The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Page 11

  I positioned my arms shoulder-width apart and awaited his command.

  “Go.”

  I pushed slowly and concentrated on form.

  “Twenty . . . thirty . . . forty. One minute, Ranger. Nine more. Forty-seven. Forty-eight. Forty-nine.”

  I smiled as he called out “forty-nine.” I looked up, asking with my eyes whether I needed to keep going.

  “Don’t eye-fuck me, Ranger. Just keep pushing. This is Ranger School. We don’t do minimums. I want you to push until your arms fall off.”

  I reached eighty before the two-minute clock ran out.

  “You passed, Ranger.” He checked a mark on his clipboard. “Go stretch out for the run.”

  The humidity was a shock to my lungs on the two-mile run, but I still crossed the finish line in the middle of the pack. Marathon training had made my legs much tougher than my arms. At an RI’s command, I sprinted to change into camouflage and boots for the next event—the Combat Water Survival Test. We boarded a bus as the sun broke the horizon and began to add heat to the humid air. Fifty of us ran off the bus and formed up on a grassy patch next to the pool. For an hour the RIs had us on our backs doing flutter kicks until our abdominal muscles cramped. Then they turned us over to exhaust our legs with mountain climbers. Then back to flutter kicks. Then over to mountain climbers. The point was to exhaust us before we even dipped a boot in the water.

  “Move, move, move!”

  We rushed into the fenced-off pool area swarming with RIs. We lined the edges of the pool and observed an RI demonstrating several aquatic skills we needed to imitate successfully. The first event was a fifteen-yard swim in full combat gear.

  “Rangers demonstrating undue fear will receive a no-go.”

  What about “due” fear?

  When it was my turn, I jumped in and began paddling with one arm while suspending a rifle above the water with the other. At the tenth yard I began to look like a candidate for a lifeguard rescue. My boots were like concrete blocks, and my uniform dragged through the water like a parachute.

  “Ranger, you are not authorized to drown,” shouted the instructor who escorted me from poolside with a giant hook poised to snatch me from the bottom.

  “No excuse, Sergeant,” I gurgled between bobs.

  The next event was a perverse twist on Peter Pan. A bear of an RI, playing the part of Captain Hook, marched Rangers off the ten-yard diving platform. Freezing on the platform meant an instant no-go. I ascended the ladder after requesting permission. Captain Hook pulled my wet patrol cap down over my eyes and walked me to the edge. I took a deep breath, stepped into the void, and crashed the surface with a loud splash. As I swam toward the light, my shoulder was loose, and I knew I had to be careful of dislocating it again. After the wrestling tournament with Aram, it had never fully healed. A trip to the medical clinic was the shortest route out of Ranger School.

  The temperature peaked in the nineties as our bus returned to Camp Rogers. We rushed into the barracks to change into dry uniforms and formed up by the dining hall. A half-dozen pull-up bars signified the dining ritual we would perform as an ablution before every meal at Ranger School. Just like a Catholic with rosary beads, the Ranger student recites the six verses of the Ranger Creed in a strangely rhythmic intonation before performing pull-ups at the dining hall entrance. By the time I finished Ranger School in mid-September, I would recite the Creed a thousand times; enough repetitions to forever tattoo its tenets on my memory. In an all-male bass chorus, we vowed to uphold the prestige and honor of the Rangers, to never fail our comrades or leave them behind on the battlefield, to demonstrate intestinal fortitude, and to complete whatever mission we were given. Mounting the pull-up bars, each Ranger knocked out ten pull-ups and an extra one for the “Airborne Ranger in the Sky,” a prayer that attached an almost mystical reverence to the mission we had embarked on.

  As expected, dinner was rushed and chaotic. Twenty-one-hour days in the Georgia heat sweated off reserves of fat faster than a sauna. Ranger School was probably the only place outside a dietician’s clinic where calories were counted so obsessively. We could expect enough to keep us alive, but not enough to compensate for what we burned. The object was to consume as much food as quickly as possible—period. Talking was a waste of calories that we needed to survive. Before entering the mess hall, they warned us in the gravest terms not to sneak food out of the chow hall. The fact that they mentioned smuggled sugar packets gave some indication of the desperate measures Rangers had resorted to in the past.

  Three hours of supervised pain immediately followed dinner. We sprinted on full stomachs to retrieve our duffel bags and lined up “on the rocks,” a formation area lined with jagged gravel. We spread our bags twenty yards away from our positions, dumped the contents, and began a “layout,” a time-tested haze that served the purpose of screening our luggage for “contraband,” the actual term used to describe an unauthorized item that might give a Ranger student an unfair advantage. Punishable items included Tylenol and civilian long underwear. The layout was like an extended shuttle run. As the RI called off an item from the list, I ran to my pile, grabbed a pair of “boots, hot weather,” ran back, and placed them on a poncho at my position. When we were too slow or lacked appropriate “motivation,” the RIs motivated us with rounds of flutter kicks or push-ups. As we pushed, rocks dug into our palms, eventually puncturing the skin and leaving recognizable Ranger stigmata. The packing list was nearly three single-spaced pages long, encompassing everything from lip balm to fingernail clippers. By the time we finished, it was nearly midnight. I fell asleep on my plastic mattress before the filaments cooled in the lightbulbs.

  Sleep was a precious commodity. We counted and savored minutes of rest like calories of food. Three hours was a gift. Most nights we counted less, and some nights no sleep at all. This first week at Ranger School at Camp Rogers was no exception. The RIs referred to it as “RAP Week,” short for “Ranger Assessment Phase,” a week’s worth of gut checks that whittled our numbers by a third. Each event was an opportunity to avoid wasting taxpayer dollars on someone who lacked the “intestinal fortitude” demanded by the last verse of the Ranger Creed.

  The second day began three hours after the first ended. The lights banged on, and minutes later we were running. The five-mile predawn run was at a slow eight-minute-mile pace, but even that pace cast some students from our ranks, especially when the out-and-back route carried us back over the start line without slowing. This was a frequent tactic in Ranger School. We were never done when we thought we were. “One hundred percent and then some,” they’d echo the Creed. “You’re not going to give up just because the finish line moved a few yards.” After breakfast a medic jabbed our arms with a dozen inoculations and sent us to a giant sawdust pit to reinforce the soreness with close-quarters combat skills. Paired off, we threw headlocks and hip tosses, jabbed and ducked, and learned how to block knife attacks. In between kung fu kicks and bayonet thrusts (“Blood, blood, bright red blood! Whirl! Kill!”), we ran lap after lap around the perimeter, echoing “Ran-ger” with every step. The heat was unbearable. Even the sawdust couldn’t absorb the sweat soaking my uniform. Medics and RIs circled like vultures, the former seeking out Rangers they could boot out as “heat casualties,” and the latter making sure we weren’t pulling punches on our boxing partners. I skirted both adversaries as best I could, but not everyone was as lucky. Five dehydrated Rangers were pulled out and removed from the course in the first twenty-four hours. Nearly seventy more joined them by the end of the week. Each victim reinforced the RIs’ message to “hydrate or die.” I paid heed and swilled water by the gallon, downing ten to twenty one-quart canteens a day.

  The third morning tested our land navigation skills and followed up with a water confidence course. Falling into water was apparently something Rangers were expected to do a lot of in combat because our next event was the “Suspension Traverse,” a.k.a. the “Slide for Life.” I climbed an eighty-foot tower and looked down
the length of a guide wire sloping at an angle above the lake to a mass of tires intended to bounce malfunctioning Ranger students who failed to release from the wire at the appropriate command. Like an aircraft carrier crewman signaling F-18s, an RI on shore waved a pair of signal flags. I held on to the pulley with an iron grip and tried in vain to ignore the raw wounds where my blisters had popped. I flew down the wire and dropped at the next signal, adopting an L shape so that I wouldn’t “break myself,” to use the words of the RI.

  MALVESTI. EVEN THE NAME of the obstacle course we attempted on day four sounded nasty, like a poisonous snake or an incurable skin disease. The torture began with a climb up a ramp of cargo netting. I watched in shock as a student began convulsing on the net. Heatstroke, said the RI nonchalantly. An ambulance arrived and carted him away. Business as usual. On the other side of the netting, RIs turned fire hoses on a fifty-yard length of mud—the dreaded Worm Pit—ensuring that the water was frigid and miserable. A rat scrambled out of the muck moments before I dove in. Gooey mud and cold rancid water seeped into my ears and nostrils. I emerged and faced a climbing obstacle built with logs as thick as telephone poles. There were ropes to climb and descend and then a horizontal ladder of monkey bars. The mud of every Ranger that had gone before me coated the bars. It was worse than lard. Every time I slipped and fell into the mud, I had to begin again from the start. After a dozen attempts, I made it across. I dove into the last pool of mud, deeper and nastier than the previous cesspool. Inches above my back were strands of barbed wire emplaced to keep our heads and butts down in the mud. I turned my head sideways and was plowing a furrow through the slime with my helmet when my shoulder overextended and then dislocated from its socket with ripping pain. I stopped moving.

  “Get out of my mud, Ranger!”

  My mind flashed to a jump I had made the year before. My shoulder had dislocated in freefall, rendering me unable to pull my parachute. I had to pop it back into its socket at 120 miles an hour. It was the first time I had ever been mortally afraid. This pressure was less compelling, but the pain was greater. My arm was limp and screaming even louder than the RI.

  “Move, Ranger!”

  I started crawling with my other arm, dragging the disabled arm through the mud like a useless appendage. I moved at half the speed of the other students but made it to the end. When the instructors weren’t watching, I popped the shoulder back into place.

  That afternoon, the RIs corralled us into twelve-foot squares for boxing matches. It was only a fifteen-second bout, and all I needed to do was jab enough with my left to keep my opponent at arm’s length. I jabbed and jabbed, but some instinct kicked in when I saw his left side open up. I went for the kill with a right cross and threw my shoulder out again. Thirty seconds later I woke up lying on my back.

  “Ranger, you’re going to the clinic.” An RI stood over me like the Eiffel Tower.

  I struggled in vain to dissuade the RI. Fortunately, I had better luck convincing the medic that I could continue with the course. For a moment, sitting on the examining table, I considered quitting. Dozens had already quit. In Ranger parlance, they had LOM’d: dropped out for “lack of motivation.” At West Point I had always risen to the challenges. The challenges of Ranger School, however, were on a different scale, and I wondered whether I could take two more months of punishment at this voltage. At the moment, motivation was scarce. A medical “drop” was an honorable reason to leave Ranger School, I rationalized to myself. No one would call me a coward or a failure if I had a legitimate medical excuse. It was the easy way out. I could be on a plane home to Rhode Island in twelve hours, sitting by the pool with a margarita. Covered in mud and sweat, the prospect was especially appealing. Ranger School could wait a couple of years, I told myself. Maybe after Oxford?

  Another voice, however, urged me to stay. This sort of decision had an audience of one. Forget what my father would say as he picked me up at the airport. Forget LoFaro, Ostlund, and Charlie. Would I be able to look at myself in the mirror again if I quit? So I stayed in the course, a decision I would curse during every painful march or sleepless night staring out at the dark from a cold patrol base. There were no good days in Ranger School, just variations of bad. It demanded an almost inhuman level of endurance.

  I mounted the pull-up bars that night and strained with one good arm to knock out my eleven repetitions. As we stood outside and shouted the six verses of the Ranger Creed, I shouted six words louder than the rest. And for the rest of the course I repeated those words to myself whenever the temptation to quit resurfaced.

  “Surrender is not a Ranger word.”

  8

  Movement to Dawn

  Do your duty—and never mind whether you are shivering or warm, sleeping on your feet or in your bed.

  MARCUS AURELIUS

  IF CAMP ROGERS WAS TOO DISMAL A PLACE FOR FORT Benning to recognize with road signs, Camp Darby must have been Hell’s furnace. Getting there from Camp Rogers was an all-night sixteen-mile march along sandy firebreaks in Georgian pine forests. I carried sixty pounds inside my rucksack and a squad machine gun in my hands. Every ounce of its 16.41 pounds strained my exhausted biceps. I had already lost ten pounds in Ranger School; at this rate I would disappear before finishing. My boots were still damp from the mud, and my socks bunched up into folds and rubbed the soles of my feet raw. As my eyes followed the luminescent cat’s-eyes sewn on the helmet of the Ranger in front of me I bobbed in rhythm with him. Rhythm was good, taking my mind off the blisters and variegated pains spiking my lower back, shoulders, and hips. Our class stretched out nearly a mile, but not nearly as far as it would have if everyone who had started Ranger School was still with us. Fewer than two hundred remained of the three hundred who had begun RAP Week five days earlier. In case this fact renewed our confidence, the RIs made sure to remind us every time they crept up on a marching silhouette that RAP Week was the easy part of Ranger School. We had only reached the start line.

  What remained were fifty-six days of small-unit patrolling through the Darby, Mountain, and Swamp phases. Our instruction in the lost art of patrolling began at Camp Darby, an outpost in the woods consisting of just a few open-air classrooms covered in corrugated tin. An outside observer would probably have mistaken it for a guerrilla camp in Central America. In a way it was. The scenario was simple. A group of drug-crazed rebels on the fictitious island of Cortinia threatened the central government. Our mission was to shut them down using the two most basic tactics in the infantry textbook: ambushes and raids.

  Firepower and air support would help us in the field, but the RIs insisted that the true keys to success were subtler. Only with careful planning, thorough reconnaissance, and stealth could we hope to beat the Cortinian Liberation Front. Our movement through the terrain had to confound the enemy’s expectations. If we took the roads and well-beaten paths, we would soon find our roles reversed, with our columns ambushed and our patrol bases raided.

  RIs focused on teaching us how to win a guerrilla war in professional but painstaking detail. Classes under the tin roofs were long and hot, lasting until midnight on some occasions. We learned how to build our own booby traps, how to disguise our uniforms with twigs and leaves, and how to pick up the spark of a sentry’s cigarette from a quarter mile’s distance. A class on an L-shaped ambush could last four or five hours. If we could have gotten away with it, we would have rolled our eyes in boredom. Vietnam was our parents’ war. We thought guerrilla warfare had gone out of style with the Contras. Even our instructors admitted that the tactics were antiquated. They told us that the ambushes and raids were merely vehicles for testing leadership under stressful conditions. “You won’t actually need to know how to conduct an ambush in Kosovo,” quipped one instructor. Ranger School had eliminated its desert phase in 1995. Back then, no one had expected we would lead platoons in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was still a year before 9/11.

  In order to assess our comprehension, the RIs devised three-day field exercises hunting
a trained opposition force dressed in Cortinian uniforms. Every day we rotated through leadership positions in our squad, taking turns planning, leading treks through the bush, conducting attacks, and finally establishing new patrol bases under cover of night. It seemed like one long march through vines and briars. Our fumbled raids and noisy ambushes would have scared off any enemy long before they entered the kill zone. We were careless and sloppy because careless and sloppy couldn’t get us killed, not in Ranger School. I never believed I would ever conduct a real ambush. And I never believed I would ever be ambushed.

  The longer we stayed in the bush, the dumber and clumsier we became, by compromising our reconnaissance missions, leaving weapons on prisoners, or losing one another as we crashed through the woods following fireflies rather than the luminescent cat’s-eyes on our buddies’ helmets. We weren’t going to convince anyone that we were an elite force. Sustaining the ability to talk in complete sentences was difficult enough after a couple of weeks without adequate sleep. As we inevitably became more careless with equipment, the instructors made us tie everything to our vests with “dummy cords.” As a result, we lost fewer weapons, batteries, and radios, but became a lot slower exchanging items between rotating squad leaders. Two Rangers trading radios looked like a game of cat’s cradle. Without much juice to power one’s brain, disentangling wires and nylon cord was like computational physics.