Читать книгу Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime - Ben Blum, Ben Blum - Страница 10

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 KILL by 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.

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.^fn1 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^fn2 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^fn3 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.