Campy schlock was good too. Now that Alex and his compatriots were real Special Ops commandos, it never ceased to delight them that all the terrorist-killing, hostage-rescuing, bomb-defusing action heroes America slavered and thrilled over were doing a Ranger’s actual job. They loved to hoot together at Hollywood’s efforts at military realism: the boneheaded tactics of the supposedly elite counterterrorism team scrambling through a shower grate to be slaughtered in The Rock, the garbled lingo in just about everything. Their favorite was Navy Seals, the 1990 bomb in which Charlie Sheen plays a bad boy in a red Corvette and Bill Paxton plays a sniper code-named God (“Your God does not help you now!” screams a terrorist at his helpless victim just before Bill Paxton puts a bullet between his eyes, triggering convulsive guffaws from every Ranger in the room). Rangers often collaborate with SEALs on critical missions in the Middle East, which causes problems: the rivalry between army and navy gets particularly fierce between their elite units. A few days before block leave, Platoon Sergeant Congdon had gathered all of Charlie Company’s First Platoon by the trophy case in the hallway that featured a Mercedes hubcap and a certain prominent Iraqi’s bloody uniform to ask that they please, if possible, on the upcoming deployment, refrain from calling SEALs “swim fags” or asking them how Charlie Sheen was doing.
Violent movies, violent video games, juvenile pranks, and porn: the barracks were a lot like what any other dorm in America would look like if you slipped a canister of vaporized testosterone into the air conditioning. Some privates went to frat parties in Tacoma with no other goal than to start fights and steal beer.
When I asked Alex who the big characters at Ranger Batt were—the scary guys, the cool guys, the weird ones and outcasts—I could tell the question grated.
“See, now you’re getting down to an individual aspect. You don’t have that there. Guys had tabs or they didn’t. EIBs [Expert Infantryman Badges], CIBs [Combat Infantryman Badges], number of combat tours. That’s what made them them.”
There was only one soldier Alex identified as failing in some way to fit in: a private named Chad Palmer in the line team Alex’s gun team was paired with. The reasons were various. Palmer had a combat deployment but no tab. Nearly everyone in Ranger Batt chewed Copenhagen, but very few smoked, because it compromised endurance; Palmer was one of them. When he talked he tilted his head back and squinted as if with secret knowledge, a peculiar and off-putting attitude in an environment where every single experience was shared. He just didn’t seem as serious about the Rangers as some others—a big deal to PFC Blum, who was as serious as it got. But Palmer’s biggest fault was acting too familiar with the tabs. He chatted and joked with them as if he were their equal.
That’s what Alex told me. Soon I had developed my own theory: the real problem with Palmer, I suspected, was that PFC Blum couldn’t understand why Specialist Sommer liked him so much.
The cherry privates were as comfortable with each other’s bodies as lovers. This came in part from all the fighting. In the total mutual exertion of hand-to-hand groundwork you had to grab whatever you could to gain advantage. They practiced a lot, in venues both official and otherwise. A favorite tab game was to send a private down the hall to ask for dental floss or some other pointless item from another squad, whose members would invariably drop him to the carpet, wrench his wrists behind his back for flex-cuffs, duct-tape his mouth, and leave him slumped outside his squad room door.
“How often did that happen?” I asked Alex.
“Daily. Literally every single day.”
On rarer occasions, tabs would stage free-ranging battles between squads that left everyone in bruised piles by the end. PFC Blum once took a boot to the face that cut halfway through his lip. At times he was spurred by the tabs to choke other privates to unconsciousness. Other times he himself was choked out. When I told Alex that I couldn’t imagine how that felt, he offered to show me.
By now it was the summer of 2010. A lot had passed between us in the six months since that first conversation in the Denver bar: thousands of cell-phone minutes, a growing repertoire of inside jokes, and an increasing undercurrent of subtle verbal jockeying over the sequence of events of August 7, which so far neither one of us had named. We were facing off on a mat in Alex’s dad’s garage in Greenwood Village, dressed in two worn black sweat suits that Alex had scavenged from his bedroom closet. Mine hung off me in pouches that looked like trash bags stuck on a fence.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”
There is a funny intimacy in the moment when someone’s arm is around your throat but he hasn’t yet started to squeeze. After some rearranging as he sought the optimal angle, Alex made a fist and expanded his biceps. I felt instantly transparent. Blood and thought rushed back into my head when he let go.
“You okay?” he asked, concerned.
“You’re really good at that,” I managed to say.
Alex grinned, glad, as always, to be of help.
It was just after noon on August 7, when PFC Blum zip-tied his desk drawers and stuffed the last of his clothes into his hockey bag, that the story started to get complicated.
Half an hour after the official release time, Platoon Sergeant Congdon conducted an inspection of First Platoon’s barracks that brought him finally to Room 321. As he poked into desks and cabinets and checked off items on his clipboard, Blum, Ryniec, and their roommate, Martin, stood at attention, spines rigid with that electric tension that always accompanied a superior; the feeling when a civilian boss materializes beside you isn’t too far off, if your boss happens to exude readiness at all times to beat your ass. In Blum’s case, the anxiety was coupled with the private swoon of worship he felt for the Rangers he admired most. Congdon was tattooed and huge, with a shouted-out husk of a voice. His friends in Delta Force all called him Sergeant Congo, a nickname meant to evoke bloody jungle atrocities.
“Don’t fuck up on leave,” Congdon said. “See you back here in two weeks.”
Blum, Ryniec, and Martin slumped into chairs and beds with the extra talkativeness of mild relief.
Next to appear at their door was Corporal Roe, Ryniec’s team leader, announcing a soft armor inspection. Although Roe was a tab, the privates had enough day-to-day contact with him to render this a fairly relaxed exchange. Each gathered his soft armor, a butterfly-shaped bulletproof vest that hugged the body without constricting movement, and dumped it in the growing pile outside the squad room door.
Shortly afterward, Specialist Sommer came by, gestured for Blum to follow him out into the hall, and asked him for his soft armor. Blum dug it from the pile and handed it over.
The first time Alex told me about this moment, I asked him how he could possibly have failed to be suspicious. He explained that questioning his superiors was a habit of mind he had long since given up. “What you have to realize,” Alex said, “is I never thought it was possible for a tab to do something wrong.” He told me that he assumed that Sommer’s request had something to do with the inspection—that he gave it no more thought than that.
For all the detailed verisimilitude of Alex’s story, it was beginning to seem increasingly strange to me how normal a day August 7 appeared to have been. In the story as Alex told it, he and the soldiers he regarded with such affection did little other than lift weights, watch TV, gobble huge rations at chow hall or off post, and insult each other’s chances with women on leave. All the while, though, Specialist Sommer was flashing in and out among them. How many suspected what he was planning for that afternoon? How many knew? Why didn’t anyone do something?