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Ranger School. Can I get a Hoowa?
This is a good but long article about making it through the US Army Ranger School: Army Ranger School is a Laboratory of Human Endurance.
I’ll say. Or, as Sheriff Walt Longmire would say, “Boy howdy” (Sorry, just binged out on three Longmire novels).
Whatever its pros and cons, if you go all the way through Ranger School you’ve earned a master’s degree in suffering; and in performing while suffering, which is pretty much the point.
The author is a Ranger-qualified veteran who goes back as a writer. He brought some memories back. If you go to Ranger School, the keyword is “suck.” All 24 hours of every day (even that one or two that you get to spend sleeping) suck. There’s not a doubt in my mind that Ranger School is the progenitor of the military philosophy of “embrace the suck.” But, the hardest thing you’ve ever done is the psychic high watermark for hard.
In my old career, being Ranger qualified was considered kind of an entry-level position. Okay, kid, you got your driver’s license; that doesn’t mean you’re ready to compete in NASCAR. One of the tropes about Ranger School is that “you learn who you are.” Okay. I learned that I don’t like patrolling 18-22 hours a day humping a rucksack heavy enough to qualify as ridonckulous. I learned I don’t like getting only one, maybe two, MREs per day when I would’ve needed about 5 for my body to compensate for the caloric output. I learned I don’t like being so sleep deprived that I hallucinate. I learned that I can tell when my body switches from burning fat to burning higher protein muscle by the smell of my own body odor. The author states that Ranger students lose up to 20 pounds during the course. I found that number too short by half. Twice that.* I think I knew all that stuff going in.
But I’m glad I went. The author attended the school and then bird-dogged with a Ranger class as a writer when the school was only three phases: Darby, mountains, and swamp. When I went (twice), there was a fourth phase, desert. The desert phase was out in Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah. That’s where we (US government we, not Ranger we) do Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation of all the radiological, chemical and bioweapons that are the stuff of nightmares. We had to carry live atropine injectors in case we hit a bit of nastiness that hadn’t been properly cleaned up. Also, whatever was in the soil there turned the black leather of our combat boots purple. Weird, right?
The author does a good job describing the privations that are inherent to the school.
I can remember doing a hit in the mountain phase. The mission was a raid. The objective was a little house tucked into a hollow (in Infantry-ese, they are called draws. Draws suck. Draws are where the monsters are). It was 0-dark-thirty. The only light was from the sliver of the moon reflecting off the pre-dawn mist clinging to the walls of the hollow. We had dumped non-essential equipment earlier. We were exhausted to the point of hallucinations. We were malnourished to the point of starvation. We were, in the parlance, a soup sandwich.
But as I watched my Ranger brethren ghost silently down the sides of the mountain like wraiths, I realized that we were also very, very good.
The raid went off without a hitch.
*I went all the way through Ranger school (i.e., completed every phase at least once) and got bounced out for not passing enough patrols. So a couple of years later I went back. I was a young Infantry officer with aspirations to go to Special Forces. So about 30-35% of the reason I went back was because I thought it right and proper that a guy on that career path be Ranger qualified and 65-70% of the reason that I went back was so that I could legitimately say that I got screwed the first time I went. If you don’t go back and earn your due, then it’s all just sour grapes. Weight loss through both iterations was greater than 40 pounds.
Published in General
It was funny. I think 98% of folks on Ricochet would get it.
Didn’t know it was against the rules. So embracing the suck it was.
I have only gotten to re-do a course once. The first time I had to do it, the material AND the schedule/ demands/ the how-to of the course were unknowns. The second time I did it, I had been doing/seeing the work done – and been to combat with it so there were really very few unknowns. All I had to do was actually do the thing again. Since there wasn’t any physical privation involved (they do make sure we got our crewrest), all I did was make sure to mentor the co-pilots assigned to me, and fly the maneuvers they needed me to fly.
Much easier, mentally and physically the second time.
I know it wasn’t easier physically for you the second time (the course doesn’t allow for that) hopefully it was easier mentally.
I don’t know much about the army, but it would seem that other people that matter agreed you had what it takes or they wouldn’t have wasted a school seat on you.
I also lucked out. I was assigned to the 24th ID during the first Gulf War. Upon re-deploying to home station, the powers that be decided that the 18th Airborne Corps having some mechanized assets in its tool box was a good idea. That meant that the unit received an allocation of Ranger school slots. That meant that I was eligible to compete for a slot. Of course, the division set up a pre-Ranger course to weed out those who would be a waste of a slot.
One of the coolest experiences of my young life at the time. The division Long Range Surveillance Detachment ran their pre-Ranger course. The NCOIC was a Vietnam veteran (who had had a long break in service, during which he did stuff like motorcycle across the country and be a history professor at a small university). To say that guy was hard-core doesn’t even begin to cover it. He had a Lima Company Ranger combat scroll.
[Before we had the Ranger Regiment and its three battalions, Army divisions had a Ranger company assigned. Lima Company supported the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Infantry Division during Vietnam]
NCOIC’s comment: What do you do when you’re in a hide site and an NVA regiment moves in and bivouacs all around you? You wait for the (deepest, darkest part of the morning, CoC) and you fight your way out. What do you do when you finally break out the perimeter? Easy, you turn around and fight your way through to the far side.
That guy knew more about Rangerin’ than I ever will.
As an armchair quarterback who has watched the military change, I find that to be the case.
It seems that you have to have more and more training before sent into combat. It seems that our ground wars are now predominantly fought by special ops even as conventional units are sent in primarily as back up.
And I spotted this in military.com. I don’t know what to think of that. And this trend isn’t restricted to the military. The civilian world requires more and more training before you can do the work, as well as formal recurring training.
The reason the military can do this is the lower scale of our fights backed up by a big support infrastructure (air power, sea power, etc).
But that training costs a lot. If we ever go into a World War II industrial style of fighting again, people with less training will be sent in to fight.
Your comment spawned the thought: a lot of this post was about gaining a certification, that holds some cachet saying “you’re the right guy.” But if a unit is doing things right, training should be ongoing and the primary focus of the unit (even once you deploy, you should still prioritize training above everything but actual combat ops).
Yes, and: if SOF is your main effort, then you’re probably doing strategy wrong. SOF can and should be an important supporting effort, but conventional forces are required to win the day.
YES, YES, YES! On both points.
The last conflict I supported was Operation Inherent Resolve. In that conflict, the majority of combat was accomplished by “partner forces” – in that case Iraqi military and Syrian indigenous forces. When I say majority, I am referring to force on force engagements (bullets, door kicking, assaulting, clearing) – not supporting combat actions – (artillery, Close Air Support, etc)
In that fight, even regular army units were support rarely, if ever, actively engaged.
It’s a very big problem. The Cheney/Rumsfeld policy to fight wars with primarily special forces was a complete disaster.
You can’t win a war by whack-a-mole. To conquer a country you need a lot of people. You need to have recognizable front lines, you need to have rear areas that are relatively secure and forward areas where the killing is done. Those rear areas need to be occupied and not ignored.
Primarily the problem is that we have been fighting as though we only need to win a battle here or there to win. That’s never been true anywhere. To win we need to convince the enemy that they are defeated. Special forces can’t do that. They are special, and by definition they will never be numerous enough.
More training for everyone is fine, but in the end, the bulk of the soldiers don’t need to be Rangers or Seals. The bulk of the soldiers just need to be strong men willing to kill anyone who doesn’t behave as we allow them to behave. In fact, the less fancy, the more convincing it is. War in the end is a personal matter for everyone being conquered. If the ordinary person isn’t motivated to cooperate, we’ll never win. What our “hearts and minds” mentality does is teach the enemy population that we won’t hurt them, but the enemy terrorists will, so they’d better cooperate more with the terrorists.
I have never served (other than the occasional danish), but all of the history I’ve read around this stuff remains entirely consistent. If you don’t do enough damage to the nation/people collectively, and remove their willingness to fight back (however that is achieved, which is typically done by what’s described above), then they’ll never cooperate. Special Forces in all of their flavors can’t do that, that’s not what they’re built to do. You need large volumes of men, equipment, and a seriously heavy foot that stomps repeatedly and vigorously until everyone, countrywide, gets the message – we lost. We can stop getting punched repeatedly in the face now. Acquiesce. The alternative in this scenario (keep fighting) becomes the non-viable option.
To steal a line from our SEAL brethren: The only easy day was yesterday.