After practicing with dummy rounds, we marched down to the live range to throw real explosives. We waited under a tin roof and heard debris land above us each time a grenade went off. When it was my turn to throw, I limped to my assigned bunker and listened to a Drill Sergeant review the prep and throw process. When he finished he handed me a grenade and we squatted as I prepped the explosive. I held the spoon with my right thumb, took off the safety and pulled the pin. I stood up and got into my throwing stance. When I put weight on my right leg I felt a POP! and fought through the pain to stay conscious. I managed to throw the grenade before I fell and heard the dim sound of the explosion while on my back. The Drill Sergeant grabbed me by my body armor and shouted “Holy fuck, Cletus! You almost killed me, you stupid piece of shit!” He eased up when he saw the pain in my face and told two of my buddies to help me to the ambulance. I hung on to their necks and struggled to the Humvee at the top of the hill.
For two days Alex stood around on crutches watching his buddies march and flutter-kick, begging to be allowed to join back in, mocked by the drill sergeants for his weakness. It was only when x-rays showing a cracked tibia came back that they sent him home. Two months later, when he rejoined another training company, his closest friends, Roman and Kane, the remaining two thirds of the “Battle Bastards” fellowship that had met for extra PT in the stairwell, had already graduated. Alex missed swapping intel with them about surviving RIP (hot tips from those who had made it before included squirting Tabasco sauce in your eyes, snorting chewing tobacco, and bayoneting your earlobes to stay awake and focused), but he made the most of it, getting into the swing of things as training zeroed in on the fine points of the infantryman’s arsenal. When he graduated at last, Alex refused to let anyone in the family fly out for the ceremony. This one didn’t matter. Next up was Jump School, where he would earn the pin that put the “Airborne” in “Airborne Ranger,” a pair of wings on either side of a bulbous parachute.
It turned out to be a cakewalk.
There were no shouting Drill Sergeants or the constant threat of being smoked. Jump School was just that, a school! The Instructors were called Black Hats and its students consisted of privates all the way up to majors, from cooks to infantrymen. The environment was friendly and everyone joked and talked to one another except for the Infantrymen. We stayed together and only talked to each other. We shared a strong dislike towards everyone else and viewed them as inferior in every way. While all the other MOS’s (Military Operational Specialty’s) complained about the difficulty of the school we viewed it as a vacation and breezed through PT (Physical Training) and our daily classes. The first two weeks we spent practicing exiting the mock Aircraft and landing. We rarely got smoked and tried to piss off the Black Hats to get them to drop us to the ground as often as possible so we could laugh at all the other pussies as they struggled with the pain. This was our first interaction with the rest of the Army and it showed us just how different Infantrymen were from EVERYONE else in the Army.
Alex graduated from Airborne School at Fort Benning in December 2005. I remember that Christmas clearly. At the traditional Blum family gathering, while Anna hovered nervously alongside him, Alex secured a position leaning against the banister that divided Aunt Judy’s house in two and commenced squinting around with the facial expression that zombie-slaughtering action heroes must hide behind their aviator shades.
Like everyone else, I tried to talk army with him. He responded with monosyllables and grunts. Only long after he left the army would I learn how much I had been pissing him off. All our blithe, ignorant questions about what guns he’d shot and whether basic had sucked implied that his new life still had some place within the civilian universe of job applications, gas mileage, and adult-league sports where we piddled away our own lives. This was a fundamental error of category. He and his infantry buddies were the shining knights of freedom. For months they had been experiencing levels of physical unpleasantness beyond what any of us could conceive of, learning every day how true all the marching cadences were that said the only ones you could rely on were fellow DICKs—Dedicated Infantry Combat Killers.
Basic is in fact a carefully calibrated process. Recruits are both habituated to violence and acculturated into a new family with radically different standards of behavior. Drill sergeants are not sadists—at least not entirely. They are also there to teach, correct, motivate. A faint paternal air suffuses the brutality, a sardonic kind of lovingness expressed through torment. From moments of wryness in Alex’s manuscript—“Basic is very ‘fucking’ and ‘holy shit,’” he summed up at one point—it was clear that he was aware of it too. Ultimately the drill sergeants wanted everyone to succeed, qualify, graduate. The war needed soldiers.
The Rangers did not need soldiers. They genuinely wanted candidates to quit. At times they actually seemed to want to kill them.
The final section of Breaking Point was broken out from the rest and titled “Ranger Indoctrination Program.” The 10,000 words that followed were a scary read. The rigid formal bounds that had contained the violence of basic, from the synchronization of drill and ceremony on the parade ground to the absolute stricture against drill sergeants striking recruits, no longer appeared to apply. The atmosphere was chaotic, alive with threat. Ranger instructors did not yell “Holy shit!” Often they did not yell at all. They darted through the pages like musclebound velociraptors, creeping up behind candidates and saying “cunt” into their ears in intimate, terrifying voices. Smoke sessions in basic had been guided by cadences. “One two three,” the drill sergeant would count off. “One!” the recruits would yell back, completing a rep. “One two three,” the drill sergeant would count off. “Two!” the recruits would yell back. Ranger instructors would simply bark out, “Beat your faces, cunts,” and then the only sound would be the syncopated thumps and grunts of fifty chests hitting the concrete as fast as they could.
The pretense of instructional value that attended activities at RIP was so flimsy as to be a kind of mockery. For the Ranger Combat Water Safety Test, Alex strapped on sixty pounds of gear and climbed up a high-dive ladder, where a sergeant said, “You look like a piece of shit!” and threw him in the pool below. For combat medicine training, he and his fellow candidates were given some cursory instruction, then sent out into a field with hypodermics and saline and instructed to pump the latter through the former into each other’s bodies. None had done this before. The needles kept poking through skin and slithering off into muscle as the recruits tried to keep their hands steady and slide them into veins. After dozens of failed jabs, blood was splashed all over the grass. For their incompetence as medics they were forced to crawl on their bellies through the gore.
But all this was just preamble. The carnival really got going in the middle of week two, at the land navigation course on Cole Range. It was January in Georgia and very cold.
At 5:00 am we were bussed out to the land nav course and were told to run across the field to the wood line a quarter mile away and get wood for the Sergeants’ fire. We sprinted across the field as fast as our legs would take us. We picked up as much as we could hold and sprinted back to our rucks.
As I got closer to the sand bags I noticed a bunch of gear floating in a nearby body of water named “Just Cause Pond.” The Sergeants had been checking our rucks and any that weren’t secured properly were torn open and thrown across the pond. We dropped off our wood and were immediately sent back to the wood line. It was 5:30 am Wednesday and Cole Range had just begun.
The temperature was between 38 and 45 degrees and we were wearing only our cotton BDU’s.fn1 We were sent to the wood line more times that I can remember. We bear crawled, low crawled and buddy carried across the field returning with wood each time. We were given MRE’sfn2 at 12:30 pm and had five minutes to eat our first meal of the day. I ate as much as possible and put a small Tabasco bottle in my pocket. When we finished eating we were smoked for another hour for eating too slow.
We