Ranger instructors happily met our graduating class to shuttle us to their compound and start the selection process. By “shuttle” I of course mean that they made us run—with all of our gear, personal effects, and duffel bags—the couple of miles up the road. And by “selection process” I mean they immediately started separating the wheat from the chaff, the strong from the weak, the fast from the slow. Anyone who fell behind the instructors at the back of the formation was immediately relieved of their class position and sent to another unit.
Once we arrived at the Black Top, an infamous location on the Ranger Compound where millions of push-ups have been done and even more “Fuck You”s have quietly been uttered, a pep talk worthy of a Bobby Knight halftime speech commenced.
“Forty percent of Rangers get wounded, fifteen percent get killed,” the instructor said. “Y’all still want to be here? Great. If not, go the fuck home.”
Standing out there in the shit Georgia weather with all the other newbies, these first words out of the instructor’s mouth rang through the humid air like a gunshot. He wasn’t trying to scare us, exactly; it was more about setting the tone. The next few weeks were going to be as hard and as shitty as any of us could imagine the vetting process would be for entry into a highly selective fighting force. Not just anyone gets to kill people and run into bullets, mmmkay? Instructors would be creating immense stress on a nearly constant basis to test our adaptability and leadership capabilities as we neared our breaking points. That’s the real goal of RASP: to push you to the limit, to try to break you. To make you miserable every fucking second of the day so that you’ll quit, because having someone in the Ranger Regiment who is susceptible to fear, physical exhaustion, or poor decision-making as a result of mental fatigue is like walking around with a land mine strapped to your ankle. There is no sense in sugarcoating it: Having some weak motherfucker in your unit will get you killed.
As the instructor kept talking, he added the next bit of stress, the next test for timidity and weakness. He made all of us hold our rucksacks above our heads. Even after our super shuttle to the Black Top, there were still too many students in the class. They needed to get rid of a bunch before they could start the course. So the first fifteen Airborne graduates to drop their rucks, well, they got a one-way ticket home.
I remember looking around and taking the measure of my classmates, studying their faces as the instructor’s warnings resonated. Most of us had just gone through OSUT and Airborne together, so I figured everyone would be prepared for this last-man-standing test. I was wrong. Some guys were confused; others were plainly fearful. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t hide it. As their arms shook under the weight of their rucks and their own estimations of themselves, you could see people calculating the odds in their head, questioning if they had what it took to keep going, to roll those dice, wondering if they should really be here. The number of guys who’d never even thought about quitting, let alone dying, between the time they enlisted and the time they got to RASP would blow your mind. It wasn’t long before people started dropping their rucks, not because of physical fatigue but because of the reality check—I could actually die. Within thirty minutes, the instructors had their fifteen sacrificial lambs, and the rest—about forty to fifty of us—moved on.
The first week of RASP was less difficult than I expected, mostly because there wasn’t much that was new. A lot of this initial week was just an extension of the previous twenty-week marathon suckfest, except now the training was constant—twenty hours per day, every day. The real dick-twisting came during the second week when they sent us out to this awful, remote part of Columbus called Cole Range, which is a forest-lined swampland. If Columbus is the asshole of America, then Cole Range is those bloody little cuts at the top of the asshole that snag all the dingleberries when it gets hairy up there.
The real beauty and elegance of Cole Range isn’t in the topography, it’s in the timing. It doesn’t signal the end of a training phase, like other brutal military rites of passage do. It’s just