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Not much has changed about Ranger School since World War II. At 0500 the squad leader for the day kicks you. “Get up, fifteen minutes to eat an MRE and get on the line.” Back then it would have been a C-Ration, but it’s basically the same. 1000 calories of shelf stable gruel forced down your throat. You must prolong your deliberate starvation for the amusement of your captors. Don't bother warming up breakfast. Your Camelbak hose is probably frozen anyway, and the water activated chemical heater only works at civilized temperatures. Did you spend most of your time staring at trees when you were in Ranger School grandpa? Yep? No change there. It was off to stare down the barrel of your rifle at trees until noon when the mission will have been planned and briefed, and we could walk for 12 hours with 100 pounds on our backs. Somewhere out there some marine infantry basic holdovers cum insurgent fighters would be waiting for us.
What happens if you stop staring at the trees? You have to get sleep on the line because everyone else does when they can, and the last thing you can be at Ranger School is weaker than the man next to you. Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne stated that sleep is a weapon, and nowhere is that lesson taught more carefully than in Ranger School. But you close your eyes and when you open them a terrifying man with a walking stick carved into the shape of your denuded skull will appear like a ghost crouched on top of you, breathing gently in your ear. “Have a nice nap Ranger?” You gulp, feeling your life force being forcibly sucked from your body. You deny it was good. This is of course a lie, it was a great nap. Then you’ll realize your finger has been removed from your machine gun and placed up your nose, and then your weapon will go off, 50 rounds, fully automatic, and 50 miserable half-asleep men will start shouting the word “contact!” and running around preparing for battle. Eventually they'll settle down and the truth will slowly filter around the perimeter. “False alarm, someone fell asleep.” There will be an audible groan as everyone wishes you death. People tell me they’re scared of Ranger. I tell them it's mostly just walking and staring at trees, what’s to fear? A similar description could be made of The Bataan Death March.
A few things at Ranger have changed. In the 90s, four Rangers died of hypothermia in the swamps on one long four hour movement through the water. They died just a few hundred meters from dry ground. Now, the Ranger Instructors (RIs) carry little thermometers and temperature charts. While this may reduce the chance of freezing to death, we suspected it only made our torture more scientific. Like giving Nazi scientists scalpels and a pair of ice tongs. The Ranger Instructors of yor had to guess what would kill Ranger. The modern RI knows exactly how far he can abuse Ranger before he goes belly up. If you know a human being won't die without a fleece cap until the temperature drops another five degrees, might you not be tempted to institute a fleece cap moratorium until the temp has dropped another four degrees?
Of course not, you're not a sadist, but remember that sociological experiment in the 70s where half the test subjects were made guards, and half prisoners? The guards began to torture the prisoners. Imagine instead if first the prisoners had been tortured, and then made into guards, and then told to uphold the sacrosanct standard of torture in the interest of protecting all that is sacred. Imagine that the guards formed an ultra masculine club premised on how extensive that torture had been? In Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation, a Ranger Commander recalls standing atop Point du Hoc on D-Day looking down on the bodies of his Ranger brethren and feeling angry. He was angry because he felt that his Rangers had been too well trained to be killed. Even in death his fellow Rangers failed to escape his wrath. I read that book cover to cover waiting to go back into the swamps in the coldest cycle of the year. I imagined myself freezing to death, and all the unpleasant things my instructors would say about me if I were to display such weakness.
On my 100th day of Ranger School I was assigned to build a memorial to the four Rangers that had frozen to death in the swamps. Having just cleaned out an alligator pen (maintained to teach Ranger about things to avoid in the swamp), we spent a day turning a volleyball court into a three dimensional map of that fateful mission twenty years ago. I knelt, shaping the sand with my bare hands. I traced the river where they had walked, and I would follow, emptying a bottle of blue spray paint into the sand. Up to that point I had beaten the odds, making it straight through the forests of Ft Benning, and the notorious mountain phase at Camp Delonaga. I had returned home triumphant for twenty unmolested days of Christmas leave, only to return for a last month in the swamps of the Florida Panhandle. There I failed, consigning myself to four weeks of on-site incarceration before I could even begin again the final phase with a new class.
It's hard to imagine another occupation in which you can be sentenced to four weeks in what closely resembles a Louisiana Chain Gang. To fail and have to repeat a portion of the course with the next class of Rangers was called “recycling,” and we were recycles. It is an appropriate term that captures the sense that you are discarded garbage. Garbage with the distant possibility of redemption. We had No cell phones, we could not leave. We spent each day bouncing violently in the back of a truck, picking up spent ammunition and actual garbage at all the awful places we vaguely remembered having starved and shivered and promised ourselves that it was all almost over. We fired rounds praying we wouldn't have to pick them up. Pick up the first shell casing you know was yours brings about a feeling of despair.
Not far from the Ranger recycle barracks is a bank of six payphones, three of which are broken. Every night between phases, the phones are shared by forty Rangers. Payphones in 2016? Presumably these are the last few payphones in America, and all the payphone repairmen are long dead. As I wait in line watching an expert team jiggle a payphone in a specific way to get it to dial, I imagine that future Rangers will have to be taught to repair the antiquated devices. Perhaps a Ranger will have to operate the switchboard, and when recycled Rangers show up to the recycle barracks, they will find a payphone repair manual scrawled on a roll of toilet paper, complete with illustrations of a Ranger shimmying up a telephone pole to repair a blown transformer with a pocket knife, chewing gum, and a few of his own molars.
Even more important to Ranger than sleep or contact with the outside world, is food.You are fed almost as much as you can eat in the purgatory between phases. The transition from a phase of Ranger School itself to waiting for another to begin is similar to the experience of a German POW transferred from a Siberian work camp to an American run prison. Under the new administration at least you are treated with benign neglect, an improvement from a decidedly fascist policy of working you to death. During a phase, I remember laying in a dirt hole asking the man next to me why we all smelled like ammonia. “That’s the smell of your body cannibalizing your muscles for fuel. It’s the smell of your body eating itself.” Starvation smells like cat urine. On recycle status you find yourself turning to the guy next to you as you fish a maggoty bag of 'Patriotic Sugar Cookies' out of a patrol base poop hole saying, “this isn't so bad, dinner’s in 45 minutes. I'm getting the chocolate pudding!”
Instead of two 1,200 calorie MREs a day during the phase itself, you eat 5,000 calories during off-cycle, and become terribly afflicted with Ranger Face, the Ranger corollary to gout. It's the final insult in the systematic destruction of your body, where your face becomes rotund, even as your once muscular trunk remains flaccid and shrunken. When you return to civilization people will whisper behind your back. “He doesn't look starved, actually he looks kinda chubby. Look at those jowls.” Naked, you look like a moldy Stay Puft Marshmallow stuck on the end of a stick, and that stick is also covered in a layer of moldy marshmallow, because your body hasn't seen the sun in months, and you are pale with a diaper rash all over that oozes irritably, causing your uniform to crust to your skin. 2,400 hundred calories a day may seem like a lot, but I went from 220 pounds to a sprightly 180 when I showed up for Christmas break after Mountain Phase. When you burn 5,000 calories a day just carrying weight and staying warm, 2,400 calories is a crash diet.
It's at the payphones that I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I was a 24 year old man with a college education at a good university. A month picking up garbage admittedly made me question what I was doing with my life. Had I committed a crime? Not as far as the Army knew, and this was an unusual prison in which you had to fight desperately to remain incarcerated. I certainly hadn't been convicted by a jury of my peers. Yet, as we swapped stories in the payphone line, I discovered I was a young offender, serving easy time. When at graduation a crusty circa World War II Ranger Sergeant Major asked, “who's been here the longest?” A first lieutenant with a haunted expression raised his hand. “247 days sir.” He'd been in my squad in Mountains, and we'd rated him number two out of nine. What did he do to deserve such a sentence? What separated a 62 Day tab from a 200? It was the most discussed topic on any given night in the patrol base, apart from the recipe for a certain breakfast burrito that was passed around like pornography. A man climbs into your dirt hole in the ground and asks, “you were saying about that breakfast burrito…” With a sigh you reach into your pocket, pull out your notebook, and thumb to a dog eared page. “Scrambled eggs, bacon, country gravy, onions sautéed in a cast iron pan with olive oil. Is this where I left off?” He nods, and settles into the mud, closing his eyes to listen.
The guys I really felt bad for had the families. Guys with two kids and 150 days under their belts. Guys who failed their third phase and had to explain to their sons and daughters why they wouldn't be picking daddy up on Friday. The RIs reminded us often that nothing at Ranger compared to war. If anything approximated its mental strain, it was our proximity to the familiar. We drove through Floridian towns towing zodiac assault boats, filthy, laying on top of one another in the back of the truck. Night vision goggles jutted like probosces’ from our foreheads. We resembled a nest of cockroaches, a pile of dirty twitching creatures, antennas jutting every which way. Suddenly there's mom and dad, and little Timmy with an ice cream cone behind us at a stoplight in the station wagon, staring up at us like we’re on TV. Yes, they’re a little pudgy, and the car is a bit aged, but it’s Americana so close you can touch it. “There it is boys, freedom. Just jump down, get in the backseat, and tell those nice people to take you to the nearest strip club. We'll tell the RIs you fell out and bounced into a storm drain.” I felt a little self-conscious beneath their mildly curious gaze. We were spotlit, blinking in a reminder that the world continued to operate without us.
If you google the words 'sleep deprivation,' the words 'Ranger School' will appear on the first page of search results. Sleep deprivation turns intelligent people into idiots, and idiots into drooling wards of the community. Presumably the Ranger obsession with sleep deprivation stems from a desire to teach Ranger the most important lesson of Ranger School, possibly even of life: do not trust anybody. When you're hypothermic from standing guard at 2am, and you kick the frost encrusted sleeping bag of the next guard he will tell you, “alright, I'm up.” Ranger teaches you not to believe him, because he is lying to you. At first you know he’s lying, and you will keep kicking. He will squirm, and protest, and you will strike him until your foot is tired. Eventually, he will stand up and ask, “I'm up, are you happy now?” Your teeth are chattering. You are not happy, but you're tired, so very tired, and so you go to bed. At four in the morning an artillery simulator will explode, and an RI will begin screaming about lazy Rangers not wanting to stand guard and getting their buddies killed. He promises to make your day a living hell. You will turn to your buddy and ask him if he woke up Jimmy after he finished his shift, and he will look at you like you've lost your goddamn mind. “You never woke me up! Check this guy out trying to blame me for him not waking me up!” You'll realize that depending on one's definition of wakefulness, he's not lying.
If one wanted to hallucinate without the use of psychedelics, I would recommend sleeping only an hour or two a night, and spending the remainder of those evenings walking while staring through a night vision monocle with one eye. Something about the world viewed through one eye in fluorescent green turns the mind to fantasy. As you fall asleep, you will drift into trees and bushes and become entangled. Because Ranger cannot be trusted and likes to, in the words of one Ranger Instructor, “fuck you behind your back,” it is standard operating procedure at Ranger to tie all sensitive equipment to the body with parachute cord. Night vision goggles are tied to swing arms, which are tied to mounts, which are tied to your chest with cord that swings obnoxiously in front of your face. Changing leadership positions necessitates a 20 minute battle, as cold stiff fingers fumble with knots. Maps and thermals are desperately untied along with weapons, and a dozen other items specific to each role are exchanged.
After a fall, I found myself stuck preposterously upside down with my face inexplicably tied to my knee. Vines cover everything in Georgia. They hold you against trees by an invisible parachute cord force field. Eventually, like a wild animal driven mad by flies, you don't even attempt to identify the offending vine. You thrash and swing your head wildly. You fall to the ground and crawl through the darkness like a Disney princess fleeing a malevolent anthropomorphic forest. You become a blind wretch. These impromptu meltdowns give Ranger Instructors a dim view of their wards. Ranger will be found dragging his weapon and rucksack behind him, his night vision goggles hanging in front of his face, already in retreat long before having made contact with the enemy.
On other occasions, a tree may pretend to be your friend. Do not be fooled. In one instance, a sleepwalking Ranger arrived at our patrol base without his weapon. When accosted by his horrified Squad Leader regarding the location of his machine gun, he replied indignantly that he “just handed it to a guy who said he'd 'take care of it.” That he didn't receive a weapon in return, and was wandering the woods unarmed, hadn’t until that moment warranted his concern. Frantically, the patrol set out searching for the missing metal, and the mysterious man who had, with his forked tongue, made off with a heavy machine gun from one of our nation's elite soldiers. Was it Al Qaeda? Perhaps another platoon? Or maybe this was in fact hell, as many suspected, and it was Lucifer himself, twisting the knife.
A desperate search revealed the truth. Tired of toting his weapon, Ranger had asked a nearby tree if it would be so kind as to carry his burden for just a little while. Apparently the tree agreed, and Ranger proceeded to untie his weapon from his vest, and deposit it in the trees’ outstretched branches. Often we help out our buddies by tying weapons off to their vests, and it appears the tree had requested this service. The weapon was found tied responsibly to a branch. Perhaps it also received a thankful pat on the bark as Ranger went stumbling off into the woods, finally free.
Such stories may seem absurd, but they happen. We yell at people in the dark, and find that they are not there. On a long road march we coast to a stop like a robot running out of power, asleep on our feet with 100 pounds on our back. I myself saw a gargoyle crawl onto the helmet of the man in front of me. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘well, that there is a gargoyle.’ These happenings must be as old as the school itself, but change was in the air as I arrived at Ranger.
The first lady Rangers had just graduated the course, and the organization was perhaps just catching its breath in the wake of intense national media scrutiny. As we shuffled through the in-processing lines, we spotted them, as explorers in a strange land might spot snow leopards.
“There, that's definitely one!”
“No it's not, that's just a small man. In fact, I think that's Jim. Hey Jim!”
With shaved heads, women look very similar to men. There were probably a few smaller male Rangers who, while completing the five mile run were told, “There you go girl, you're doing great!” much to their confusion. I suppose it would be better than being told, “go home bitch! Your kind aren't welcome here.” That's the kind of thing that can really mess with a guy's head. But such a comment would never be made by a Ranger candidate, as Ranger is too tired and miserable to be G.I. Jane vindictive. Under extreme duress a person’s relationship to others is reduced to a primeval question: can you help me or hurt me? Guys only stayed away from females out of paranoia that Ranger Instructors might view such fraternization as a sign of weakness. In an environment meant to drum out anything that was soft or weak, maybe associating with female Rangers felt to them like wearing their softer side on their sleeve.
What really makes The 90’s film G.I. Jane, about the fictional integration of The Navy SEALs, unrealistic, isn't that Demi Moore wouldn't be able to do that many pull-ups while remaining that busty, it's that the U.S. Navy, or Army for that matter, would never allow a male instructor to touch a female trainee. If there's anything the modern United States military controls more minutely than gender integration, it's the policing of sexual assault. The military loves safety, and safety briefs, and sexual assault prevention briefs have in recent years consumed a large portion of the army's briefing energies. And for good reason. Like the eponymous Ranger, Private Snuffy will try to fuck you behind your back.
Maybe it's the briefs that make Ranger Instructors hate lady Rangers. In an all male platoon, a Ranger Instructor was queried about what he thought of the lady Rangers. He replied, “those were some bad ass bitches, but they have no place in combat arms branches, and I hope they have a serious injury they don't know about yet.” Maybe it's the embattled state of the ubermensch infantry culture that fosters the sentiment. Few technologies have changed less than the art of having men with guns walk twenty miles to lay in wait to murder other men. This is less a Silicon Valley environment of rapid transformation, and more of an ancient fraternity like the samurai or the Catholic priesthood.
As I was bartending at The Gator Lounge, slave labor at the local Swamp Phase RI hangout while waiting for my life to begin again, the topic picked up again between two instructors. “You don't see women playing in the NFL. They can’t do this shit.” Ranger School was not the NFL though. It only takes four pounds of pressure to pull a trigger. The American military is the over-muscled freaks of the world’s armies. Yes, more North Vietnamese died in Vietnam than Americans, but how about pound for pound? You don't have to be able to take a hit from a 320 pound linebacker to fight a war. I met a twenty year old sniper just back from Afghanistan who'd proudly packed on 40 pounds taking the steroid Winstrol. He failed out the first day of Ranger. Yes, it's nice to be able to throw your enemy through a plate glass window with one arm when he grabs the barrel of your rifle. I've met a guy who's done that. But not many Rangers can do that anyway.
Maybe it's the American male’s obsession with size that makes the lady Ranger an offensive creature. Ironically though, Ranger whittles you down to what a ground fighter is supposed to look like. Yes, you're a marshmallow perched on top of a pair of legs, but you're finally efficient. A champion bodybuilder can burn up to nine pounds just while he's sleeping. That's why they consume casein, a slow release protein before they go to bed. I know Soldiers who refuse to go to Ranger because it'd ruin the physiques they'd spent a decade obsessing over. But why did you get big to begin with if not to become an elite Soldier? I viewed this reluctance as a conceit of the ego. It seemed frivolous to spend one's life tethered to industrial sized refrigerators and fruit ninja blenders. Green Berets fail out of the first week of Ranger School in droves. Because they spend so much time fighting wars they don't have time to work out. They spend an average of 200 days deployed, and their small biceps and guts belong to true warriors. Body dysmorphia is spread among Soldiers by hulking Hollywood killing machines with zero percent body fat. While incredible fitness is required to enter that world, eventually Soldiers have to choose between looking like a warrior and being one.
The most common complaint about the first lady Rangers was that the three who had passed were hand selected and trained specially for over a year in order to get through. Heck, I spent the seven years since I contracted with the Army at seventeen training for Ranger, and I still barely survived the first week. Maybe they deserved a bit of time. How were they supposed to know to start training when the course only just integrated?
My first conversation with a lady Ranger came on one of the first few days of Ranger School. We were broken into teams of two and sent off running a four mile course as fast as we could. I was assigned a burly lieutenant named Jim with a slightly shell shocked expression. His responses to my questions were monosyllabic, and it was clear that the last few days of abuse had been a shock to his system. The first week of Ranger is the only really physically challenging portion of the course. It's called Ranger Assessment Phase (RAP), and it tests your basic soldiering competencies like land navigation and physical fitness. It also sees the vast majority of course failures. My partner struggled to keep pace on the run, and we slowly fell to the back of the line. We emerged on an apocryphal scene. It was the middle of the night, and a field appeared out of the woods lit with bright stadium lighting. Men crawled through water beneath barbed wire. RIs screamed into megaphones as they sprayed Rangers with fire hoses. This was what you thought of when you imagined Ranger School. This was what all those Tough Mudder adventure racers paid to do. This was just the original.
I felt a shiver of a thrill, and gave my partner an ‘isn't-this-exciting’ nudge in the ribs. He gave me an I'm-gonna-vomit stumble. We fell in doing pushups while getting sprayed with a fire hose. In practice, Ranger physical fitness operates on the ‘running from a bear’ principle. You can't hold a deep squat all night, so you fake it a little better than the guy next to you. The tendency is to get scared when an RI is making you do 50 push-ups and you're already at muscle failure falling on your face. The key is to just focus on the fact that neither can the guy next to you. You hold onto that. You don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your buddy.
At Sapper School, a similarly brutal military course, we wore chem lights around our necks. If at any moment you were deemed poorly motivated, the instructor walked over and broke your chemlight. Every morning my monster of a friend Benson would return to the barracks with a broken chem light.
“What are you doing wrong dude?” I'd ask.
“I'm telling you, they just don't like my face,” he'd reply, miserable.
Rule number one of Ranger is look cool. If you’re not gonna do good, then look good
I ran with my little Ranger buddy, leaping over walls and frog walking between obstacles. Ranger Instructors are a little disappointed when a soldier is able to meet the requirements. They circle like sharks, snapping at weakness. “Do the exercise correctly Ranger! Get fucking lower!” When you do, they moodily break away to circle back for more vulnerable targets. My buddy Jim was quickly attracting sharks. His squat was shallow, and he struggled to muster a jog between obstacles. I realized suddenly that I was invisible. Two Ranger Instructors had taken up yelling at Jim as a full time occupation, and I was forgotten as I lunged casually along nearby.
Slowly, Jim became an inconvenience. As he became physically unresponsive to abuse, the RIs cast about for some other means of torturing him, and spotted me nearby. “Why are you fucking your buddy Ranger? If you won't do the exercise correctly, your buddy will have to do them for you. He will carry you to the light pole and back until you do the exercise correctly.” Unhappily, I hefted Jim onto my back and sprinted to the light pole and back, depositing him gingerly like a small shaky child onto the ground, before returning to the push-up position. Jim was also supposed to be doing pushups, but he was instead doing a sort of spasm while in the high plank. I was bullshitting my pushups by only going halfway down, but to an uninitiated third party it would have no longer been clear what my partner was trying to do. As soon as his arms began to bend, they snapped back to the locked position, as though this seemed to them like a reasonable range of motion. The RIs had now taken up a unified cry, “What are you doing right now Ranger? Do you even know where you’re at right now?” I was providing pep talks as I carried Jim again and again to the light pole. “Hey buddy, you got to give me 100% so they’ll let us out of here, or eventually we’re going to die.”
These words were lost on Jim who had at this point taken on the vacant gasping of a fish flopping on the deck of a fishing vessel. When he responded to the torrent of insults it was with slurred words. Watching a fit human being worked to death isn't particularly exciting. Eventually they don't make any sense, and you feel that they’re being deliberately obtuse.
“Do you want to quit Ranger? Are you done with this course?”
“No sergeant, I will not quit. I am good.”
“You’re not good Ranger, you fucking suck, but get the fuck out of my pit.”
The next obstacle was the thirty foot tall Giant’s Ladder, a ladder of boards six feet apart, rising thirty feet straight into the air. I actually found my state of total exhaustion helpful, as it was too complicated to conceptualize a fear of heights in my fragile state. I was quickly straddling the top beam, only to look down and realize Jim was still at the bottom. He looked like a seal. An awkward rigor mortis had set into his arms, which were now only about as useful as flippers. He tried to hang on using his chin. His hands grabbed at the planks but fell away impotently. Despite his apparent handicaps he had made it up two rungs, about ten feet in the air. He went for another rung and peeled off, falling lifeless, resigned to his fate on the mat below.
“You are a safety hazard Ranger, you don't even know where you are right now.” Jim was still struggling to formulate a response as they laid him down in the back of an ambulance and took him away. I was told, “get the fuck off my obstacle Ranger,” and when I did, I fell in with a lady Ranger and her partner on monkey bars over a pool of water. I was too heavy to feel confident on monkey bars under laboratory conditions, and in my current state, I barely made it two rungs. The observing Instructor started asking me my number to write me a minus (like a demerit) for failing the obstacle, but then he stopped, “Where’s your partner Ranger?”
“In ambulance,” I croaked.
“Oh. Alright, get out of here.”
When we assembled at the end of the course, I fell in next to the lady Ranger.
“How was it?” I asked.
“They gave me a minus at every station, they didn't give out any to my partner.”
“Well, it’s probably because you’re a woman,” I said.
She nodded looking angry, but determined. The guy in front of us turned. “I was here last year. RAP week didn't used to be this hard. I hear they made it harder to get rid of the girls.”
By the second week of Ranger School, only one artifact of gender integration remained. In our small encampment in the woods, the squad leader of the day prepared to give his operations order brief. The RI sat nearby watching. As the squad leader began his brief, a Ranger walked up no more than 10 meters away, turned away from us, dropped his pants, and began pooping into a hole in the ground. The Ranger Instructor grimaced. He stopped the brief. “Medic!” The medic came trotting over. “You were given four ponchos weren't you? Tomorrow you will string them up around the pit toilet at waist level.” All five of the female Rangers that had started in our class of 400 had failed out on the three hour timed twelve mile ruck march event in the first week. A Platoon of some thirty male Rangers had disappeared with them, felled by hundreds of squats and sprints that had lasted all the night before. Those four ponchos were all that indicated anything had changed. Four camouflage ponchos, part and parcel to the outside world’s assault on this men’s club for carrying heavy objects long distances. Why then was the Ranger Instructor insisting that we pull out these symbols of a meddling progress? Had they not succeeded in their mission to stem the fall of man for at least one more class? Stow away those ponchos and all was as it should be in this small thatch of woods, wasn't it? It was clear that this instructor wanted to see a man poop as little as we did. Patrolling was filthy exhausting work as it was, maybe he didn't mind a tiny iota of civility. So he allowed this small change to make the patrol bases, where I would spend the next three months, look a little bit more like the world outside. He must have thought, just this once, maybe it was time for a little change.
by John Bradley
