Thank You for My Service - Mat Best Page 0,34
have to crawl before you can walk. In other words, instructors basically become the worst parents ever and treat you like you’re the baby who should have been a blowjob but who has ruined all of their life plans instead—and now they’re going to make you pay for it. They don’t let you sleep, they shove you to the ground all day long, and they scream at you with colorful words like “cocksucker” and “titty boy.” It’s like a depressing episode of COPS except you also get to learn the fundamentals of squad-level mission planning, which are the basic building blocks of Ranger leadership. If you can’t lock in this stuff, then you weren’t meant to lead men—or at least not yet—and you had a quick trip home ahead of you.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous going into Ranger School, having come straight from Arlington Cemetery and Ramadi before that. Under normal circumstances, Rangers deploy once after RASP on a kind of probationary status to determine if they have what it takes, then go straight to Ranger School to get the tab and become a full member of the Battalion. But because 2/75 got surged forward before I could go, I ended up deploying twice as a probationary private before my chance to attend Ranger School came up. You’d think going in with all that experience would be an advantage—and to an extent I’m sure it was. It certainly kept my mind busy and focused on my goals, partly as a way to avoid getting caught up in my grief over losing Brehm and Barraza. But the benefit of going in six months earlier, after just one deployment, young and cherry, is that you still have the bliss of ignorance. You don’t truly understand, in a visceral way, the real-world implications of what you’re being taught. It’s not all fun and games, obviously, but it’s also not exactly life and death. After two deployments, which taught me the cold realities of war, I fully appreciated the stakes associated with mission planning. I knew what happened when shit went sideways, and I did not want to be the kind of soldier who might fuck that up.
More than anything, I did not want to disappoint Sgt. Brehm, wherever he may be. He knew I’d make it home, he knew I’d make it to Ranger School, and he knew I’d make it through. It was his job to know that, both as a Ranger team leader and as a leader of men. There was only one thing that Dale didn’t anticipate on my behalf: flesh-eating bacteria.
Listen, I could go into the many challenges that Ranger School presents, or you could Amazon the other eighty “how to be a Ranger” books that probably exist. This isn’t a fucking self-help book, okay? And this isn’t a chapter about the rigors of training. It’s about how impressive it is that the only infection I got came not from the multitude of sex acts I’ve committed but from Ranger School itself.
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In Florida Phase, which is the real fun one, you conduct small water operations, small craft movements, and platoon-sized operations, all in an awful Florida swamp on Eglin Air Force Base, situated strategically along the picturesque Redneck Riviera. Those last three weeks of Ranger School are where you learn just how much you want that Ranger tab on your left shoulder, because that entire stretch stinks like a bag of smashed assholes that has been left to rot in a Wal-Mart parking lot in the middle of July—which is exactly when I was there.
Every day you’re wading chest-deep into a scum-infested river, over and over again, using what the Army calls, in a hilarious bit of sadistic understatement, “expedient stream crossing techniques.” I can tell you from firsthand experience, what we crossed every day was not a goddamn stream. A stream is something you and your girlfriend hop over to reach a meadow for a breezy little weekend picnic. In the rushing nightmare the Army had constructed for our navigating pleasure, you were lucky to keep your boots attached to your feet, because each step across the “stream” sucked them a little bit deeper into the swampy mud bottom. The true bliss of all of this training was knowing that I would never be in a fucking swamp in Iraq. (Great foresight, Army, getting rid of Desert Phase, BTW.)
Once you’re across and back on land, the instructors can finally