Army Ranger School

U.S. Army Ranger School

 Ranger School has almost mythical status within the Army. Soldiers who successfully complete the nine-week course are awarded a small black and gold tab with the word “Ranger” embossed on it.  It is worn on the Ranger’s left shoulder sleeve. To earn that little black and gold tab men endure nine weeks of rigorous and extreme physical and mental stress. After Ranger School everything else in life seems easy by comparison.

Ranger School is broken down into three separate three-week phases. Phase I is conducted at Camp Darby, an isolated outpost on the larger Fort Benning, Georgia military reservation. The Darby Phase is marked by strenuous physical training including fast runs with full combat gear, water survival training, hand-to-hand combat and bayonet training and extensive training in small-unit infantry tactics including patrolling, raids and ambushes.

The Ranger instructors employ a variety of tactics to push the Ranger students to the limits of their physical and mental endurance. The physical stress is both extreme and almost-continuous. In addition to the runs, road marches and daily calisthenics (all performed at a higher level than regular Army standards), the hand-to-hand combat takes a heavy toll. Woe be unto the Ranger student whom an instructor catches “going easy” on his opponent. He will quickly regret it. Broken bones and dislocated joints were not uncommon. Less serious injuries such as strains and sprains or perhaps a cracked rib were routine and not to be complained about. In the instructor’s eyes, to complain, even by, say, a physical limp resulting from a sprained ankle was the equivalent of asking for sympathy. As you might imagine, the Rangers are not interested in people who are looking for sympathy.

At Camp Darby, as in the other phases, two of the additional stress inducers are lack of sleep and lack of food. On a typical night the average student may get one and a half  or two hours of sleep. Any night where you can get as much as four hours of sleep is a rare luxury. Some nights you get no sleep. It is relatively easy for a healthy, fit young man in his 20s to maintain that pace for two or three days, but at the end of that time most people crash. Ranger students, however, are required to sustain that pace for weeks at a time. The exhaustion and stress induced by lack of sleep is enhanced both by the constant physical demands and hunger. While in the field on patrol the students typically are allowed one meal each day. The lack of sleep, lack of food and constant physical demands break down healthy young bodies to the point of exhaustion and increase mental stress exponentially. Yet, Ranger students are still expected to perform at the highest levels.

Upon completion of Phase I the surviving students are given a nine-hour break. Most take advantage of the chance simply to eat and sleep.  The Ranger students are then trucked to the Mountain Ranger Camp at Dahlonega, Georgia to begin Phase II. For those whose exposure to Georgia is Atlanta or Sea Island, Dahlonega is a different world.  It is in the mountains of North Georgia, just south of the Tennessee border at the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains. I slept in the truck during our ride to Dahlonega. When I awoke and saw the mountains my initial impression was that we somehow had been transported to Vermont. I did not know that such mountains existed in Georgia. The next three weeks in the mountains were dominated by mountaineering training and longer patrols through the mountainous terrain.

A word about the patrols – a unit conducting a patrol might be as small as a squad of approximately 10 – 12 men, or as large as a platoon of approximately 40 men. Each patrol was assigned one or more missions.  A typical mission might be the reconnaissance of a target followed by a raid on that target to accomplish a specific objective, such as hostage or prisoner rescue or a prisoner snatch. Students rotate between leadership positions during patrols, principally positions as patrol leader and assistant patrol leader. During the entire Ranger course each student is required to fill a leadership position on at least six patrols. Testing is pass/fail, go/no-go. To successfully earn his Ranger tab, a student must pass at least half of his graded patrols. The pressure to pass is another stress-inducer. No one wants to complete the miserable nine-weeks of Ranger school only to not receive a tab because he did not pass half his patrols.

At the conclusion of the Mountain Phase in Dahlonega, we prepared to deploy to the Florid Ranger Camp at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle. We arrived at Eglin AFB by parachute –a night tactical parachute drop onto a remote portion of Eglin.  we then commenced our first patrol. Our three weeks at the Florida Ranger camp were marked by patrolling in swamps, river crossings, and other hardships peculiar to the Florida geography and weather.

Ah, yes, the weather.  In the mountains of North Georgia the additional stress-inducers included rain, sleet and snow in late November. On top of our run-down physical condition, this physical discomfort added to our physical and mental stress. To this day, Rangers think of thirty-five degree weather with rain as a typical “Ranger day.” Even now, over forty years later, when I am outside on a miserable winter day with temperatures in the 30s and a hard, cold rain, I always think, “At least I’m not in Ranger school. I will get to eat tonight. I will get seven hours of sleep. Life is a picnic.” After the miserable mountain weather most of us were looking forward to sunny Florida. Boy, were we in for a surprise.

In Florida we actually had more cold weather-related injuries than we had in the mountains. I do not know how cold it was. It probably was in the 40s most of the time, although it seemed much colder. But, when your body is as debilitated and run-down as were ours, you feel the cold much more acutely. Oh, did I mention, we were wet almost all the time. More often than not, our patrol routes were through the swamps, our target required a river crossing, and there was little opportunity to dry out.

I recall that we did get one respite from the unseasonably cold weather in Florida that December. For about one day it warmed up and the temperature seemed to be in the mid-70s. It was a mixed blessing. It was too good to be true.  In Ranger School, as in life, there is no free lunch.  You pay for everything.  We paid for the warm weather.  During that brief warm spell, my patrol alone encountered one coral snake and three eastern diamond back rattlers. Three! They had come out to enjoy the sunshine. We were quickly praying for it to turn cold again as we trudged through the swamp grass, fearful of stepping on a large diamond back rattler.

With the passage of so many years, many of my memories of Ranger school have blurred together. Of course, some of them were blurred together after only twenty-four hours. The combination of the lack of sleep, lack of food and physical duress causes people to hallucinate, especially in the mountains. Every Ranger school graduate has seen another hallucinating Ranger student talking to a tree, thinking it was an instructor, or trying to squeeze into a space between two large boulders, thinking that he was entering a phone booth, or some similar form of hallucination.

In spite of the passage of years, however, some of my still-vivid memories of Ranger school include time spent with my Ranger buddy, Bob Seitz on one particularly miserable rainy night ambush. Prior to graduation from West Point I had asked Bob to be my Ranger buddy. Not only were we good friends, but Bob was ranked No. 1 in our class in physical education. Bob was a stallion and I wanted someone who was that fit to be my Ranger buddy. Other lasting memories include the 19 mile road march with full combat gear at the conclusion of the Camp Darby Phase. The march is a blur in my memory because I was in a fair amount of pain the entire time. Both my feet were so swollen from an extreme case of tendonitis that I could not lace up my boots. I marched 19 miles in that condition because I had no other option. I was not about to quit and there was no such thing then as being recycled into another class. As the French Foreign Legion says, “March or die.”  Ranger buddy Seitz and Ron Male helped keep me going though that pretty unpleasant walk.

At graduation on December 19, 1969, I was surprised and honored to be chosen as one of the honor graduates of our class. There were, as I recall, six honor graduates and one distinguished graduate. As best I could determine, the honor graduates were those Ranger students who had maxed out all of their physical training test scores and passed 100% of their graded patrols (remember, the grading was sufficiently rigorous that passing 50% was sufficient to graduate). The distinguished graduate was a Regular Army Major who already had two combat tours in Vietnam under his belt. I do not remember his name, but I do remember that he was a stud. He was probably about thirty years old which made him the “old man” of our class and, truth to tell, a bit old for the rigors of Ranger school. But, he excelled and was the distinguished graduate of our class.

Almost exactly thirty years after my graduation I had the even greater pleasure of attending another Ranger graduation and pinning the coveted black and gold Ranger tab on my son David’s left shoulder. David’s military career and exploits have now far surpassed anything I ever dreamt of doing. He has five combat deployments under his belt — one with the Tenth Mountain Division, two with the Third Ranger Battalion and two with the Fifth Special Forces Group as an ODA Commander.