Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime - Ben Blum

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      A few days after my conversation with Norm, Alex and I met in his father’s driveway to talk about his training.

      “Hope you’re ready to get smoked,” Alex said, hauling up the garage door.

      The next two hours were the most animated I had seen from Alex since his arrest. He rolled around on the cement of the garage floor shouting synchronizing codes to demonstrate a “talking guns” drill he had practiced on the quad with Womack, swapping in and out at Sommer’s command and cycling bursts to keep the barrels cool. He grabbed printer paper and pens from Norm’s home office to draw diagrams of the bullet-riddled live-fire shoot houses that had to be rebuilt every few months, remembering jogging excitedly back to the barracks alongside buddies who had once more succeeded, through a mix of professionalism and luck, in not killing each other. He dug cardboard boxes and soup cans out of the recycling bin to build a three-dimensional map of a company-wide training mission, pointed out breach points to each building with a golf club. He slipped into voices for sergeants and tabs with theatrical relish as he issued commands down the chain. I could almost see his gear-laden teenage form in digital-print fatigues and combat boots floating at twilight into the mock city in the hills where they staged the exercise, mind compressed inside his helmet by the pulse of chopper blades. He talked me through the sequence as if it were a favorite movie: dropping to a hover with dozens of other black helicopters over a dark field, leaping from a cabin packed tight with men and gear into open air on a thick black rope that charged up through your thighs and gloves like an animal, watching the grass beneath you widen, ripple in coiling eddies, hit through your boots with the total shock of body woken to itself. It was as close to battle as PFC Blum ever got. Hours later, as they flew home through the dark, Corporal Sager, a friend of Sommer’s from British Columbia who had taken over as Alex’s team leader after Sommer moved to a line team, let him sit in the helicopter’s door with his legs dangling in the wind.

      “The moon was full,” Alex intoned. “We were flying along the highway. I was strapped into the Black Hawk with the 240 hanging between my knees. The wind was pushing my right pant leg across my lap. Sager leaned over. He said, ‘I wouldn’t let you sit in the door if you hadn’t done a perfect job.’” Alex paused for a moment to savor the memory. “I was so happy that I’d made him proud. I knew if we’d been in Iraq, he would have trusted me to be in the door to engage the enemy. The highway cut through mountains covered in pine trees. We were eight hundred, nine hundred feet up. I remember watching a lone car weaving through them, the faint lights on a Honda or a Toyota or whatever it was, and thinking it had no idea we were up there, no idea what we’d just done.”

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      Those months were transformative for all the cherry privates. At night and on weekends, they ventured into Tacoma with new eyes. Every door was a potential breach point, every bar counter a red zone concealing hidden gunmen, every Denny’s dining room partitioned into lines of fire. Civilians looked more and more like another species entirely. Cherry privates watched in bemusement as men and women with giant poofs of hair puzzled over menus, smoothed napkins over their laps, wiped their children’s mouths. One night after raiding airplane hangars, Alex and his buddies went out to see the new X-Men movie at the AMC multiplex near the highway, and all they could talk about, lined up there in the dark among teenagers who had no idea they were surrounded by Rangers, was how simple it would be to take down the theater. They all tried to outdo each other in assessment of the tactical problem, which was almost identical to that of a hangar: three exits, red zone in the projectionist booth, big interior space with a bunch of sheep to herd. Piece of cake.

      Talk of hitting spots around Tacoma was a reliable way to show off knowledge and sound hard, a real-world application of their classroom sessions planning raids on satellite photos of al-Qaeda complexes. Whenever they watched heist movies, they laughed at how much better they could do the job themselves. Tabs were fluent in the lingo of tactical planning, but the sharper of the privates were already picking it up. In this PFC Blum was lucky to enjoy the special mentorship of Specialist Sommer.

      Even after his replacement as Blum’s team leader, the specialist popped in once in a while as Blum broke down M16s or shined boots to ask him for a ride into town. He was friendlier to the privates than other tabs were, taking more than a few of them out to facilities around Tacoma to war-game, but Blum seemed to be a favorite of his. Sommer thought the silver Audi was cool, nicknaming it “the Transporter,” after one of his favorite movies, in which a disillusioned Special Forces operator runs criminal errands in an Audi A8. Blum tried to hide his nervousness about the stick shift. No matter where Sommer wanted to go—Chili’s, Starbucks, Quiznos, Dairy Queen, the supermarket, a porn shop—he made a little lesson out of it.

      “Where’s our infill?”

      “Side door by the booths.”

      “Right. Red zones?”

      “By the counter. From the kitchen. Behind that soft-serve thing.”

      “You forgot the bathroom, Blum. Bang. You’re dead.”

      As they ate, Sommer would regale him with tales of Iraq and Afghanistan and of his youth in Kelowna, a city of several hundred thousand east of Vancouver. His mother was a Royal Canadian Air Cadets instructor, but since Sommer had dual citizenship, he had chosen the U.S. Army, because Rangers were the ones who scoured the world of the vilest bad guys. He singled out one group in particular for his venom: the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, a gang that Blum was surprised to learn maintained a stranglehold on Kelowna. Sommer detailed their offenses: drug dealing, extortion, squatting in houses and ejecting their elderly inhabitants. He fantasized about gathering a team of Rangers to take them on.

      “These guys are like the insurgents of Canada. A few Rangers would wipe these motherfuckers out, easy.”

      “Hell yeah they would.”

      Hooah. Get some. Blum was thrilled to be included by a tab in this kind of swaggering banter. Specialist Sommer impressed him: funny, experienced, highly motivated to stamp out evil wherever it might be found. Of course, in Blum’s heart of hearts, he was a little more into defending America from freedom-hating jihadis than Canada from some aging biker gang. But he wasn’t about to say that. The range of Sommer’s expertise in tactics, weaponry, and politics was formidable, and he was drilling PFC Blum on the skills he would soon need to perform flawlessly in Iraq: securing sight lines, covering hostages, taking quick charge of the package. The package might be a terrorist leader, a stash of guns, a hard drive full of enemy plans, anything. If you didn’t get out with the package, the mission was a failure.

      When I asked Alex how it felt to complete these extracurricular exercises, he emphasized their similarity to the work Rangers did every day. As a nineteen-year-old private, he had simply been grateful for the chance to improve his skills. He was dreaming of heroic feats in Iraq. It seemed clear enough, though, that he had also found them profoundly exciting—like a video game you got to play in real life. Not that this distinguished them much from the rest of his training. Blowing the heads off plastic terrorists with assault rifles was another real-life video game, and Alex and his comrades played a lot of others on their Xbox, especially a game called Hitman, whose Mafia storyline dovetailed with a real-world game they called “Sommer Syndicate.”

      By July, Sommer’s vigilante fantasy had expanded to include building a team of Rangers that would take over Kelowna and keep the Hells Angels out for good, sustaining themselves with protection money from local businesses and living by a strict code of honor. Once in a while he would toss a pistol to Blum, Palmer, or one of the other privates he was tight with and call “suicide check.” The requirement then was to point it at your head and pull the trigger. To examine the chamber first was an insult, forbidden. The godfather, “Don Terrino,” commanded absolute trust. In return, he was available to help out when it really counted. Once, when Blum pulled charge-of-quarters duty after two straight sleepless nights of field drills, he passed out at the desk and woke to a furious sergeant demanding to see his supervisor. Blum went upstairs and instead got Specialist Sommer, who somehow managed to calm the guy down and keep Blum out of trouble. The import of this anecdote

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