, an homage to their German ancestry. Family lore had it that Opa had written a memoir of his World War II service, but I had never laid eyes on it.

“The shrapnel they took out of him,” Alex ticked off, “his German cross … oh, this is funny. Well, it’s not funny. It’s kind of ironic. Opa killed a German at the point where we were pushing them back into Germany, this blond fourteen-year-old kid from the Hitler Youth. He got his papers. The kid’s last name was Becker. Then Opa married Oma—Beverly Beck.”

He raised his eyebrows at me. Our grandfather, a New York Jew, killed a teenage Nazi in the country his people left behind, then married a blond Texan Protestant who almost shared the boy’s name? I wanted to give Alex the response he was looking for, but I was honestly not sure what I thought of this piece of family trivia. I didn’t share his simple fascination with war. I’d never known that deep manly camaraderie he experienced in the army, that unity of violent purpose, although in my own way I’d longed for it.

I realized to my surprise that he was on the verge of tears. Before I could respond, he broke eye contact to look over my shoulder at the TV above the bar, where we had both been glancing periodically at the Broncos game.

Blums love their football. During his coaching days, my father once explained that what looks like a brawl to the unpracticed eye is in fact a complex strategic interplay of formation and counterformation amid a fog of feints and reverses. Big college coaches are as prized as star professors not just because of the fund-raising dollars involved but because the required blend of analytical prowess and charismatic machismo is vanishingly rare. The coach is the general. He has to persuade a group of very tough, opinionated men to put enthusiastic effort into acting against almost any sane measure of self-interest.

I’ve since learned that the war/football analogy goes only so far. Ever since machine guns and precision artillery blasted close infantry formations apart in the late nineteenth century, armies around the world have had to find new ways to maintain discipline and motivate troops without recourse to the mass choreography that makes football so comparatively precise. How to get soldiers in thousands of private hiding spots to decide, each independently of the others, to leave cover and apply the strategically desirable quantity of violence in situations where the more natural human response is to run away or go murderously insane? This is the problem of battle command. It is a much harder job than coaching. Even leaving aside the vastly higher scale, vastly higher stakes, and vastly denser fog of miscommunication induced by all the explosions and killing and fear, there is also an essential difference between the players on the field: by the standards of professional or even college athletics, war is fought by laughably unpracticed amateurs. Every player on a university team, from the quarterback to the nose tackle, has been staring for years into the eyes of opposing formations through the grilles of their facemasks, learning subtle nuances of stance and shift to draw on instinctively in the grunting crush of a game. In the early years of World War II, by contrast, the average newbie infantryman received only seven weeks of drill on his rifle, none of it against real opponents. In the American Civil War many men went to the front lines with no training whatsoever. Wars back then were fought by teenage farmers, blacksmiths, shopkeepers, and teachers, as clumsy as Little Leaguers forced onto the team by their dads. Now, when most American soldiers enlist directly after high school without first learning a trade, wars are fought by basketball jocks and cheerleaders, by skaters and emo kids, by Harry Potter fans and stoners and jazz band clarinetists. At an age when many parents hesitate to trust children with their own cell-phone accounts, we trust our young soldiers to follow complex rules of engagement in determining when they are supposed to kill.

“Another thing,” Alex said, looking back from the game. “When the Iraq war started, I was sitting by the fire in the living room. The power was out. I remember seeing the bombs go off in Baghdad on this little battery-powered TV. I was so happy that we were invading Iraq, because I knew I’d get to go to a combat zone when I joined the army.”

While Alex was in prison, Norm had offered an evolving series of explanations for his involvement in the robbery that culminated in a version whose principal virtue was that it was less crazy than any of the alternatives: Alex had been so brainwashed by his training that he actually thought the bank robbery plans were some kind of legitimate military operation.

I waited until my second drink with Alex to ask him if my understanding was correct.

“Actually,” he said, “I kept thinking that for probably four months in prison. There were points where I was like …”

“Wait,” I said. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah.” Alex shrugged. “I was like, there’s no way this is possible.”

In the months ahead, my disbelief would give way to amazement and outrage as Alex and the rest of the family told me more about the crime. I heard my uncle Fred in North Dakota muse about it in his baritone croon: “I think Alex just had no idea what he was getting into.” I heard my uncle Kurt in San Diego growl in disgust: “Ben, that team leader had Alex completely freaking brainwashed.” I heard Oma brush it off in her mannered Texan lilt: “All Alex did was follow that man’s orders.” I heard Norm sputter with despairing incredulity: “And this whole time Alex was thinking this was a freaking training exercise.”

But before all that I heard it from Alex himself, who made time every Monday during his break between Zamboni passes at the ice rink to fill me in over the phone about the day the one thing happened.

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_269afba2-98f5-5a60-9feb-496460a674d3)

ONE FINE DAY AT BATTALION (#ulink_269afba2-98f5-5a60-9feb-496460a674d3)

On August 7, 2006, in Room 321 of Charlie Company barracks, Second Ranger Battalion, Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment, U.S. Army, the alarm went off at 0430. Privates Blum, Ryniec, and Martin clicked awake like soldiers, with none of that shell-shocked fog that clung in your brain during the Ranger Indoctrination Program, when all the late-night wake-ups by sergeants screaming at you for your latest failures wore the edge off the self you recognized. They climbed out of bed like soldiers, snapped their sheets taut and tucked them under the mattresses like soldiers, rolled a quick smear of deodorant under their arms. Charlie Company, Second Ranger Battalion: same outfit Tom Hanks’s character commands on D-Day in Saving Private Ryan. How cool was that?

A few stars still shone out the window over Fort Lewis’s Ranger field. Blum swapped a morning nod with each roommate. All down the hall came the muted wooden bangs of wardrobe doors slamming open and shut, the abortive beeps of alarm clocks sounding and just as quickly going dead. The walls of the cramped, dormlike room were papered with the weapons specifications the privates had been studying for their Expert Infantryman Badges as well as an array of bumper stickers: TERRORISM IS A DISEASE; RANGERS ARE THE CURE. RANGERS DON’T DIE; THEY JUST GO TO HELL AND REGROUP. When Blum first arrived here four months ago, it had taken him a moment after waking to see the Ranger memorabilia all over the walls and remember—I made it. Now the routine moved through him like a piston through a cylinder, the pride of being a Ranger thrumming deep in his bones. The men didn’t shout endless Hooahs here as they had in basic training. Rangers leaned more toward a clipped Roger, Sergeant: cool, clean, deadly professionalism.

“Cherry” privates like Blum—combat virgins—were at the very bottom of Second Battalion’s pecking order. When their platoon’s time came on the rotating schedule, they rose an hour and a half earlier than anyone else so they could buff every windowpane and porcelain fold of toilet to the same sheen of purity they strove for in their minds and bodies. If some dusty corner failed inspection, they would all be marched outside and smoked. There were London Towers, Mountain Climbers, Flutter Kicks, Bear Crawls, Iron Mikes. There were TV Watchers, squatting with an invisible TV held in front of their faces. There were Koala Bears, clinging upside-down to telephone poles until they lost their grip and dropped. There were, always and forever, push-ups, which the sergeants liked to order by shorthand: “Beat your fucking face!”

It was still dark when Blum and Ryniec pushed open the stairwell door to the concrete apron behind the barracks. The tall firs that ringed the parking lot waved in the early breeze. They circled in opposite directions to pick up all the empty Skoal cans and damp plugs of earthy chew that littered the pavement. Ryniec kept his voice just above a whisper as he and Blum converged on the dumpster with their handfuls of trash, bantering about all the blood they’d spill on deployment.

At 1200 hours today, the entirety of Second Battalion would be released for two weeks of block leave, after which the damp green mountains of Fort Lewis would be swept aside for the blazing dust of Iraq. Deployment. Excited speculation about the missions to come had hummed for weeks through every conversation. On Second Battalion’s last deployment, they had helped rescue a Navy SEAL named Marcus Luttrell, whose account of the harrowing mission, Lone Survivor, would soon become a New York Times bestseller and a major Hollywood film. Now rumor had it they would be deploying with Luttrell to Ramadi. For Private Blum, the feeling resembled nothing so much as the anticipation that had built inside him just before a big hockey tournament when he was a kid, that same little bell ringing on and on. This was it: what he had worked for more than half his life.

He and Ryniec ducked to look beneath the benches and pull-up bars of the small exercise area. Behind them, pale beige room lights showed through the windows on the second and third floors, where the privates stayed. Darkness prevailed in the windows on the first, which housed the noncommissioned officers and “tabs,” those who had completed a combat deployment and passed Ranger School to earn their Ranger tab, a black arch above the shoulder sleeve insignia with RANGER inscribed in gold thread. One of these rooms belonged to Specialist Sommer, the team leader Blum had taken orders from when he first arrived at battalion and who by now had become a kind of mentor. Also sleeping in Specialist Sommer’s room were the two Canadian friends that Blum had driven Sommer to pick up at the Tacoma Greyhound station last night. But Blum’s thoughts were not on Sommer or his friends. Even deployment was a little unreal to him on a day like today. All he could think about was getting through the hours that lay between now and his evening flight home to see Anna.

I had been talking to Alex for two months on the phone about every other possible topic before he finally opened up about his ex-girlfriend.

“In basic training,” he told me, “you can’t control the drill sergeants, can’t control what time you wake up, when you eat, when you piss, what you do all day. The one thing they can’t touch is Anna.”

Before leaving for basic, Alex had arranged for two of his friends at Littleton High to deliver Anna a new red rose every day, accompanied by successive installments of a long love letter. He wrote more letters to her from the barracks, often taking an entire hour from the handful he’d have for sleep to fill page after page of notebook paper.

I love you baby I love you as far as the universe stretches you are the love of my life and my best friend. Whenever I am surrounded by darkness I see you and all of a sudden I am surrounded by light. Thank you.

Between the body and the signature, some letters contained as many as six pages composed entirely of the phrases “I love you” and “I miss you,” modulated with varyingly effusive relatives of “so much.”

You are my entire life baby. Marry me. I love you

Alex

During Alex’s tenure, a Ranger battalion generally deployed for three months, then came back for six months of rest and recovery as the other two deployed in sequence. Rangers trained hard in the off-season. Their elite standards demanded intensive upkeep, like a top-shelf Ferrari in racing condition. Because the RIP curriculum contained precious little in the way of actual instruction, the biggest challenge was to bring the new cherry privates up to speed on Ranger tactics and integrate them into combat teams, each of which specialized in one of the two primary zones of urban warfare: inside and outside. A “line” team performed home invasions and secured interiors. A “gun” team provided cover with M240 machine guns from outside, shooting “squirters”—those who attempted to flee the building—and lighting up targets with tracer rounds for the helicopters, known as “little birds,” to hit with the serious weaponry. Although Ranger protocol has changed a little since Alex’s time, when he joined battalion the responsibility for training new guys mostly fell to their team leaders, recently anointed tabs who enjoyed the same gleeful lordship over cherry privates as fraternity brothers over new pledges.

To PFC Blum, the tabs represented a standard of competence and achievement he could barely imagine attaining himself. Not only had tabs actually taken on terrorists in combat, they had all completed Ranger School, a leadership course twice as long and just as brutal as RIP. The presence of a tab in a room brought in a thrilling after-scent of Iraqi dust and blood. Cherry privates admired them desperately. The tabs repaid the favor with unrelenting hazing. At any moment, whether firing rounds at the machine-gun range or shopping downtown on weekend leave, a tab could yell “tab check” and force a private to do whatever he wanted: bark like a dog, pump out fifty push-ups in a crowded elevator, chug three beers and run ten laps around the barracks.

August 7 marked a loosening of the hierarchy. Soon the soldiers would all fight side by side against a common enemy. Today, Charlie Company’s morning hour of PT was light and fun, a reward for all the work the privates had recently put in for their Expert Infantryman Badges. The forty-odd soldiers of Blum’s platoon gathered in formation at 0600 hours in the parking lot behind the barracks for warm-up calisthenics and stretches, bouncing on their toes to keep warm. Blum and Ryniec had taken special care not to leave even a stray gum wrapper or cigarette butt. Nearly all Blum’s closest Ranger comrades were here, including Specialist Sommer and the other tabbed specialists and corporals who filled out the ranks of team leaders and assistant team leaders—the “E4 Mafia,” as they called themselves, referencing their military pay grade. Exercise gear had been dragged through the side door from the gym for a five-station circuit: power military press, box jump, rowing machine, squats, clean-and-jerk. Platoon Sergeant Congdon bellowed the names of five soldiers at a time to sprint up and rotate through, doing as many reps as they could manage in the minute allotted for each station. Privates struggled wildly to outdo the tabs. The whole platoon screamed encouragement and happy threats as the clanks and wet thumps of bodies in motion echoed through the parking lot. After half an hour, the sun cracked over the shaggy silhouettes of the firs, netting the Rangers’ chests and faces in pale, orangish light.

When grouped as one unit, the gun teams were known as “MGT Squad.” This was short for “machine-gun teams,” but it was pronounced, with relish, “Maggot.” After everyone had been through the PT circuit, Corporal Roe led Maggot Squad on a run out the Ranger complex gate and around some nearby barracks. The point of this route, the easiest they ever took, was to intimidate regular infantry ground troops. Maggot ran by at full speed, puffing their chests out in an exaggerated goose step, then circled back to the barbed wire fence wrapped in brown tarp that surrounded their complex. Blum and the other cherries had been told that just before their arrival at battalion, a first sergeant from a nearby Stryker brigade had led a daredevil charge of other sergeants through the gates. The tabs who saw them, all outranked, had chased them down, beaten them up, flex-cuffed them, and deposited them outside.

After a quick shower, everyone changed into BDUs—battle-dress uniforms, which the soldiers called fluff-and-buffs because they dirtied and washed them so often. Most days they went straight from breakfast to the morning’s training, which was typically dangerous and exhilarating. Today their only responsibility was to prepare their rooms for block leave inspection. Blum went to the gym with his team leader, Corporal Sager, to lift weights for an hour, then returned to his room and started cleaning out his minifridge. In contrast to nearly every other day he had spent at Ranger Batt, the morning was unstructured and leisurely. Privates wandered between rooms to hang out for a minute and chat. All the talk was of how excited they were to go on deployment and shoot people.

The infantry’s job is to “close with and engage the enemy,” a classic piece of military euphemism that translates roughly to “run up near armed, dangerous men and perforate their bodies until they die.”

“Can you sink into that?” I asked Alex that first night at the Denver bar. “What’s the back-and-forth like?”

Alex obliged me, making his voice go excited and young. “It’s like, ‘Dude. I can’t wait to go fuckin in-house. We’ve been practicing all this fucking time to go take a house down—I can’t wait to kill a fucking hajji. Those fucking sand niggers. Fuck those motherfuckers. I can’t wait to waste those motherfucking … Can you imagine the size of a 7.62 going into those cocksuckers? Kill a little fucking kid with a bomb strapped to him? That’d be fucking sick. I can’t fucking wait.’ It’s like that.”

I couldn’t help wondering if any of the guys in Broncos sweatshirts at the bar were within earshot. Alex’s eyes flicked a little, as they do when he’s nervous.

“Is that an exaggeration, slightly?”

“That’s literally how it is. It’s probably worse.”

I asked him where the men had picked up that habit of speech. He told me it came from mimicking the soldiers with combat experience.