there in the middle of everything to remind you that getting your dick kicked in the dirt for a week straight is probably going to be a regular part of your job—if you even make it, that is. The isolation, the constant companionship of only other dudes who are as miserable as you, that’s just extra!
Most days at Cole Range, you’re operating on two hours of sleep if you’re lucky. Some days you march with eighty-pound rucks strapped to your back, not really sure where you’re headed. Other days, the instructors capitalize on the exhaustion and constant chaos of training to throw all manner of ridiculous fuckery at you, just to see how you respond. It was at this point in my life that I learned to laugh at situations that were beyond fucked. I realized that there was no point in complaining about things that are outside of my control because no one would be listening, especially since I was the one who had volunteered for this shit in the first place.
In the middle of Cole Range, I would have killed for someone to bring clarity to my choices—Why, Mat, did you agree to submerge yourself in gator-piss swamps at 4 A.M.?—but instead, day after day, all I could do was laugh at everything and repeat to myself, “It’s only a few more weeks.” A few more weeks and I can finally sleep and be warm again. A few more weeks and I can eat a decent meal again. A few more weeks and maybe I can sweet-talk one of those Columbus Waffle House waitresses into a covered and smothered Best Hot Plate Special. (It’s off the menu, available by request only.)
The worst part of the whole experience, at least for me, came on the very last night at Cole Range. It was early spring, and it had rained nearly every goddamn day. In Georgia, temperatures are still kind of cold this time of year. Every night we were out there, it felt like it dropped into the twenties. By sundown our uniforms would be soaked through with rain and sweat, only to freeze over like giant, stinking sweat-sicles by midnight if we didn’t keep moving.
The good news, I guess, was that we rarely stopped moving. Every night, the instructors made you set up a patrol base in what was invariably the shittiest possible location to do so. It was a fun little exercise, like burpees on broken glass or listening to rich suburban college students from two-parent households talk about systemic poverty and social justice. On the last night, the instructors had us set up our patrol base in about a foot of standing water. I can still see the smiles on their faces as they looked at us, shivering and feeling like death.
“All right, Ranger Best, how about you sit the fuck down in it?” one of them said.
“Right here, Sergeant?” I asked, pointing down to the puddle of water.
“No, in your suite at the Doubletree. Yeah, right the fuck there! Is that a problem?”
“No, Sergeant, just double-checking.” That joke, along with many, many others I told to cut the edge off the misery during the week, did not land well.
“The rest of you can join the comedian for open mic night. Everybody down in the fucking water,” he said with the ease of a man versed in the subtle science of slow torture. “It’s bath time!”
“All of us?” a guy in our class responded, almost pleading for any other kind of punishment. Come on, bro, you know the answer. We’re Three Musketeer–ing this shit.
“Oh yeah, Sugar Bear. Snuggle up,” the sergeant said.
At first, as we settled down in our waterbed, I was amazed that we might actually be able to steal a couple hours of shuteye. When you’ve been run this ragged, any time you’re off your feet feels like an opportunity to sleep.
Then reality kicked in. Oh right, this stagnant-ass water is arctic cold.
It wasn’t long before my entire class looked like a youth group at a Parkinson’s convention. To a man, we were violently shaking. We had to do something or one of us was going to get hypothermia and fucking die in this Michael J. Foxhole. (N-n-n-nailed it.) The instructors were fully aware of that. They weren’t just testing us to see if we could endure all this bullshit, they wanted to see if we could work together as a unit to unfuck ourselves.