Читать книгу Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime - Ben Blum, Ben Blum - Страница 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.