We disappointedly ran upstairs and crowded into the showers. We stood under the showerheads hugging each other trying to create more warmth as we shivered uncontrollably. For the first 15 minutes I couldn’t feel anything. We stayed under the water for an hour and a half and slowly warmed up. We dressed into PT’s and sat on our bunks for another hour until it was time to go back down. My feet were raw and I was covered with cuts and bruises. We helped one of my buddies clean and wrap his feet in a ripped T-shirt. When he had taken his socks off he cried out in pain. As we turned his socks inside out the soles of his feet lay on the floor completely peeled away.
That was two and a half days. RIP went on for fifteen more, and so did Alex, in excruciating detail. He and a team of six others raised a telephone pole on their shoulders and weren’t allowed to drop it for forty-eight hours, napping two at a time in brief shifts underneath. Afterward Alex found a pair of bumps on his calf. He spent three days ignoring them as the bumps grew wider and began to leak pus, until a sergeant spotted him limping and sent him to the infirmary, where the medic took one startled look and informed Alex that these here brown recluse spider bites were necrotizing fast. This being the Rangers, the medic issued no anesthetic before scraping the dead flesh out with Q-tips, swabbing out the wounds with iodine, strapping on a bandage, and sending Alex back out to be smoked for his laziness.
In the final week those who remained in the drastically thinned class were issued M4s, a shorter version of the M16 which Rangers and other Special Ops units had recently adopted for use in the confined spaces of urban combat. Two hours into the first day of training on this new weapon, a sergeant leaned over a buddy of Alex’s whose mother had recently been killed in a car accident and yelled his intention to do a range of graphic things to her body. The recruit stopped firing for a second, and that was enough excuse for the sergeants to halt all shooting drills and smoke everyone for an hour. For another two days they shot at plastic targets. That was the end of RIP.
Thursday we got the day off to clean and pack our belongings. That afternoon my buddies and I went to Ranger Joe’s. After four weeks of hell, filled with more pain than I could ever imagine, I was allowed to purchase a $7 Beret and $2 Scroll.
The next day my Dad pinned the Second Battalion Scroll on my shoulder and hugged me. I had made it; I was an Airborne Ranger. After four weeks, our starting class of over a hundred graduated only about thirty students from one of the most difficult courses in the Military. My original Company from basic had 60 Ranger Candidates and only 4 of us had made it through the program.
I left Basic Training looking for a challenge and graduated from RIP with the mental capacity to kill. Before I joined the Army I was vibrant, funny, easy going, loving and independent. When I got my Tan Beret I was a shell. I was an angry, testosterone-driven prick. I was no longer me. I only felt comfortable with other Rangers. When I was with childhood friends I was standoffish and unable to hold a real conversation or relate to them. I couldn’t relate to my family and was no longer the fun and pleasant kid they knew me to be.
I had changed dramatically. My thought process was that of a five year old and when I got to Battalion (next assignment after RIP) I had to be raised again. I was brainwashed. When you arrive at Basic Training you are entirely isolated from the world and your entire life becomes the Army. During the first few weeks I would go to sleep terrified of Iraq and try to convince myself that the Army would not send me. Surely they knew that I was “too young to die!” I also could not imagine being put in a position where I had to kill someone. I was still able to think objectively, but over time your mind gets so used to being controlled it is unable to do anything independently.
You are told when and how to do everything, and when the Drill Sergeants see that you’re thinking by yourself or expressing any type of emotion or action associated with free thought or will they punish you severely with the best teacher understood by your brain. They teach you with pain. We got smoked so often I began to doubt every thought and feeling I had. During the fourth week I could literally feel my brain shutting down. I would no longer think “this is unfair” or “I don’t want to do this.” I no longer had an opinion. I was unable to value human life and could no longer weigh pro’s and con’s or right and wrong. I was unable to understand emotions. I would feel scared before jumping and nervous while setting a door charge or waiting to enter a shoot house. I felt these emotions but could not understand why or what they meant.
The only exception to all of this was Anna. Every time I got smoked or would be terrified or felt alone I would escape by thinking about her face and the time I had spent with her. She became my strength and sense of hope. The only feelings I understood were toward her. I would be happy and excited when I was with her and it would make sense. She made me feel safe and I felt like the most important person in the world when I was with her. For that I love her more than I have ever been able to express. I felt that no matter what happened I would always be the kid that loved Anna and the kid that Anna always loved. That love was the only thing that linked me to who I once was.
Basic Training turned me into a mindless follower and RIP confirmed it. I used to think RIP was a way to root out the weak. I have since realized that it is used to root out the ones who are still able to objectively think. When things got out of hand they could say, “I am not going to put up with this BS, I don’t want to do this anymore, I quit!” The guys that make it through to graduate are unable to quit because they feel there is no other choice but to finish. I never had to fight the urge to quit. In my mind there was no option to quit. I would think, “You’ll be dead soon and it will be over. Just go until you die.” I never said anything about my leg wounds for two reasons: I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble and I believed that how I felt was irrelevant. I waited to be told what to do.
There is a quote from Band of Brothers: “There are no bad soldiers, only bad leaders.” This is especially true in Ranger Battalion. Privates are a product of how their superiors raise them. They will do anything their leaders tell them because we are taught to trust and believe them in every way. Kids who join the Infantry don’t join to kill. In fact the Army doesn’t accept people who are already willing to kill. They want young impressionable minds that join for the adventure. They want kids who see the ads on TV and in magazines who think it looks like a fun challenge.
These kids leave home with the morals and teachings of their parents and society. We emerge from Basic Training wiped clean, lacking any type of objective thinking. We are then re-taught the standards of our superiors. We blindly follow and do as told. Our superiors re-teach us right and wrong and we are no longer able to think about pros and cons. The Army doesn’t want us to.
There are no positives or right in what Rangers do as viewed by our society. If we weren’t brainwashed the Rangers wouldn’t exist. It is our superiors’ responsibility to guide us because of our mental state. I was literally unable to understand my emotions and believed everything I was told was the right way to act and think. I had complete faith in my Tabs (superiors at Ranger Battalion) and knew they would never do anything wrong. I was unable to think or question. I was a model Ranger.
There the document ended. I sat back from my laptop. My lab mates had left one by one while I read. I was alone with the hum of centrifuges and agitators in the darkened medical center.
The modern army is mostly support staff. More than 80 percent of servicemen package foodstuffs, install WiFi hubs, repair helicopters: the shaft, in a favored army metaphor, of the spear that drives into the body of the enemy. The infantry is the blade. The Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment, U.S. Army Special Operations Command,