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

“Do they talk that way about people they’ve actually killed?”

I saw the memory hit in his eyes as he nodded. His voice climbed before he remembered to hush himself. “Oh man. Oh fuck. One time we were at this range learning how to set off Claymores. This one sergeant, this was him, I swear to God, his fucking husky voice, he goes”—Alex’s voice dropped an octave as he leaned over his tumbler of whiskey—“‘You motherfuckers. When you get over there, I swear to God you don’t know shit. When you kill a body, you take their soul. You fucking take their soul. But fuck ’em, cause they’re going to kill your buddies.’”

He glanced around to see if anyone had heard him, then met my shocked expression with one of his own. “That’s what they’re like! That’s the mind-set! He goes, ‘This fucker was shooting at my squad with his kids on his back, so I wasted him and his little shits. I killed a little twelve-year-old girl. I pissed in her bulletholes.’ And we thought he was the coolest guy in the world! Like, ‘Holy shit, this guy’s fucking crazy!’”

Moral outrage sounded a little jarring coming from Alex. In tone it was only a few degrees away from the fascinated awe he used to express for all things military.

“In the infantry,” he went on, “you want to be a cold-blooded, detached killer. That’s the coolest thing to be.”

“So you talked that way to impress each other?”

“I think we said how excited we were to do it to tell ourselves we could do it. We can talk hard, we can be hard.”

It wasn’t just the veterans from whom they drew cues. Video games and movies were also full of role models and great lines. Like NFL players squeezing in a game of Madden NFL in the locker room or drummers taking on the lead singer in a tour bus round of Guitar Hero, the Rangers relaxed after training by sniping each other’s heads off in Call of Duty 2. Blum and his buddy PFC Anderson from Bravo Company had joint custody of an Xbox that lived in Room 321. If they couldn’t muster the energy for the taunts and fights that inevitably followed a multiplayer death match, they opted for cinema.

The movies the privates loved best were big-budget epics that presented a vision of war both accurate enough to believe in and glorious enough for them to want in. Movies about heroic Rangers like Saving Private Ryan and The Great Raid had inspired a lot of them to go army in the first place, but around battalion, Black Hawk Down was the go-to choice. For a Ranger, it played like a two-hour highlight reel. It had been filmed with close cooperation from the regiment and featured real Rangers as extras and helicopters exactly like the ones they trained with. Big-name actors played people they saw every day. Their chaplain, Major Jeff Strueker, a squad leader back then, had dragged an early Mogadishu casualty to safety and demanded to be returned to the action. Strueker was whispered of around battalion as “a fucking killer, man.” The running joke was that he had found God only to get his captain’s bars.

Campy schlock was good too. Now that Alex and his compatriots were real Special Ops commandos, it never ceased to delight them that all the terrorist-killing, hostage-rescuing, bomb-defusing action heroes America slavered and thrilled over were doing a Ranger’s actual job. They loved to hoot together at Hollywood’s efforts at military realism: the boneheaded tactics of the supposedly elite counterterrorism team scrambling through a shower grate to be slaughtered in The Rock, the garbled lingo in just about everything. Their favorite was Navy Seals, the 1990 bomb in which Charlie Sheen plays a bad boy in a red Corvette and Bill Paxton plays a sniper code-named God (“Your God does not help you now!” screams a terrorist at his helpless victim just before Bill Paxton puts a bullet between his eyes, triggering convulsive guffaws from every Ranger in the room). Rangers often collaborate with SEALs on critical missions in the Middle East, which causes problems: the rivalry between army and navy gets particularly fierce between their elite units. A few days before block leave, Platoon Sergeant Congdon had gathered all of Charlie Company’s First Platoon by the trophy case in the hallway that featured a Mercedes hubcap and a certain prominent Iraqi’s bloody uniform to ask that they please, if possible, on the upcoming deployment, refrain from calling SEALs “swim fags” or asking them how Charlie Sheen was doing.

Violent movies, violent video games, juvenile pranks, and porn: the barracks were a lot like what any other dorm in America would look like if you slipped a canister of vaporized testosterone into the air conditioning. Some privates went to frat parties in Tacoma with no other goal than to start fights and steal beer.

When I asked Alex who the big characters at Ranger Batt were—the scary guys, the cool guys, the weird ones and outcasts—I could tell the question grated.

“See, now you’re getting down to an individual aspect. You don’t have that there. Guys had tabs or they didn’t. EIBs [Expert Infantryman Badges], CIBs [Combat Infantryman Badges], number of combat tours. That’s what made them them.”

There was only one soldier Alex identified as failing in some way to fit in: a private named Chad Palmer in the line team Alex’s gun team was paired with. The reasons were various. Palmer had a combat deployment but no tab. Nearly everyone in Ranger Batt chewed Copenhagen, but very few smoked, because it compromised endurance; Palmer was one of them. When he talked he tilted his head back and squinted as if with secret knowledge, a peculiar and off-putting attitude in an environment where every single experience was shared. He just didn’t seem as serious about the Rangers as some others—a big deal to PFC Blum, who was as serious as it got. But Palmer’s biggest fault was acting too familiar with the tabs. He chatted and joked with them as if he were their equal.

That’s what Alex told me. Soon I had developed my own theory: the real problem with Palmer, I suspected, was that PFC Blum couldn’t understand why Specialist Sommer liked him so much.

The cherry privates were as comfortable with each other’s bodies as lovers. This came in part from all the fighting. In the total mutual exertion of hand-to-hand groundwork you had to grab whatever you could to gain advantage. They practiced a lot, in venues both official and otherwise. A favorite tab game was to send a private down the hall to ask for dental floss or some other pointless item from another squad, whose members would invariably drop him to the carpet, wrench his wrists behind his back for flex-cuffs, duct-tape his mouth, and leave him slumped outside his squad room door.

“How often did that happen?” I asked Alex.

“Daily. Literally every single day.”

On rarer occasions, tabs would stage free-ranging battles between squads that left everyone in bruised piles by the end. PFC Blum once took a boot to the face that cut halfway through his lip. At times he was spurred by the tabs to choke other privates to unconsciousness. Other times he himself was choked out. When I told Alex that I couldn’t imagine how that felt, he offered to show me.

By now it was the summer of 2010. A lot had passed between us in the six months since that first conversation in the Denver bar: thousands of cell-phone minutes, a growing repertoire of inside jokes, and an increasing undercurrent of subtle verbal jockeying over the sequence of events of August 7, which so far neither one of us had named. We were facing off on a mat in Alex’s dad’s garage in Greenwood Village, dressed in two worn black sweat suits that Alex had scavenged from his bedroom closet. Mine hung off me in pouches that looked like trash bags stuck on a fence.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

There is a funny intimacy in the moment when someone’s arm is around your throat but he hasn’t yet started to squeeze. After some rearranging as he sought the optimal angle, Alex made a fist and expanded his biceps. I felt instantly transparent. Blood and thought rushed back into my head when he let go.

“You okay?” he asked, concerned.

“You’re really good at that,” I managed to say.

Alex grinned, glad, as always, to be of help.

It was just after noon on August 7, when PFC Blum zip-tied his desk drawers and stuffed the last of his clothes into his hockey bag, that the story started to get complicated.

Half an hour after the official release time, Platoon Sergeant Congdon conducted an inspection of First Platoon’s barracks that brought him finally to Room 321. As he poked into desks and cabinets and checked off items on his clipboard, Blum, Ryniec, and their roommate, Martin, stood at attention, spines rigid with that electric tension that always accompanied a superior; the feeling when a civilian boss materializes beside you isn’t too far off, if your boss happens to exude readiness at all times to beat your ass. In Blum’s case, the anxiety was coupled with the private swoon of worship he felt for the Rangers he admired most. Congdon was tattooed and huge, with a shouted-out husk of a voice. His friends in Delta Force all called him Sergeant Congo, a nickname meant to evoke bloody jungle atrocities.

“Don’t fuck up on leave,” Congdon said. “See you back here in two weeks.”

Blum, Ryniec, and Martin slumped into chairs and beds with the extra talkativeness of mild relief.

Next to appear at their door was Corporal Roe, Ryniec’s team leader, announcing a soft armor inspection. Although Roe was a tab, the privates had enough day-to-day contact with him to render this a fairly relaxed exchange. Each gathered his soft armor, a butterfly-shaped bulletproof vest that hugged the body without constricting movement, and dumped it in the growing pile outside the squad room door.

Shortly afterward, Specialist Sommer came by, gestured for Blum to follow him out into the hall, and asked him for his soft armor. Blum dug it from the pile and handed it over.

The first time Alex told me about this moment, I asked him how he could possibly have failed to be suspicious. He explained that questioning his superiors was a habit of mind he had long since given up. “What you have to realize,” Alex said, “is I never thought it was possible for a tab to do something wrong.” He told me that he assumed that Sommer’s request had something to do with the inspection—that he gave it no more thought than that.

For all the detailed verisimilitude of Alex’s story, it was beginning to seem increasingly strange to me how normal a day August 7 appeared to have been. In the story as Alex told it, he and the soldiers he regarded with such affection did little other than lift weights, watch TV, gobble huge rations at chow hall or off post, and insult each other’s chances with women on leave. All the while, though, Specialist Sommer was flashing in and out among them. How many suspected what he was planning for that afternoon? How many knew? Why didn’t anyone do something?

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_546be7c4-5654-5f9f-9b8f-1a74354503ac)

YES, SPECIALIST SOMMER (#ulink_546be7c4-5654-5f9f-9b8f-1a74354503ac)

August 7, 2006, was not, of course, PFC Blum’s first experience of Specialist Luke Elliott Sommer. Sommer was one of the very first tabs Blum met at Ranger Battalion.

PFC Blum reported for duty about four months before the robbery, in April 2006. After the exhilaration of surviving the Ranger Indoctrination Program and the princely rides in limousines from the airport to Fort Lewis, he and the other new cherries had passed for the first time through the hallowed gate in the brown-tarp-covered chain-link fence and discovered a ghost town. The few tabs in the barracks dumped out all their belongings and smoked them perfunctorily, then ignored them. The rest of Second Battalion was still in Iraq. The new privates’ only duties were to clean up the barracks and service gear in preparation for their return. When Specialist Luke Elliott Sommer arrived three days later from Ranger School with a brand-new tab on his shoulder and gathered the new privates to watch The Great Raid with him in Charlie Company’s bar, they were glad just to have their existence registered. Five minutes into the opening sequence a sergeant strode in, puffed up with displeasure at the presence of cherry privates in the bar. The privates steeled themselves to get smoked. But Sommer told the sergeant that they were with him, and that appeared to be enough.

Even among Rangers, Sommer stood out: over six feet tall, with dark hair, blue eyes of powerful intensity, and a smattering of fierce tattoos. He spoke quickly but reasonably with a mild Canadian accent about his two combat deployments, one each to Afghanistan and Iraq. He laid out his philosophy on the Rangers for the new privates. “Ranger Batt is like no place on earth. You’re with the best of the best now,” he said. “But you have to play it smart. It’s a political game.”

Near the end of Ranger School, after weeks of slogging through Georgia swamps, climbing rock faces with numb hands and combat boots, and leading all-night ambushes in which even the intestine-clenching certainty of imminent explosions could barely keep you awake and moving, Sommer had fallen out of formation to administer first aid to a soldier with heat stroke, after which he had been recommended for an award at graduation.

PFC Blum listened in awe. This was the first time an active-duty Ranger with combat experience had treated him like someone worth talking to. Specialist Sommer’s birthplace in Canada just so happened to be home to the Kelowna Rockets, an elite youth club that the Littleton Hawks had once traveled up to compete against. Nervous but excited, Blum spoke up to mention the connection. Sommer told him that he had once played for the Rockets, although in a different age bracket. And there was another link between them: the room Blum was staying in now, number 321, had been Sommer’s the year before.

The rest of the Rangers returned from deployment, then were released on April 7 for two weeks of block leave. Alex flew home to Colorado to see Anna and his family. When he returned, he found himself assigned to the second of three gun teams with a private named Womack, whose measured speech and prickly shaved head reminded him of Squidward from the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants. Their boss, the team leader assigned to teach Privates Blum and Womack how to do their new job, would be Specialist Sommer.

A few weeks later, shortly after Alex’s nineteenth birthday, Ranger Battalion held a parents’ visit weekend. Norm drove out from Colorado in the silver Audi A4 he had promised Alex for use at battalion.

Alex has always worshipped his father. Back when Norm was playing a charming and tolerant host to his friends, he had been the coolest dad around. On this weekend, though, for the first time in his life, Alex found himself embarrassed by his father. Mortified, actually.

“So what kind of guns do you guys shoot?” Norm asked.

“Guns” was a civilian term. PFC Blum winced.

“Weapons, Dad. They’re called weapons.”

He introduced Norm to the specialist in the parking lot behind Charlie Company.

“I just remember, ‘This is Specialist Sommer,’” Norm recalled to me when I asked him about Sommer on the patio behind his house. “I recognized the name. Alex had talked about him, because this had been his boss for a period of time. He was just a big, thick British Columbia kid. Pretty studly-looking, outgoing, polite. He was bright. Before Alex enlisted, my opinion of army guys was that they had nothing better to do with their lives. ‘Alex, you’ve got all this opportunity, why do something like this?’ But the guys I met there were really impressive. Physically, they’re in perfect shape. They’re so committed to their cause, you have to respect it.”

Later that day Sommer showed up again, joking his way into a room full of privates and launching his big frame up Alex’s back like an extension ladder. Norm was puzzled by his son’s kowtowing formality in response but soon learned that cherry privates and tabbed E4s were strictly separate castes. “There was such a divide between private and specialist, tab and nontab,” he told me.

Ranger Battalion had been set up as a kind of war-themed day camp, with several activity stations to choose from. Sommer asked Norm if he and Alex would like to join him for the walk to Range 7, where parents would have the opportunity to fire automatic weapons. He told Norm to call him Elliott. Norm was happy to oblige. While they chatted about Sommer’s childhood, swapping jokes and hockey lingo, Alex cringed in silence.