LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 4

       ONE FINE DAY AT BATTALION

      On August 7, 2006, in Room 321 of Charlie Company barracks, Second Ranger Battalion, Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment, U.S. Army, the alarm went off at 0430. Privates Blum, Ryniec, and Martin clicked awake like soldiers, with none of that shell-shocked fog that clung in your brain during the Ranger Indoctrination Program, when all the late-night wake-ups by sergeants screaming at you for your latest failures wore the edge off the self you recognized. They climbed out of bed like soldiers, snapped their sheets taut and tucked them under the mattresses like soldiers, rolled a quick smear of deodorant under their arms. Charlie Company, Second Ranger Battalion: same outfit Tom Hanks’s character commands on D-Day in Saving Private Ryan. How cool was that?

      A few stars still shone out the window over Fort Lewis’s Ranger field. Blum swapped a morning nod with each roommate. All down the hall came the muted wooden bangs of wardrobe doors slamming open and shut, the abortive beeps of alarm clocks sounding and just as quickly going dead. The walls of the cramped, dormlike room were papered with the weapons specifications the privates had been studying for their Expert Infantryman Badges as well as an array of bumper stickers: TERRORISM IS A DISEASE; RANGERS ARE THE CURE. RANGERS DON’T DIE; THEY JUST GO TO HELL AND REGROUP. When Blum first arrived here four months ago, it had taken him a moment after waking to see the Ranger memorabilia all over the walls and remember—I made it. Now the routine moved through him like a piston through a cylinder, the pride of being a Ranger thrumming deep in his bones. The men didn’t shout endless Hooahs here as they had in basic training. Rangers leaned more toward a clipped Roger, Sergeant: cool, clean, deadly professionalism.

      “Cherry” privates like Blum—combat virgins—were at the very bottom of Second Battalion’s pecking order. When their platoon’s time came on the rotating schedule, they rose an hour and a half earlier than anyone else so they could buff every windowpane and porcelain fold of toilet to the same sheen of purity they strove for in their minds and bodies. If some dusty corner failed inspection, they would all be marched outside and smoked. There were London Towers, Mountain Climbers, Flutter Kicks, Bear Crawls, Iron Mikes. There were TV Watchers, squatting with an invisible TV held in front of their faces. There were Koala Bears, clinging upside-down to telephone poles until they lost their grip and dropped. There were, always and forever, push-ups, which the sergeants liked to order by shorthand: “Beat your fucking face!”

      It was still dark when Blum and Ryniec pushed open the stairwell door to the concrete apron behind the barracks. The tall firs that ringed the parking lot waved in the early breeze. They circled in opposite directions to pick up all the empty Skoal cans and damp plugs of earthy chew that littered the pavement. Ryniec kept his voice just above a whisper as he and Blum converged on the dumpster with their handfuls of trash, bantering about all the blood they’d spill on deployment.

      At 1200 hours today, the entirety of Second Battalion would be released for two weeks of block leave, after which the damp green mountains of Fort Lewis would be swept aside for the blazing dust of Iraq. Deployment. Excited speculation about the missions to come had hummed for weeks through every conversation. On Second Battalion’s last deployment, they had helped rescue a Navy SEAL named Marcus Luttrell, whose account of the harrowing mission, Lone Survivor, would soon become a New York Times bestseller and a major Hollywood film. Now rumor had it they would be deploying with Luttrell to Ramadi. For Private Blum, the feeling resembled nothing so much as the anticipation that had built inside him just before a big hockey tournament when he was a kid, that same little bell ringing on and on. This was it: what he had worked for more than half his life.

      He and Ryniec ducked to look beneath the benches and pull-up bars of the small exercise area. Behind them, pale beige room lights showed through the windows on the second and third floors, where the privates stayed. Darkness prevailed in the windows on the first, which housed the noncommissioned officers and “tabs,” those who had completed a combat deployment and passed Ranger School to earn their Ranger tab, a black arch above the shoulder sleeve insignia with RANGER inscribed in gold thread. One of these rooms belonged to Specialist Sommer, the team leader Blum had taken orders from when he first arrived at battalion and who by now had become a kind of mentor. Also sleeping in Specialist Sommer’s room were the two Canadian friends that Blum had driven Sommer to pick up at the Tacoma Greyhound station last night. But Blum’s thoughts were not on Sommer or his friends. Even deployment was a little unreal to him on a day like today. All he could think about was getting through the hours that lay between now and his evening flight home to see Anna.

      I had been talking to Alex for two months on the phone about every other possible topic before he finally opened up about his ex-girlfriend.

      “In basic training,” he told me, “you can’t control the drill sergeants, can’t control what time you wake up, when you eat, when you piss, what you do all day. The one thing they can’t touch is Anna.”

      Before leaving for basic, Alex had arranged for two of his friends at Littleton High to deliver Anna a new red rose every day, accompanied by successive installments of a long love letter. He wrote more letters to her from the barracks, often taking an entire hour from the handful he’d have for sleep to fill page after page of notebook paper.

      I love you baby I love you as far as the universe stretches you are the love of my life and my best friend. Whenever I am surrounded by darkness I see you and all of a sudden I am surrounded by light. Thank you.

      Between the body and the signature, some letters contained as many as six pages composed entirely of the phrases “I love you” and “I miss you,” modulated with varyingly effusive relatives of “so much.”

      You are my entire life baby. Marry me. I love you

      Alex

      During Alex’s tenure, a Ranger battalion generally deployed for three months, then came back for six months of rest and recovery as the other two deployed in sequence. Rangers trained hard in the off-season. Their elite standards demanded intensive upkeep, like a top-shelf Ferrari in racing condition. Because the RIP curriculum contained precious little in the way of actual instruction, the biggest challenge was to bring the new cherry privates up to speed on Ranger tactics and integrate them into combat teams, each of which specialized in one of the two primary zones of urban warfare: inside and outside. A “line” team performed home invasions and secured interiors. A “gun” team provided cover with M240 machine guns from outside,

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