Читать книгу Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime - Ben Blum, Ben Blum - Страница 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that an exaggeration, slightly?”

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

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

“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?