The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Read online

  “Incoming!” I screamed and heard it echoed through the column.

  Ssssssssss—boom!

  “Twelve o’clock, three hundred yards!” I commanded, ordering the platoon to continue in the direction we were going toward a rally point three hundred yards away.

  I crashed through a tangle of mountain laurel, cursing every step as my stress factor doubled by the minute.

  Ssssssssss—boom!

  We ran again.

  Ssssssssss—boom!

  And again.

  The RI kept us moving for over a mile up a mountain through briars, bushes, and vines. By the time the artillery stopped bombarding us, I was thoroughly lost. I called my squad leaders to the center of our perimeter and asked their opinion. I triangulated from their guesses and hoped for the best.

  “Where are we, Ranger?”

  I gulped and pointed to the map with my thickest finger, hoping our true location fit somewhere under its shadow.

  “Ranger, are you sure?”

  Getting this wrong meant failing the patrol. I had no choice but to guess at our position.

  “Not quite, Ranger. Artillery is no excuse for getting lost.” He pointed to our correct location, about two inches and a mile away. I dropped my head, certain I had failed the patrol.

  “If you can still pull off the ambush on time, this won’t matter.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.” I crossed myself in silent prayer as he turned away, and then hammered out a plan with my squad leaders. The ambush we set up was nearly perfect, the best we had done yet. Unfortunately, we were two hours late. It might as well have been two days. All that mattered was that we missed our quarry. Step up to my line. Do not step on my line. Do not step over my line.

  It was a hard way to learn a lesson. I failed again during my second patrol and was “recycled” along with half my platoon. It meant repeating the entire Mountain phase: the rock climbing, the one-hundred-pound rucksacks, and those damned ridges. We sat cleaning our weapons by the barracks while the rest of the class boarded buses for the Swamp phase in Florida. I turned the same piece over and over in my hands, scratching against the carbon with a toothbrush and cleaning solution. It took my mind off failure.

  A few days later I snapped out of the funk. I had picked up a book to read, Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. I zoomed through it in between the odd maintenance jobs they had us perform while we waited two weeks for the next cycle of Ranger students to arrive. In the book a Greek warrior recounts his brutal training with the Spartans and the Spartans’ heroic, outnumbered stand against the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. I copied a passage from the book and stuck it in my Ranger handbook. “The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind. The Spartans say that any army may win while it still has its legs under it; the real test comes when all strength has fled and the men must produce victory on will alone.” I had one last chance to advance to the final phase in Florida. All I had left was willpower. They could kill me, but I wasn’t going to quit.

  Friends from West Point sent notes of encouragement after news spread through the grapevine that I had been recycled. Bill Parsons, predictably, sent biblical verses. Aram, my former wrestling partner, was already a Ranger. He put my predicament in familiar terms. “Wrestle hard and give it your all. And, win or lose, KEEP YOUR HEAD HELD HIGH. Beat them and stand firm!” Aram was destined to become either a general or a motivational speaker. I wrote back and signed off with our personal salutation, “No Regrets.” Liz Young, the classmate going to Oxford with me, didn’t know what to write a Ranger student, but I appreciated the effort. “I hope your spirits are high.” I could hear her voice writing it, inflecting the last word in a verbal question mark and bobbing her hair. My spirits weren’t high, but knowing friends were pulling for me lifted them considerably.

  IT WAS I A.M., cold, raining, and as dark as ink. Ten days earlier, all the Mountain recycles were incorporated with the next class of Ranger students who had arrived at Dahlonega. After training together, we headed up the ridges. We had just finished a successful ambush and recovered our rucksacks when the RI called my name. “Your patrol,” he said.

  Finally, I had an opportunity to get the “Go” I needed to pass the Mountain phase and advance to the Swamp phase. The mission was to march the platoon to a grid coordinate several miles away, set up a patrol base before dawn, and avoid being overrun before the next platoon leader took over. Under most conditions it would have been an easy mission. Not that night. It was our fourth night in the field, and adrenaline was the only thing keeping me awake.

  My peers were little better than zombies. Most had passed the brink of consciousness and entered a state RIs called “droning.” It began the night before when one Ranger became so confused with sleep deprivation that he wandered into another platoon’s patrol base and failed to remember even his own name. (“Ranger, it’s on your name tag.”) Hallucinations were common for droning Rangers. Urban legends of students ordering pizza deliveries to grid coordinates or mistaking trees for soda machines abound. The closest I had ever been to this state of mental dysfunction was in a hypobaric chamber at the Air Force Academy. At a simulated altitude of thirty thousand feet, I couldn’t even write my telephone number backward. Ranger School was worse than that. One night I nearly wandered off a cliff following a firefly. Simple calculations were nearly impossible after even three days without sleep. Adding distances between checkpoints was futile. I began to chew Redman tobacco, but even that buzz wore off under the droning spell. There was simply no cure for droning other than sleep. The rest—tobacco, push-ups—were only palliatives.

  When I took over, my men were walking dead. After moving out, the column stopped abruptly. I marched to the stop and found a Ranger staring at a tree.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “Why’d you stop?”

  Pointing to the tree, he replied, “The man in front of me stopped.”

  The actual Ranger in front of him, however, was already fifty yards down the trail. I coaxed, cajoled, and herded the platoon for the remainder of that miserable night, but we were moving too slowly to reach the planned base before dawn. After consulting with my squad leaders, I decided to adopt a new location for our patrol base. It was a gamble. I doubted the RI would approve the deviation (patrol bases were planned and monitored by higher headquarters). The base we set up was a mess of positions zigzagging around laurel bushes, but it was adequate. The alternative—forty droning Rangers still marching through daylight—would have left us easy targets for a Cortinian ambush. As the adrenaline wore off, it was a struggle to keep my eyes open when I checked on the machine-gun positions.

  The sun rose, and the RI who had stayed silent throughout our meandering trek approached me to debrief the patrol.

  “How do you think you did?” he asked with the standard Socratic opener.

  “I’m not sure, Sergeant.”

  “Good move, changing the patrol base. I’m impressed you managed to even get off the mountain with this group. You all were droning pretty hard.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.” I suppressed a smile as it dawned on me that I might have passed.

  “Keep this to yourself, Ranger. You’re a Go.”

  “Yes, Sergeant. Thank you, Sergeant.” After nearly three months I had finally earned my ticket to the last and toughest phase of Ranger School: Swamp phase. I said a prayer and threw another plug of tobacco in my cheek. I suddenly felt wide awake.

  10

  Tab Check

  I woke up in my foxhole in a cold sweat. I had a nightmare

  that I was still in Ranger School. Thank God that I was in

  Vietnam. Compared to Ranger School, combat was easy.

  COLONEL ROBERT A. “TEX” TURNER, former Ranger Department Commander

  “AN ALLIGATOR CAN OUTRUN A MAN,” SAID AN RI AT the front of the auditorium. He had an ugly snout that bore an uncanny resemblance to the baby alligator he led with a leash. No, he responded to
a Ranger’s question, no Ranger had ever been killed by a gator. Then again, he added, there’s a first time for everything. If we found ourselves being chased through the swamps, the best tactic was to run at right angles. Apparently gators have difficulty making turns. Just don’t zigzag, he warned, or the alligator will cut you off, literally.

  After dropping onto Auxiliary Airfield #6 of Eglin Air Force Base in northern Florida for the final phase of Ranger School, the first thing I noticed was that it was as flat as a Dahlonega pancake. Not even a small hill broke the level horizon. It was late August on the Gulf Coast, and heat rippled off the tarmac in waves. As I ran off the drop zone with my parachute, I stopped to down a canteen of water. I hadn’t forgotten the Ranger who convulsed with heatstroke on Malvesti. The bleached bones of rodents poked out of the grass ominously. Camp Rudder (named after the Ranger commander who had led the assault on Pointe du Hoc in Normandy) was intentionally isolated. The farther we were from civilization, the less likely someone would hear us scream.

  RIs shouted, Rangers hustled, and bags emptied. Standard protocol at Ranger School. The second event was more dramatic—a reptile class taught by specially trained Army snake handlers. We got a sneak peek at the cottonmouths that slithered through the swamps along the Yellow River.

  “You will know they’re in your swamp when you smell ’em,” concluded the instruction.

  What does a poisonous snake smell like?

  Swamp training was brief but intense. We altered our navigation techniques for flat land, practiced paddling Zodiac rafts, and drilled ambushes and raids. What we lacked in practice we made up during the field exercise—a ten-day mission to defeat the Cortinian Liberation Front. Dropped behind enemy lines, our mission was to seize their planning bases, disrupt their logistics routes, and disguise our own movements by winding through the worst terrain in all of Ranger School.

  The exercise began inauspiciously. One of my squad mates was rushed from the drop zone with a sprained neck. No sooner was he evacuated than a thunderstorm clapped above our heads. The RIs had told us that Eglin Air Force Base has the highest density of lightning strikes in the United States. As a precaution against electrocution, every time the RIs saw lightning they stopped us. Obediently, we dispersed to the four winds in small groups of three or four, huddled under our ponchos, and enjoyed fifteen minutes of precious sleep before the storm passed and we continued the mission. It was the only way to cool down in the heat, although our uniforms promptly dried after we started marching again.

  Hunger and fatigue were the real enemies in Florida. Apart from the lightning drills, we didn’t sleep for the first four days. The last six were only a moderate improvement, and even then our sleep deficit reduced us to drooling idiots. It got so bad that the RIs had us stand up on the perimeter of our patrol bases like emaciated shooting targets. They knew that the minute we reached the horizontal, our helmets would topple off our heads as we fell asleep.

  After seizing our objectives, we marched mile after mile on sandy roads that doubled the effective distance. Some nights the only thing that kept me going was holding the straps on the rucksack in front of me. Other nights I hummed Don McLean’s “American Pie.” Three times through made a mile. Thirty times completed a march.

  THE BOILING WAS A mission I’d heard about even before arriving at Ranger School. It began with the sort of image that recruiters hang on their office walls—four squads of camouflaged Rangers floating down a slow, murky jungle river. At the coxswain’s command, our paddles dipped into the putrid water and propelled us past mangrove forests. All eyes concentrated on the shores, looking for alligators. It was almost too clichéd to take seriously, and we didn’t. The RI enjoyed himself (he wasn’t paddling) by whistling tunes and cracking dirty jokes about our mothers. At a designated mark on the map, we paddled to shore, disembarked the Zodiacs, and moved toward the objective, a Cortinian base camp. A long rain shower delayed our attack and worried the instructors. Tragically, six years earlier four Ranger students had died due to a combination of rising water, falling temperatures, and fog. Our attack wasn’t tragic, but it was ugly. No one anticipated a barbed-wire obstacle, and a few Rangers, including me, shredded their uniforms in the dark. Ragtag, indeed.

  At midnight we set off in a single file to cross through the Boiling Swamp. Mud swallowed my legs to mid-calf. As I lifted my boots, they popped out of the sludge with a sucking gasp of foul air. Within minutes we were chest-deep in fetid water. My rucksack floated up to the surface with a layer of swamp scum as thick as gravy. Gnarly mangrove roots hid underwater. At each step, roots whacked my legs, each time at a different spot, leaving welts under my sodden uniform. We moved through the swamp as fast as possible; no one wanted to test the diligence of the RI who had screened the lane earlier for alligators. We stopped when it became clear the point man was lost. It was 2 a.m. by now, and the temperature plummeted quickly after we stopped moving. When we began again, I picked up an unusual smell of musk.

  “Do you smell that?” I asked another student.

  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s a cottonmouth.”

  “Oh,” I replied as nonchalantly as I could under the circumstances. So, that’s what a poisonous snake smells like.

  The platoon’s situation deteriorated rapidly. We stopped again to swim across a wide river, but then the RIs canceled our crossing. The water was rising too quickly, and the current was too strong. They radioed headquarters for motorboats to be dispatched to pick us up and bring us downstream. During the hour it took the boats to arrive, we stood in place in chest-deep water as the temperature dropped. The cottonmouth rumor spread quickly, and nearly all of us were shaking from early-stage hypothermia, fear, or both. Eventually, the boats arrived and brought us to drier ground. We hiked into a patrol base, and the RIs attempted to dry us out by making us build fires. We stood by the fires in shivering clusters. “Ranger TV” was what the RIs called it. That night I fell asleep standing up and stumbled into the fire, twice.

  When we woke in the morning, the new RIs handed out mail. I opened a letter filled with wise advice from Bill Parsons, my old roommate. “Persevere, persevere, persevere,” he wrote, “and remember that this training could one day save your life.” He left a verse from Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians. I penned it into my notebook where I would see it every day, “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.” Saint Paul would have made a good Ranger.

  Our attack on Santa Rosa Island, the culminating exercise of Ranger School, was only a few days later. Santa Rosa lay a few miles off the Florida coast near the entrance to Pensacola Bay. In the late afternoon, trucks deposited our platoon on Fort Walton Beach. Driving through the town was part of the torture. I was torn between directing my attention at the Kentucky Fried Chicken or the bikinis. I hadn’t seen either in nearly four months. After sunset we pushed off from the beach in our Zodiacs and crossed the sound, choppy from wind and bulging with the wakes of merchant tankers. The moon rose over our heads as we paddled, casting everything in a silvery light. My shoulders ached with each of a thousand strokes. On the opposite shore we disembarked and then headed into the moonlit dunes. I carried one of the platoon’s machine guns that night—twenty-three pounds of cold steel. Crawling into place through saw grass, we set up on top of a sand dune. Below us were a handful of tents, stacked crates, and a half-dozen Cortinians. The ammo bearer next to me linked his belt of ammunition to the starter belt, and we looked for a signal from the platoon sergeant. The moment before a raid commenced was always the quietest. No scratching, no sneezing, no wiggling, only every so often a deeper breath above the wind like a whale breaching the sea.

  His hand dropped in a karate chop, cutting the humid air. A half second later, tracers illuminated the objective and three dozen Rangers blasted through their ammunition. The barrel of my machine gun began to glow as I fired off eight-second bursts at the enemy soldiers running
between tents. The rhythmic burps from the machine gun thrust the gun stock back into my shoulder. The muzzle sparked like a magic wand releasing bolts of lightning. At a signal from the patrol leader, I unlatched the gun from its tripod and rushed down the dune. My boots were barely in the sand long enough to leave an impression. Moments later I was on the opposite side of the objective. Under my sweat-soaked shirt, my heart raced and my lungs heaved. Back on the ground, I lay next to my ammo bearer. We didn’t need to say a thing. It was over. The last major mission was complete. In less than a day we would walk across the finish line.

  We both turned our heads and stared out at the Gulf of Mexico. Oil tankers plowed through the water, stretching away in deep midnight blue. A yellow moon beat a path across the waves like a spotlight shining on our position. The air was salty and humid. I recovered my breath slowly and picked up the whirr of helicopter rotors announcing our departure. I lifted the machine gun, suddenly much lighter, and joined the other silhouettes kneeling in a circle by an abandoned gravel road. Black Hawk helicopters approached like steel dragonflies. As they hovered above the road, static electricity charged the rotor blades with spectral sparks.