Chapter 3
You’re in the Army, Now?!
There is a simple truth that comes with sibling rivalry, especially when you’re the baby of the family: It is never as easy as following in your brothers’ footsteps. Doing what they have done is never enough. You have to exceed them. To quote Jay-Z, “You have to go farther, go further, go harder, and if not, then why bother?” If they learn to skydive, you have to BASE jump. If they BASE jump, you have to HALO jump. If they HALO jump, I don’t know, then fucking Red Bull it from space. It doesn’t matter. The point is: In my mind, I had to be better than my brothers.
This quest to be the better Best started with learning everything I could about the military. I immersed myself in military culture and quickly became obsessed to a nearly unhealthy degree, like the Japanese are with poop or the Germans are…well, also with poop. I started with movies. I watched every single war movie I could get my hands on: Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Patton, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk Down, Hamburger Hill, Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, Major Payne. I studied these war flicks the way conspiracy theorists study the Zapruder film—pantsless.
After I was done with every military film ever made, I turned my attention to learning about generals. George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower. We mostly remember them as presidents now, but as generals those motherfuckers iced a serious number of bad guys in the name of #Merica. And as much as I eventually wanted to be the guy who put the bullets in those bad guys, initially I wanted to understand strategy and the psyche of the war mind as well. I wanted to understand what it meant to be lethal in every way possible.
Next I tried to memorize all the different ranks in all branches of the military. I still wasn’t sure at this point where I wanted to enlist after high school, but wherever I ended up I was sure there would be men and women there who were not only bigger, meaner, faster, smarter, and stronger than me, they would also be in charge. I was confident that I would be able to recognize the hellfire headed my way from the looks on their faces, but why not get better at being able to identify it by the rank on their shoulders? Stars, bars, stripes, and oak leaf clusters—those were the symbols of the people who could fuck my world up.
Sooner or later, I would have to choose a branch. The easy route would have been to join the Marines. My dad was a Marine, my brothers were Marines, I had a general feel for how things worked over there—it would have made sense. But how could I be better than them if all I did was do the same thing they did? You know what they say: If you want to be the best Best, you have to beat the best Bests. (People do say that, I swear.)
Based on my intensive research of war movies, the surest way to outshine my brothers was to forgo basic infantry and join Special Operations. Historically, Marine infantry was “the tip of the spear,” but for a few decades now it’s been Special Operations who have been the cutting edge. Unfortunately, the Marines didn’t really offer a good path toward that goal when I was ready to enlist in 2004. The branch with the most options was the Army. They had ███████████, the Green Berets, the Rangers and—with the exception of Full Metal Jacket—they also had the best movies.
As the Army path came into focus, my determination to enlist became fully consuming, and all the other stuff I was doing to pass the time in high school started to fade away. Bye-bye, Botany Club. It’s been real, Blind Story. I started hanging out with guys who seemed to be on a similar trajectory, and I spent my down time trying to figure out the best way to prepare for boot camp and get into Special Operations. I knew that the Rangers required, at a minimum, scoring an 11x Option 40 contract to fast-track to the unit.
A few definitions are in order here. “11” is the MOS (military occupational specialty) designation for infantry, which is just military jargon for “the dudes who get to kill bad guys.” The “x” is the general infantry designation, which means that you aren’t pigeonholed into a certain method of shooting them. The “Option 40” part is what gets you the slot in RASP (Ranger Assessment and Selection Program), which gives you the chance to sneak up on these bad guys and shoot them right in the fucking face in the dead of the night. Pew personified. The question I had was “How do I get me one of those?”
In retrospect, I should have bitten the bullet and asked my dad or my brothers what to do. But in the same way that the youngest always has to exceed the eldest, the youngest can’t show any vulnerability. I couldn’t seem weak or uncertain to those jackals or they would have eaten me alive:
Mat: Hey guys, what should I do to prepare for Army Rangers?
Alan: Don’t ever quit.
Davis: Actually you should quit…being such a pussy.
Mat: Dad?
Dad: I can’t hear the game over your feelings.
Instead, I approached a kid named Travis, who was a senior when I was a junior and had expressed interest in enlisting after high school.
“Hey man, you still thinking about joining the military?” I asked.
“Hell yeah, man. That’s all I think about every day,” he replied.
“Cool, me too. What do you think about ROTC? That seems like something we should get into. My brothers were in—”
“No dude, that’s useless,” Travis shot back. “We need to get into something harder. Something to get us even more prepared.”
“Shit. What will get us more prepared than ROTC?” I asked. Travis turned and looked around, all conspiratorial-like, making sure no one was listening.
“Civil Air Patrol,” he said, squinting and nodding, like he actually knew what the fuck he was talking about. I didn’t really know anything about ROTC or Civil Air Patrol at the time, so I had no way of judging them against each other, but I didn’t feel like I needed to, because the conviction in Travis’s eyes had already sold me.
“I’m in.”
The next day, Travis and I enrolled in the after-school program known as Civil Air Patrol. In case you are as unfamiliar with Civil Air Patrol as I was when I signed up, let me sum it up for you: The only difference between a member of the Civil Air Patrol and a Webelo Scout is pubic hair. Even our uniforms were more ridiculous than what the Webelos had. The Webelos might look like a Little League team made up of park rangers, but at least their uniforms fit properly and looked like actual uniforms. Civil Air Patrol uniforms were baggy pieces of shit that looked like pre-packaged Army costumes from one of those inflatable roadside Halloween stores shaped like a giant pumpkin.
Putting on that uniform and leaving the house during daylight hours ended up being the hardest part of Civil Air Patrol. Occasionally, we’d do these weird drills like lying on our backs and holding a two-by-four over our heads for five minutes straight. To this day I don’t know what the purpose of that drill was: Simulate an Amish barn raising in zero g? Your guess is as good as mine. I remember one afternoon the instructor trying to get stern with us and saying, “Can you fellows give me twenty push-ups?” As a kid who wanted to be the tip of the spear, I was starting to feel distinctly like the shaft.