LITMIR.BIZ

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an instant pariah in his unit. His girlfriend broke up with him. A week after he got out of the brig he committed suicide.

      In civilian life back home in British Columbia, where Sommer had gone by Elliott, his near-poetic facility with wild tales had earned him the nickname “B.S. Elliott.” Among his close associates at battalion, his bullshitting and over-the-top craziness was known as the “Sommer factor.” He liked to pop his dental retainer—one false tooth lodged in the middle to fill a gap he’d earned in a fight—in and out as a joke. Other tabs played along with his games. One day at the 240B gun-mapping range, Corporal Sager gave Blum his keys and asked him to move his truck so he wouldn’t get a ticket. Blum came back glowing from the trust that this personal errand implied and discovered Sager talking to Sommer on the curb. Sager raised his eyebrows at Blum with an air of jokey conspiracy. “You planning to take out some Hells Angels, Private?” he asked.

      “Definitely, Corporal.”

      In late June, Blum drove Sommer to a casino off I-5 along with PFC Palmer and an older tab named Byrne whom he had never met before. After Byrne made a recon run, they all brainstormed the tactical problem of taking it down: breaching the vault with plastic explosives, escaping in Humvees. As usual, Sommer took the normal Ranger chest-beating one step further, going so far as to diagram the mission on Google Earth satellite images in the same way raids were marked up in the classroom. But whenever PFC Blum started to think this was all getting just a little too real, Sommer would throw in some crazy detail about bringing Bravo Company along to fast-rope in from Black Hawks while Maggot Squad covered them with 240s, and soon it was all laughter and comfort again.

      Now that they were spending more and more time together, Specialist Sommer told PFC Blum that he could begin to call him Elliott. Blum was flattered by the offer but found himself too uncomfortable to accept, sticking instead to “Specialist Sommer” as regulations required. Sergeants cracked down hard if they saw a private fraternizing too closely with a tab.

      “He kept it in military-speak,” Alex told me. “It was always, ‘This is the infill, and I need you to map this out for me, and this and this and this.’ I was like, ‘Okay, okay, okay.’ It was just like homework for me. Maybe in his mind he was like, ‘Yeah, he’s in on it, he’s good with it.’ But at the same time … This is actually the main question I have. Was he like, ‘I have to keep this power over him’? Or was he like, ‘We’re actually equals’?”

      On the afternoon of Thursday, August 3, just after PFC Blum successfully completed the rigorous multiday testing phase for the Expert Infantryman Badge he would need for combat duty in Iraq, Sommer asked him for a ride to the Bank of America branch on South Tacoma Way, where he had a checking account. While Sommer engaged in a lengthy transaction with a teller, Blum sat in a plush chair in the lobby and gave the place a once-over. Afterward, at a nearby Quiznos, he charted out on a napkin how a Ranger team would hit the place, trying his best to impress the specialist with his tactical acuity.

      For PFC Blum, the morning of August 7 really was in many respects no different from an ordinary day: a long series of more-or-less arbitrary orders from superiors, some making sense, some not. Sergeant Congdon came by to release them for block leave. Corporal Roe came by to announce the soft armor inspection. Specialist Sommer came by to pick up PFC Blum’s soft armor. Blum and the other privates wandered into each other’s rooms to kill time until their flights. Two hours later PFC Blum was in the squad room watching TV with a few other privates and their squad leader, Sergeant Waterhouse, when Specialist Sommer leaned in the door and gestured for him to come out into the hall.

      “My grandma just died,” he said.

      PFC Blum had no idea how to react. Was it his place to give comfort? In fact, as Alex would learn years later, Sommer’s grandmother had just suffered a botched biopsy that would soon lead to her death but had not yet passed away. The story Sommer had given to superiors was that his Canadian friends were here to ride north with him and visit her in the hospital.

      “I’m sorry, Specialist,” Blum ventured, which was how he truly felt.

      “I need your car keys,” Sommer said.

      “Sure.”

      As he watched the specialist walk away with his keys, Blum realized to his dismay that he was now in danger of missing his evening flight. His buddy Anderson from Bravo Company was supposed to drive him to the airport in the Audi. Back home in Denver, Anna was waiting. But there wasn’t anything Blum could do about it. He returned to the squad room.

      Around 1500, Privates Anderson, Ryniec, and MacDonald decided to take Ryniec’s old Ford Explorer into Tacoma for an afternoon snack at Applebee’s. From there they would drive MacDonald to the airport to catch his flight. Anderson planned to go in to the airline counter to see if he could switch his own flight to tonight. If he managed to do so, Alex’s ride would evaporate. His best bet was to load his hockey bag in the Ford and go with them to the airport now.

      “You sure you don’t want to come, Blum?”

      “Nah, I have to wait for Specialist Sommer.”

      They all slapped hands with him, pulled it in for the clinch, exchanged a few last words of excited anticipation for deployment, and disappeared down the hallway.

      PFC Blum received two phone calls in the next hour from friends carpooling to the airport and offering rides. He was forced to decline both offers.

      By 1610 he was all by himself in the squad room, slouched in a pile on the sofa, alternating his attention between the TV and the clock. His cell phone lit up again: Specialist Sommer.

      “I need you to come downstairs and drive,” Sommer said. “We’re going to the bank. We’re going to take care of it.”

      It was a warm July afternoon a few days after the mock mission in Norm’s garage when Alex and I drilled down to the deepest level yet on these crucial few minutes, in a conversation on my mother’s balcony that would resonate with me for years. A brigade of storm clouds were bearing down in slow motion from the Rockies.

      “‘We’re going to take care of it,’” I repeated.

      “Yeah,” said Alex.

      After months of army talk and job commiseration and, more recently, exultation at the conquering prowess of the five-year-olds he had been granted permission to coach at the rink despite his lack of a license, Alex and I seemed to our mutual surprise to have entered the ranks of each other’s closest friends. His loyalty, I had discovered, was hard-won but immense. He called regularly, kept up with the details of my life, told me stupid jokes when I seemed down, even grew a beard to match my own. But for all his efforts to explain how he could have believed the robbery was a training exercise, I still kept getting hung up on small details. In his lawn chair he was sunk into a very different slouch from the kind in the squad room years ago, his hat pulled low over his eyes, his lips popping on and off the mouth of his beer bottle to hide his nervousness. He had only recently begun trusting me with the more difficult details of his story.

      “But,” I said, “I mean … you know what that means. You guys have talked about the bank.”

      Alex made a pained noise through his teeth. “Well … I think he didn’t specifically say it, so it was kind of like—and I think that’s where the mind-set goes, where it was like—and I, like I said, I … You’re always under the impression that he wouldn’t do something wrong.”

      Within a few months, after driving Alex to frustration by repeating the same questions over and over, after asking as many other people as I could think of, after reading thousands of pages of court documents, I would begin to see all the arguments about what Alex “knew” at each stage as serving mainly to illustrate that our conventional sense of “knowing” one thing or another was absurdly insufficient as a representation of the humongous junk wad of partially contradictory beliefs

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