To earn the legendary Ranger beret, you have to volunteer three times: for the infantry, for airborne certification, and finally for the process formerly known as the Ranger Indoctrination Program. Those dedicated, crazy, or pain-blind enough to pass up the thousand good opportunities to fail or quit along the way have proved themselves worthy of the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment’s second motto: “Sua Sponte,” Latin for “of their own accord.” They will be assigned to one of three battalions: the First and Third, headquartered in Georgia, or the Second, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
“Sua Sponte” has another important meaning to the modern regiment: self-directed initiative in meeting the enemy. Senior Rangers will sometimes joke that an overenthusiastic younger soldier has “Sua Sponte’d it.” The people of Tacoma are well aware of this particular virtue of JBLM’s most famous tenants. In 1989, at the height of the crack cocaine boom that gave Tacoma the short-lived nickname “Compton of Washington,” a Ranger sergeant named Bill Foulk took matters into his own hands when the open drug trade in his Hilltop neighborhood got out of control. After dealers threw rocks and shot BBs at a security camera Foulk had installed over his driveway during a “neighborhood solidarity barbecue,” he called a dozen or so of his Ranger buddies from on post and suggested they come armed. That night Sergeant Foulk and his team fought off an hours-long siege by the Crips with pistols, shotguns, and semiautomatic assault rifles, firing hundreds of rounds into the dark. The “Ash Street Shootout” made Foulk a national cause célèbre for the drug war. No disciplinary action was taken against any of the soldiers involved.
Special Operations soldiers have become increasingly central to the way the army fights, a model for the rest to evolve toward as the monolithic battles of the age of industrial war between great powers give way to the ambiguities of rapidly shifting opponents in complex urban environments. In 2001, army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki issued a surprising army-wide order:
In the United States Army, the beret has become a symbol of excellence of our specialty units. Soldiers of the Special Forces, our airborne units, and the Ranger Regiment have long demonstrated such excellence through their legendary accomplishments and unmatched capabilities. Their deployability, versatility, and agility are due, in part, to their organizational structure and equipment. But more significant is their adaptiveness, which keeps them ready to take on any mission, anytime, anyplace … Effective 14 June 2001, the first Army birthday in the new millennium, … the black beret will become standard wear in The Army.
Shinseki must have thought the Rangers would be honored. Instead they were outraged. Regular infantry was for bumbling slackers. As for soldiers of the noncombat branches, who steamed broccoli and fixed computers at the FOB (Forward Operating Base) while Rangers were out raiding houses and getting blown up, the nicknames were various: “fobbits,” “pogues,” “rear-echelon motherfuckers.” The idea of these clowns wearing the signature black Ranger beret was intolerable. Many Rangers road-marched to Washington, D.C., in protest. When that didn’t work, they changed their berets to tan.
U.S. Special Operations forces have long been divided into Tier I, comprising the experienced commandos of SEAL Team Six and Delta Force, and Tier II, which includes units like the Rangers, which draw directly from pools of young, unpracticed recruits. In 2003, Brigadier General Stanley McChrystal, a former commander of the Ranger Regiment and “110 percent Ranger,” in the words of a close associate, was assigned as commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). During his time leading the Rangers, he had radically transformed training, upping the tempo, concentrating on nighttime operations, and modernizing weaponry. At JSOC, the tier-based hierarchy did not sit well with McChrystal. He immediately went to work raising his beloved Rangers to the stature of the others rather than just the feeder team for Delta, giving them extensive duties on nighttime raids for “high-value targets.” For months at a time during deployment, Rangers slept and lifted weights by day and charged by night into the homes of shocked Iraqi families. Airfield seizures had once been their primary mission, but now that became assaults on homes and small facilities, a skill set McChrystal knew well: at West Point he had once organized a mock assault on a campus building with balled-up socks for grenades and real guns, nearly getting himself shot by campus security.
Alex still has his tan beret—on house arrest, he hung it from a nail over his bed in Norm’s basement—but he will never be permitted to reenlist in any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. An other-than-honorable discharge is the most severe discharge short of a court-martial.
We wrote to each other a few times while he was in custody, after Norm had commenced the long process of wiping out his business and bank accounts by flying to Washington State every weekend for visitation hours. After Alex’s revelatory experience reading Kathleen Taylor’s book Brainwashing and writing his long account of his training, Norm took him a number of other books on topics he thought might help him understand what had happened to him. I first wrote to Alex after reading a few of these myself, with some vague hope that my scientific perspective would be of help. When I asked how he felt about the war in Iraq, his reply showed an earnest moral urgency I would never have predicted from him growing up.
My view on the Army is I still respect the hell out of the men and women who make it what it is but have a much better understanding regarding the machine that it is. As for the infantry and its conduct in Iraq I will say this, Ben the men of the infantry are killers nothing more and nothing less. They are designed to kill people and the transformation their minds go through is amazing and frightening at the same time.
After Alex’s release, it was hard to see his hurt puzzlement at the failure of each successive effort to turn his new life into something he could be proud of. Even meager civilian approximations of his childhood ambitions—emergency medical technician, fireman, policeman—were closed to him now. For a long time he worked fixing three-hundred-pound lengths of steel pipe into ceilings for a fire-sprinkler installation company before landing a job driving a Zamboni at an ice rink on the decommissioned Lowry Air Force Base southeast of Denver. What Alex really hoped to do there was youth coaching, but to do that in any lasting, official capacity, he would need a coaching license, which would require a background check. Instead he drove in endless circuits on the ice, listening for problems in the hiss of blade and steam as the truck scraped off ridges and filled ruts with boiling water.
I began wondering if I might be of use to Alex and the family. His manuscript about basic and RIP had helped precipitate a career crisis of my own. For a long time I had been confounded by how little my growing technical expertise seemed to help me in understanding the forces that shape our lives. After reading Alex’s story, rather than feeding new tasks to the lab’s supercomputer, as I should have, I began spending hours in the university library researching the history of U.S. military training. What I found only dismayed and confused me more. Within a year or so of my arrival in Seattle, I was drinking all night before giving molecular biology talks, doing cocaine in strange apartments, funding a friend’s rap album with money from my National Science Foundation grant—more or less deliberately screwing up, seized by a half-articulate hunch that my lifelong impulse toward abstraction and schematization was perpendicular or worse to the real meaning of life, a long march toward, as the poet Philip Larkin puts it, “the solving emptiness / that lies just under all we do.” I had begun asking questions I had never thought to ask before. Why does this research matter? Whom exactly does this research help? Decades of scrabbling for grant money to improve the efficiency of algorithms to accomplish things I didn’t believe in sounded suddenly unendurable.
In March 2009 Alex was finally sentenced to time served. We first got together to talk about his story nine months later, the day after Christmas, shortly