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

“I liked him,” Norm recalled. “I like Canadians. I like hockey guys. I’m thinking, ‘I’m glad Alex has a hockey guy in addition to these Ranger guys. The hockey relationship’s a deep bond.’ I’m thinking, ‘Alex is really comfortable here. This isn’t all bad. So my kid lost his personality, but at least he’s around quality guys. He’s going to learn a lot about life.’”

At the range, Sommer took Norm into a pitch-black tent and strapped goggles on his head that popped the room into the horror-movie depth of night vision, then set him up outside with a squad automatic weapon, the same M240 model Alex trained with. The barrel climbed uncontrollably as Norm shot bursts at the metal targets fifty yards away. Sommer went next. To illustrate, Norm leaned forward in his patio chair, holding an imaginary assault rifle to his shoulder and taking aim at the lawn mower parked beside a broken planter across the grass.

“He’s just, boom boom boom boom. Just, ding ding ding ding. He was right on the fucking target. He didn’t fucking miss. You’re thinking, well, you don’t want to be on the other end of this.”

By the time the trio walked back from the range, crammed into the shoulder of a busy four-lane road with troop carriers whizzing past, the dynamic between Sommer and his son had begun to bother Norm. They were just a couple of kids—Alex was nineteen, Elliott only twenty—but Alex almost seemed to enjoy playing the role of subordinate. It made normal conversation impossible.

“Every time with Alex it was, ‘Yes, Specialist Sommer. Yes, Specialist Sommer.’ So we’re walking back, and I go, ‘Alex, do you guys have to do this? It’s just the three of us. Why don’t you relax a little? His name’s Elliott. Just call him Elliott.’ That’s when Sommer says, ‘Uh, Mr. Blum, that’s not how it works around here.’”

Sommer turned to Alex and barked a command. “Private Blum! Get out in that road and beat your face!”

Alex turned without hesitation and charged into traffic. Norm stared in disbelief as his son pumped off push-ups with his bare hands flat on the hot black asphalt, Specialist Sommer yelling counts from just above. Armored trucks rocked to a halt on either side of them. Alex’s form was perfect, eager, proud. His chest dropped over and over to within a millimeter of the double yellow lines. When Sommer finally called him off, Alex sprang to his feet and both jogged to join Norm on the shoulder. Traffic rumbled back up to speed.

“Sommer goes …” Norm wrinkled his forehead in an effort at recall. “‘He does whatever I tell him to do and he has no vote or say about it. He’s my …’ I don’t think he said ‘bitch.’”

Before Norm flew home at the end of the weekend, leaving the Audi behind, Specialist Sommer told PFC Blum to see if his father would loan him $200. Norm agreed. Two weeks later, Sommer paid him back.

A few days after my conversation with Norm, Alex and I met in his father’s driveway to talk about his training.

“Hope you’re ready to get smoked,” Alex said, hauling up the garage door.

The next two hours were the most animated I had seen from Alex since his arrest. He rolled around on the cement of the garage floor shouting synchronizing codes to demonstrate a “talking guns” drill he had practiced on the quad with Womack, swapping in and out at Sommer’s command and cycling bursts to keep the barrels cool. He grabbed printer paper and pens from Norm’s home office to draw diagrams of the bullet-riddled live-fire shoot houses that had to be rebuilt every few months, remembering jogging excitedly back to the barracks alongside buddies who had once more succeeded, through a mix of professionalism and luck, in not killing each other. He dug cardboard boxes and soup cans out of the recycling bin to build a three-dimensional map of a company-wide training mission, pointed out breach points to each building with a golf club. He slipped into voices for sergeants and tabs with theatrical relish as he issued commands down the chain. I could almost see his gear-laden teenage form in digital-print fatigues and combat boots floating at twilight into the mock city in the hills where they staged the exercise, mind compressed inside his helmet by the pulse of chopper blades. He talked me through the sequence as if it were a favorite movie: dropping to a hover with dozens of other black helicopters over a dark field, leaping from a cabin packed tight with men and gear into open air on a thick black rope that charged up through your thighs and gloves like an animal, watching the grass beneath you widen, ripple in coiling eddies, hit through your boots with the total shock of body woken to itself. It was as close to battle as PFC Blum ever got. Hours later, as they flew home through the dark, Corporal Sager, a friend of Sommer’s from British Columbia who had taken over as Alex’s team leader after Sommer moved to a line team, let him sit in the helicopter’s door with his legs dangling in the wind.

“The moon was full,” Alex intoned. “We were flying along the highway. I was strapped into the Black Hawk with the 240 hanging between my knees. The wind was pushing my right pant leg across my lap. Sager leaned over. He said, ‘I wouldn’t let you sit in the door if you hadn’t done a perfect job.’” Alex paused for a moment to savor the memory. “I was so happy that I’d made him proud. I knew if we’d been in Iraq, he would have trusted me to be in the door to engage the enemy. The highway cut through mountains covered in pine trees. We were eight hundred, nine hundred feet up. I remember watching a lone car weaving through them, the faint lights on a Honda or a Toyota or whatever it was, and thinking it had no idea we were up there, no idea what we’d just done.”

Those months were transformative for all the cherry privates. At night and on weekends, they ventured into Tacoma with new eyes. Every door was a potential breach point, every bar counter a red zone concealing hidden gunmen, every Denny’s dining room partitioned into lines of fire. Civilians looked more and more like another species entirely. Cherry privates watched in bemusement as men and women with giant poofs of hair puzzled over menus, smoothed napkins over their laps, wiped their children’s mouths. One night after raiding airplane hangars, Alex and his buddies went out to see the new X-Men movie at the AMC multiplex near the highway, and all they could talk about, lined up there in the dark among teenagers who had no idea they were surrounded by Rangers, was how simple it would be to take down the theater. They all tried to outdo each other in assessment of the tactical problem, which was almost identical to that of a hangar: three exits, red zone in the projectionist booth, big interior space with a bunch of sheep to herd. Piece of cake.

Talk of hitting spots around Tacoma was a reliable way to show off knowledge and sound hard, a real-world application of their classroom sessions planning raids on satellite photos of al-Qaeda complexes. Whenever they watched heist movies, they laughed at how much better they could do the job themselves. Tabs were fluent in the lingo of tactical planning, but the sharper of the privates were already picking it up. In this PFC Blum was lucky to enjoy the special mentorship of Specialist Sommer.

Even after his replacement as Blum’s team leader, the specialist popped in once in a while as Blum broke down M16s or shined boots to ask him for a ride into town. He was friendlier to the privates than other tabs were, taking more than a few of them out to facilities around Tacoma to war-game, but Blum seemed to be a favorite of his. Sommer thought the silver Audi was cool, nicknaming it “the Transporter,” after one of his favorite movies, in which a disillusioned Special Forces operator runs criminal errands in an Audi A8. Blum tried to hide his nervousness about the stick shift. No matter where Sommer wanted to go—Chili’s, Starbucks, Quiznos, Dairy Queen, the supermarket, a porn shop—he made a little lesson out of it.

“Where’s our infill?”

“Side door by the booths.”

“Right. Red zones?”

“By the counter. From the kitchen. Behind that soft-serve thing.”

“You forgot the bathroom, Blum. Bang. You’re dead.”

As they ate, Sommer would regale him with tales of Iraq and Afghanistan and of his youth in Kelowna, a city of several hundred thousand east of Vancouver. His mother was a Royal Canadian Air Cadets instructor, but since Sommer had dual citizenship, he had chosen the U.S. Army, because Rangers were the ones who scoured the world of the vilest bad guys. He singled out one group in particular for his venom: the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, a gang that Blum was surprised to learn maintained a stranglehold on Kelowna. Sommer detailed their offenses: drug dealing, extortion, squatting in houses and ejecting their elderly inhabitants. He fantasized about gathering a team of Rangers to take them on.

“These guys are like the insurgents of Canada. A few Rangers would wipe these motherfuckers out, easy.”

“Hell yeah they would.”

Hooah. Get some. Blum was thrilled to be included by a tab in this kind of swaggering banter. Specialist Sommer impressed him: funny, experienced, highly motivated to stamp out evil wherever it might be found. Of course, in Blum’s heart of hearts, he was a little more into defending America from freedom-hating jihadis than Canada from some aging biker gang. But he wasn’t about to say that. The range of Sommer’s expertise in tactics, weaponry, and politics was formidable, and he was drilling PFC Blum on the skills he would soon need to perform flawlessly in Iraq: securing sight lines, covering hostages, taking quick charge of the package. The package might be a terrorist leader, a stash of guns, a hard drive full of enemy plans, anything. If you didn’t get out with the package, the mission was a failure.

When I asked Alex how it felt to complete these extracurricular exercises, he emphasized their similarity to the work Rangers did every day. As a nineteen-year-old private, he had simply been grateful for the chance to improve his skills. He was dreaming of heroic feats in Iraq. It seemed clear enough, though, that he had also found them profoundly exciting—like a video game you got to play in real life. Not that this distinguished them much from the rest of his training. Blowing the heads off plastic terrorists with assault rifles was another real-life video game, and Alex and his comrades played a lot of others on their Xbox, especially a game called Hitman, whose Mafia storyline dovetailed with a real-world game they called “Sommer Syndicate.”

By July, Sommer’s vigilante fantasy had expanded to include building a team of Rangers that would take over Kelowna and keep the Hells Angels out for good, sustaining themselves with protection money from local businesses and living by a strict code of honor. Once in a while he would toss a pistol to Blum, Palmer, or one of the other privates he was tight with and call “suicide check.” The requirement then was to point it at your head and pull the trigger. To examine the chamber first was an insult, forbidden. The godfather, “Don Terrino,” commanded absolute trust. In return, he was available to help out when it really counted. Once, when Blum pulled charge-of-quarters duty after two straight sleepless nights of field drills, he passed out at the desk and woke to a furious sergeant demanding to see his supervisor. Blum went upstairs and instead got Specialist Sommer, who somehow managed to calm the guy down and keep Blum out of trouble. The import of this anecdote didn’t sink in for me until another soldier told me about a friend of his who, after being caught asleep on CQ duty in Iraq, was court-martialed and stripped of his rank, becoming an instant pariah in his unit. His girlfriend broke up with him. A week after he got out of the brig he committed suicide.

In civilian life back home in British Columbia, where Sommer had gone by Elliott, his near-poetic facility with wild tales had earned him the nickname “B.S. Elliott.” Among his close associates at battalion, his bullshitting and over-the-top craziness was known as the “Sommer factor.” He liked to pop his dental retainer—one false tooth lodged in the middle to fill a gap he’d earned in a fight—in and out as a joke. Other tabs played along with his games. One day at the 240B gun-mapping range, Corporal Sager gave Blum his keys and asked him to move his truck so he wouldn’t get a ticket. Blum came back glowing from the trust that this personal errand implied and discovered Sager talking to Sommer on the curb. Sager raised his eyebrows at Blum with an air of jokey conspiracy. “You planning to take out some Hells Angels, Private?” he asked.

“Definitely, Corporal.”

In late June, Blum drove Sommer to a casino off I-5 along with PFC Palmer and an older tab named Byrne whom he had never met before. After Byrne made a recon run, they all brainstormed the tactical problem of taking it down: breaching the vault with plastic explosives, escaping in Humvees. As usual, Sommer took the normal Ranger chest-beating one step further, going so far as to diagram the mission on Google Earth satellite images in the same way raids were marked up in the classroom. But whenever PFC Blum started to think this was all getting just a little too real, Sommer would throw in some crazy detail about bringing Bravo Company along to fast-rope in from Black Hawks while Maggot Squad covered them with 240s, and soon it was all laughter and comfort again.

Now that they were spending more and more time together, Specialist Sommer told PFC Blum that he could begin to call him Elliott. Blum was flattered by the offer but found himself too uncomfortable to accept, sticking instead to “Specialist Sommer” as regulations required. Sergeants cracked down hard if they saw a private fraternizing too closely with a tab.

“He kept it in military-speak,” Alex told me. “It was always, ‘This is the infill, and I need you to map this out for me, and this and this and this.’ I was like, ‘Okay, okay, okay.’ It was just like homework for me. Maybe in his mind he was like, ‘Yeah, he’s in on it, he’s good with it.’ But at the same time … This is actually the main question I have. Was he like, ‘I have to keep this power over him’? Or was he like, ‘We’re actually equals’?”

On the afternoon of Thursday, August 3, just after PFC Blum successfully completed the rigorous multiday testing phase for the Expert Infantryman Badge he would need for combat duty in Iraq, Sommer asked him for a ride to the Bank of America branch on South Tacoma Way, where he had a checking account. While Sommer engaged in a lengthy transaction with a teller, Blum sat in a plush chair in the lobby and gave the place a once-over. Afterward, at a nearby Quiznos, he charted out on a napkin how a Ranger team would hit the place, trying his best to impress the specialist with his tactical acuity.

For PFC Blum, the morning of August 7 really was in many respects no different from an ordinary day: a long series of more-or-less arbitrary orders from superiors, some making sense, some not. Sergeant Congdon came by to release them for block leave. Corporal Roe came by to announce the soft armor inspection. Specialist Sommer came by to pick up PFC Blum’s soft armor. Blum and the other privates wandered into each other’s rooms to kill time until their flights. Two hours later PFC Blum was in the squad room watching TV with a few other privates and their squad leader, Sergeant Waterhouse, when Specialist Sommer leaned in the door and gestured for him to come out into the hall.

“My grandma just died,” he said.

PFC Blum had no idea how to react. Was it his place to give comfort? In fact, as Alex would learn years later, Sommer’s grandmother had just suffered a botched biopsy that would soon lead to her death but had not yet passed away. The story Sommer had given to superiors was that his Canadian friends were here to ride north with him and visit her in the hospital.

“I’m sorry, Specialist,” Blum ventured, which was how he truly felt.

“I need your car keys,” Sommer said.

“Sure.”

As he watched the specialist walk away with his keys, Blum realized to his dismay that he was now in danger of missing his evening flight. His buddy Anderson from Bravo Company was supposed to drive him to the airport in the Audi. Back home in Denver, Anna was waiting. But there wasn’t anything Blum could do about it. He returned to the squad room.

Around 1500, Privates Anderson, Ryniec, and MacDonald decided to take Ryniec’s old Ford Explorer into Tacoma for an afternoon snack at Applebee’s. From there they would drive MacDonald to the airport to catch his flight. Anderson planned to go in to the airline counter to see if he could switch his own flight to tonight. If he managed to do so, Alex’s ride would evaporate. His best bet was to load his hockey bag in the Ford and go with them to the airport now.

“You sure you don’t want to come, Blum?”

“Nah, I have to wait for Specialist Sommer.”

They all slapped hands with him, pulled it in for the clinch, exchanged a few last words of excited anticipation for deployment, and disappeared down the hallway.

PFC Blum received two phone calls in the next hour from friends carpooling to the airport and offering rides. He was forced to decline both offers.

By 1610 he was all by himself in the squad room, slouched in a pile on the sofa, alternating his attention between the TV and the clock. His cell phone lit up again: Specialist Sommer.

“I need you to come downstairs and drive,” Sommer said. “We’re going to the bank. We’re going to take care of it.”

It was a warm July afternoon a few days after the mock mission in Norm’s garage when Alex and I drilled down to the deepest level yet on these crucial few minutes, in a conversation on my mother’s balcony that would resonate with me for years. A brigade of storm clouds were bearing down in slow motion from the Rockies.

“‘We’re going to take care of it,’” I repeated.

“Yeah,” said Alex.