“You know we are at war, right?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“You know this isn’t going to end anytime soon, right?”
“Maybe when I get there I can help speed up the process.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah, war is pretty quick, it will probably be over the day after you get there.”
“Well, I didn’t mean—”
“Let me tell you something about war, Mat. It’s a bitch. And you have no control over it. You’re going to be doing things that you’ll hate, that you’ll find pointless, and there will be rules and decisions you’ll have to follow that you won’t understand. You’ll have a lot of questions that will go unanswered. There’s going to be a lot of assholes who think they know what they are doing. They will be wrong, and you will have to do it anyway. You understand?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
I mean, how could I not say that? Pointless tasks and stupid rules? Unanswered questions? Know-it-all assholes? No say over anything? He was basically describing what it’s like to grow up as the youngest in a military household. I’d taken more than my fair share of bites out of that shit sandwich. Even if I hadn’t, this was my dream. It felt like my true calling. I was going to tell my old man whatever I thought he wanted to hear.
My dad shook his head, knowing full well that I didn’t have a fucking clue. But as he looked at me nervously trying to sit up straight in my chair at the kitchen table across from him, he could see that it wasn’t doe-eyed passion that was in my eyes. It was determination. So he did what any good father would do. He chose to believe in me and signed the papers.
“I love you. Don’t get yourself killed.”
“I won’t, Dad.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” he said, and then he walked out of the house, got in his car, went to work, and we never spoke about it again.
Chapter 4
Baby, It’s Cold Outside, So Please Piss on Me
The path to a Ranger Battalion begins the same way for every infantryman with an 11x Option 40 contract: fifteen weeks at One-Station Unit Training (OSUT), then three weeks at Airborne School, then four weeks at RASP. All of which takes place in and around Fort Benning, outside Columbus, Georgia.
Let me tell you, I have been lucky in my career(s) to travel all over the world. I’ve met some awesome people and seen some amazingly beautiful places. But I’ve also been to some real shitholes, and Columbus, Georgia is the shittiest shithole of them all. If its motto isn’t “Spread the butt cheeks of Dixie and follow the smell,” someone needs to start a petition. How else do you describe a river town on the Alabama border whose crown jewels are three Waffle House franchises within a half-mile of each other?
For infantry, OSUT is ten weeks of basic training and five weeks of advanced individual training, all in one place. The Army says that they combined the two phases to increase unit camaraderie, which it does, but there are other good reasons to keep a bunch of jacked-up eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds penned in for as long as you can when you’re training them to be badass killers. After ten weeks of total isolation around a bunch of other dudes, can you imagine putting us on a plane to some other base? No airport bartender or female flight attendant would be safe:
Flight Attendant: Thank you for your service.
Infantryman: It would be my honor to service you.
OSUT sucks in the same boring way that the basic training of every other branch of the military sucks. You do the push-ups, march the miles, eat the shit, do the drills, blah blah blah—I’m up, he sees me, moving on.
Airborne School sounds cool, but really all you have to do to get through it is run five miles in less than forty minutes and then jump out of a plane five times without breaking your leg or dying. The running part is pretty easy if you’re in decent shape. One time I broke a shoelace three miles into an afternoon run, and instead of stopping to re-rig the shoelace in the eyelets and re-secure the boot, I threw the boot into the woods like an idiot and Forrest Gumped it the last two miles, well within the allotted time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of having gone through Airborne, but for someone who has signed up to be a professional face shooter and had volunteered to run at bullets for $25,000 a year, the physical aspects of the school aren’t especially difficult.
Proving to yourself that you have the balls to jump out of a perfectly good airplane is where the real test in Airborne is, particularly once you realize that the whole jump procedure is “streamlined” for efficiency’s sake. You have to trust someone else to pack your chute, for example. And not just anyone—someone who has also agreed to run at bullets for minimum wage. Then, unlike traditional skydiving, you don’t have full control over your risers (those sweet little toggles that control the steering of your parachute), which means they’re pretty much just fallers. This makes sense when you consider that, in a war zone, you’d like to land as soon as possible. But in training, during a “mass exit” at altitude, what ends up happening is that you play three-dimensional Frogger with twenty-five other jumpers.
One day the winds were gusting like Zeus farts and all I could do to get through being thrown uncontrollably through the air during my jump was to sing the chorus to “Dust in the Wind.” I truly felt in that moment that I had no control over my life or death. It was in the hands of ’70s supergroup Kansas…or possibly fate.
I survived, but others were not so lucky. Throughout my time in the military, I’ve seen a few Rangers die or get medically retired from injuries sustained during jumps and training exercises. During jump week in the class before mine, a female soldier’s parachute suffered a major malfunction and she burned in, unfortunately losing her life from her injuries. About a year later, a fellow Ranger fell to his death during an airfield seizure exercise. Another parachutist got blown right under his canopy and stole the air that was keeping him aloft. Suffice to say, dropping to the ground with no lift isn’t pretty. Our awareness of these kinds of deaths didn’t make our own jump week harder per se, but they were very real reminders that everything we were doing had life-or-death consequences, even in training.
* * *
—
Around that time, two weeks into Airborne, I got a call from my cousin who was a full-bird colonel and who used to be a platoon leader in Ranger Battalion. He was an absolute legend in my mind, and a call from him was a big fucking deal to me. My mother had kept in contact with him throughout my training and had let him know that I would soon be going through RASP if I passed (a.k.a. “did not fall to my death in”) Airborne School. He knew from his own experience that not everyone is meant to jump out of an airplane, and I think he was checking in to see whether I was one of those guys.