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