LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 1

       SORT OF A HAPPY/SAD DEAL

      From the time we were kids, Alex always had a simple dream: to defend his country from the forces of evil and oppression. None of us took this very seriously but him. After school in the suburbs of Denver, he’d run off in his camouflage T-shirt and cargo pants to play Vietnam commando on the canal that wove through the neighborhood, laying booby traps with dry seedpods and hiding behind stands of cattails to watch joggers jump and yip as the ground exploded beneath their feet. He rented every army movie the local Blockbuster carried, played every video game. There weren’t many women in the ads back then, just grim-lipped men in high-tech gear dropping down ropes from helicopters to the sound of that unforgettable jingle: Be … all that you can be … in the arrmeey.

      Back then Alex and I barely spoke. Our dream worlds did not overlap. By age seven I had become known in the family as a math prodigy. In the fields where Alex saw darting commie guerrillas, I saw fractally branching ferns, Fibonacci-spiraling pinecones, self-intersecting manifolds of swallows. I’d tell supermarket cashiers how lasers worked, give lifeguards introductions to the Navier-Stokes equations for viscous flow. I was, I realize now, completely insufferable. Human relations were not my specialty: too complicated. By thirteen I was taking calculus and physics at the University of Colorado. The only real common ground I had with Alex lay between the tattered street hockey nets in his driveway, where on summer afternoons he would occasionally deign to scurry around my knees and destroy me, smiling up in triumph each time he scored. He was five years younger but already a budding star.

      Our fathers had both made their efforts at manly education. Alex’s father, Norm, was the assistant coach of Alex’s hockey team with the elite Littleton Hockey Association and played adult league with Denver’s finest, including a smattering of pros from the NHL during the 1992 players’ strike. Al, my own father, was the quarterback coach of George Washington High School’s football team downtown. Both raced bicycles competitively in the brutal Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, played pickup street hockey in a warehouse rink Norm had convinced a business associate to set up, skied, golfed, climbed, and pumped inordinate quantities of iron. Summers they took us camping in the foothills, hiking through the canyons, fishing in the tick-infested ranchland of our Texas relatives. They stuck earplugs in our ears, jammed twelve-gauge shotguns against our shoulders, pointed us toward the discarded appliances at the other end of the ravine, and needled us until we squeezed the trigger.

      It all took better with Alex than with me. Even when he was still in school, reports of his shining all-Americanness began filtering in: shoveling snow for an elderly neighbor, coaching little kids at hockey camp, defending classmates against bullies at Littleton High School. Though he was flying to tournaments all over the country with his nationally ranked club hockey team, he became more and more serious about the army thing. It seemed to me as if he had bought himself ready-made off a toy store display rack, a G.I. Joe action figure self, and now that he had the basic model, a world of attachments and product tie-ins were available to him. His would be a life of heroic accomplishment—an American life, a Blum life, a triumph.

      Alex signed his 11X/Airborne Ranger contract in the final semester of his senior year at Littleton, reserving the chance to try out for the army’s elite Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment. Many infantry recruits at the time signed contracts exactly like this one, lured by the chance to become an elite commando, but only a small fraction made it through the series of painful trials on the path to Special Operations. The rest were consigned to the regular infantry. Alex knew all this. He didn’t care. He shipped off to basic before dawn on the fifth of July. Five months later he graduated from basic and became an infantryman. Three weeks after that he earned his airborne wings. One final stage remained: what today is called the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program. It was a little different in 2006 than it is today. For one thing, it was shorter: a concentrated four weeks instead of eight. For another, it was still called the Ranger Indoctrination Program—RIP.

      Private First Class Alex Blum was about to become a very strong argument for changing the name.