To PFC Blum, the tabs represented a standard of competence and achievement he could barely imagine attaining himself. Not only had tabs actually taken on terrorists in combat, they had all completed Ranger School, a leadership course twice as long and just as brutal as RIP. The presence of a tab in a room brought in a thrilling after-scent of Iraqi dust and blood. Cherry privates admired them desperately. The tabs repaid the favor with unrelenting hazing. At any moment, whether firing rounds at the machine-gun range or shopping downtown on weekend leave, a tab could yell “tab check” and force a private to do whatever he wanted: bark like a dog, pump out fifty push-ups in a crowded elevator, chug three beers and run ten laps around the barracks.
August 7 marked a loosening of the hierarchy. Soon the soldiers would all fight side by side against a common enemy. Today, Charlie Company’s morning hour of PT was light and fun, a reward for all the work the privates had recently put in for their Expert Infantryman Badges. The forty-odd soldiers of Blum’s platoon gathered in formation at 0600 hours in the parking lot behind the barracks for warm-up calisthenics and stretches, bouncing on their toes to keep warm. Blum and Ryniec had taken special care not to leave even a stray gum wrapper or cigarette butt. Nearly all Blum’s closest Ranger comrades were here, including Specialist Sommer and the other tabbed specialists and corporals who filled out the ranks of team leaders and assistant team leaders—the “E4 Mafia,” as they called themselves, referencing their military pay grade. Exercise gear had been dragged through the side door from the gym for a five-station circuit: power military press, box jump, rowing machine, squats, clean-and-jerk. Platoon Sergeant Congdon bellowed the names of five soldiers at a time to sprint up and rotate through, doing as many reps as they could manage in the minute allotted for each station. Privates struggled wildly to outdo the tabs. The whole platoon screamed encouragement and happy threats as the clanks and wet thumps of bodies in motion echoed through the parking lot. After half an hour, the sun cracked over the shaggy silhouettes of the firs, netting the Rangers’ chests and faces in pale, orangish light.
When grouped as one unit, the gun teams were known as “MGT Squad.” This was short for “machine-gun teams,” but it was pronounced, with relish, “Maggot.” After everyone had been through the PT circuit, Corporal Roe led Maggot Squad on a run out the Ranger complex gate and around some nearby barracks. The point of this route, the easiest they ever took, was to intimidate regular infantry ground troops. Maggot ran by at full speed, puffing their chests out in an exaggerated goose step, then circled back to the barbed wire fence wrapped in brown tarp that surrounded their complex. Blum and the other cherries had been told that just before their arrival at battalion, a first sergeant from a nearby Stryker brigade had led a daredevil charge of other sergeants through the gates. The tabs who saw them, all outranked, had chased them down, beaten them up, flex-cuffed them, and deposited them outside.
After a quick shower, everyone changed into BDUs—battle-dress uniforms, which the soldiers called fluff-and-buffs because they dirtied and washed them so often. Most days they went straight from breakfast to the morning’s training, which was typically dangerous and exhilarating. Today their only responsibility was to prepare their rooms for block leave inspection. Blum went to the gym with his team leader, Corporal Sager, to lift weights for an hour, then returned to his room and started cleaning out his minifridge. In contrast to nearly every other day he had spent at Ranger Batt, the morning was unstructured and leisurely. Privates wandered between rooms to hang out for a minute and chat. All the talk was of how excited they were to go on deployment and shoot people.
The infantry’s job is to “close with and engage the enemy,” a classic piece of military euphemism that translates roughly to “run up near armed, dangerous men and perforate their bodies until they die.”
“Can you sink into that?” I asked Alex that first night at the Denver bar. “What’s the back-and-forth like?”
Alex obliged me, making his voice go excited and young. “It’s like, ‘Dude. I can’t wait to go fuckin in-house. We’ve been practicing all this fucking time to go take a house down—I can’t wait to kill a fucking hajji. Those fucking sand niggers. Fuck those motherfuckers. I can’t wait to waste those motherfucking … Can you imagine the size of a 7.62 going into those cocksuckers? Kill a little fucking kid with a bomb strapped to him? That’d be fucking sick. I can’t fucking wait.’ It’s like that.”
I couldn’t help wondering if any of the guys in Broncos sweatshirts at the bar were within earshot. Alex’s eyes flicked a little, as they do when he’s nervous.
“Is that an exaggeration, slightly?”
“That’s literally how it is. It’s probably worse.”
I asked him where the men had picked up that habit of speech. He told me it came from mimicking the soldiers with combat experience.
“Do they talk that way about people they’ve actually killed?”
I saw the memory hit in his eyes as he nodded. His voice climbed before he remembered to hush himself. “Oh man. Oh fuck. One time we were at this range learning how to set off Claymores. This one sergeant, this was him, I swear to God, his fucking husky voice, he goes”—Alex’s voice dropped an octave as he leaned over his tumbler of whiskey—“‘You motherfuckers. When you get over there, I swear to God you don’t know shit. When you kill a body, you take their soul. You fucking take their soul. But fuck ’em, cause they’re going to kill your buddies.’”
He glanced around to see if anyone had heard him, then met my shocked expression with one of his own. “That’s what they’re like! That’s the mind-set! He goes, ‘This fucker was shooting at my squad with his kids on his back, so I wasted him and his little shits. I killed a little twelve-year-old girl. I pissed in her bulletholes.’ And we thought he was the coolest guy in the world! Like, ‘Holy shit, this guy’s fucking crazy!’”
Moral outrage sounded a little jarring coming from Alex. In tone it was only a few degrees away from the fascinated awe he used to express for all things military.
“In the infantry,” he went on, “you want to be a cold-blooded, detached killer. That’s the coolest thing to be.”
“So you talked that way to impress each other?”
“I think we said how excited we were to do it to tell ourselves we could do it. We can talk hard, we can be hard.”
It wasn’t just the veterans from whom they drew cues. Video games and movies were also full of role models and great lines. Like NFL players squeezing in a game of Madden NFL in the locker room or drummers taking on the lead singer in a tour bus round of Guitar Hero, the Rangers relaxed after training by sniping each other’s heads off in Call of Duty 2. Blum and his buddy PFC Anderson from Bravo Company had joint custody of an Xbox that lived in Room 321. If they couldn’t muster the energy for the taunts and fights that inevitably followed a multiplayer death match, they opted for cinema.
The movies the privates loved best were big-budget epics that presented a vision of war both accurate enough to believe in and glorious enough for them to want in. Movies about heroic Rangers like Saving Private Ryan and The Great Raid had inspired a lot of them to go army in the first place, but around battalion, Black Hawk Down was the go-to choice. For a Ranger, it played like a two-hour highlight reel. It had been filmed with close cooperation from the regiment and featured real Rangers as extras and helicopters exactly like the ones they trained with. Big-name actors played people they saw every day. Their chaplain, Major Jeff Strueker, a squad leader back then, had dragged an early Mogadishu casualty to safety and demanded to be returned to the