“How is it going so far?” he asked.
“Easy breezy.”
“Sure,” he said, knowing full well that I’d just spent the last four months getting my shit pushed in. “I hear you’re going to RASP after you graduate.”
RASP is the final step that determines whether or not you have what it takes to join one of the three battalions of the 75th Ranger Regiment. The three are 1st Battalion at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia; 2nd Battalion at Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Washington; and 3rd Battalion right here at luxurious Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia.
“Where do you want to go after RASP?” he asked.
“I really want to go to Fort Lewis, 2/75, but I’m not sure if that will happen.”
“You never know,” my cousin said. “Keep your chin up and good luck.”
I wanted Fort Lewis for two reasons: I wanted to head back west to be closer to my family down in Santa Barbara, and during this time of the war, the Ranger battalions were on cycled deployments, and the 2/75 had just been pushed forward. This meant that if I got 2nd Battalion, I’d be able to deploy immediately instead of having to cool my heels for several months like the dudes in 1st or 3rd Battalion.
Regardless of how I performed at RASP, I had no idea where I’d wind up, because the military does not have a reputation for granting the wishes of its newest recruits. If you wanted to go to the 1/75, you’d end up at 2nd Battalion. If you wanted to go to the 2/75, you’d end up at 1st Battalion. If you wanted the 3/75…well, you’d end up at the 3/75, because 3rd Battalion is in Columbus, Georgia, and as I’ve said, nothing sucks more than Columbus.
It’s only fitting that RASP also calls Columbus home, because this is when shit starts to get real and the suckfest kicks into high gear. The day after Airborne ended, three Ranger instructors happily met our graduating class to shuttle us to their compound and start the selection process. By “shuttle” I of course mean that they made us run—with all of our gear, personal effects, and duffel bags—the couple of miles up the road. And by “selection process” I mean they immediately started separating the wheat from the chaff, the strong from the weak, the fast from the slow. Anyone who fell behind the instructors at the back of the formation was immediately relieved of their class position and sent to another unit.
Once we arrived at the Black Top, an infamous location on the Ranger Compound where millions of push-ups have been done and even more “Fuck You”s have quietly been uttered, a pep talk worthy of a Bobby Knight halftime speech commenced.
“Forty percent of Rangers get wounded, fifteen percent get killed,” the instructor said. “Y’all still want to be here? Great. If not, go the fuck home.”
Standing out there in the shit Georgia weather with all the other newbies, these first words out of the instructor’s mouth rang through the humid air like a gunshot. He wasn’t trying to scare us, exactly; it was more about setting the tone. The next few weeks were going to be as hard and as shitty as any of us could imagine the vetting process would be for entry into a highly selective fighting force. Not just anyone gets to kill people and run into bullets, mmmkay? Instructors would be creating immense stress on a nearly constant basis to test our adaptability and leadership capabilities as we neared our breaking points. That’s the real goal of RASP: to push you to the limit, to try to break you. To make you miserable every fucking second of the day so that you’ll quit, because having someone in the Ranger Regiment who is susceptible to fear, physical exhaustion, or poor decision-making as a result of mental fatigue is like walking around with a land mine strapped to your ankle. There is no sense in sugarcoating it: Having some weak motherfucker in your unit will get you killed.
As the instructor kept talking, he added the next bit of stress, the next test for timidity and weakness. He made all of us hold our rucksacks above our heads. Even after our super shuttle to the Black Top, there were still too many students in the class. They needed to get rid of a bunch before they could start the course. So the first fifteen Airborne graduates to drop their rucks, well, they got a one-way ticket home.
I remember looking around and taking the measure of my classmates, studying their faces as the instructor’s warnings resonated. Most of us had just gone through OSUT and Airborne together, so I figured everyone would be prepared for this last-man-standing test. I was wrong. Some guys were confused; others were plainly fearful. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t hide it. As their arms shook under the weight of their rucks and their own estimations of themselves, you could see people calculating the odds in their head, questioning if they had what it took to keep going, to roll those dice, wondering if they should really be here. The number of guys who’d never even thought about quitting, let alone dying, between the time they enlisted and the time they got to RASP would blow your mind. It wasn’t long before people started dropping their rucks, not because of physical fatigue but because of the reality check—I could actually die. Within thirty minutes, the instructors had their fifteen sacrificial lambs, and the rest—about forty to fifty of us—moved on.
The first week of RASP was less difficult than I expected, mostly because there wasn’t much that was new. A lot of this initial week was just an extension of the previous twenty-week marathon suckfest, except now the training was constant—twenty hours per day, every day. The real dick-twisting came during the second week when they sent us out to this awful, remote part of Columbus called Cole Range, which is a forest-lined swampland. If Columbus is the asshole of America, then Cole Range is those bloody little cuts at the top of the asshole that snag all the dingleberries when it gets hairy up there.
The real beauty and elegance of Cole Range isn’t in the topography, it’s in the timing. It doesn’t signal the end of a training phase, like other brutal military rites of passage do. It’s just there in the middle of everything to remind you that getting your dick kicked in the dirt for a week straight is probably going to be a regular part of your job—if you even make it, that is. The isolation, the constant companionship of only other dudes who are as miserable as you, that’s just extra!
Most days at Cole Range, you’re operating on two hours of sleep if you’re lucky. Some days you march with eighty-pound rucks strapped to your back, not really sure where you’re headed. Other days, the instructors capitalize on the exhaustion and constant chaos of training to throw all manner of ridiculous fuckery at you, just to see how you respond. It was at this point in my life that I learned to laugh at situations that were beyond fucked. I realized that there was no point in complaining about things that are outside of my control because no one would be listening, especially since I was the one who had volunteered for this shit in the first place.
In the middle of Cole Range, I would have killed for someone to bring clarity to my choices—Why, Mat, did you agree to submerge yourself in gator-piss swamps at 4 A.M.?—but instead, day after day, all I could do was laugh at everything and repeat to myself, “It’s only a few more weeks.” A few more weeks and I can finally sleep and be warm again. A few more weeks and I can eat a decent meal again. A few more weeks and maybe I can sweet-talk one of those Columbus Waffle House waitresses into a covered and smothered Best Hot Plate Special. (It’s off the menu, available by request only.)