Rangers Lead the Way

Posted on | December 6, 2015 | 32 Comments

Bob with his girlfriend Johanna, after his graduation Friday.

“Acknowledging the fact that a ranger is a more elite soldier, who arrives at the cutting edge of battle by land, sea, or air, I accept the fact that as a ranger, my country expects me to move further, faster, and fight harder than any other soldier. . . .”
— The Ranger Creed

COLUMBUS, Georgia
Friday morning was cold, and our family arrived at Hurley Hill in three cars. My wife and I had Kennedy and Reagan with us. Emerson rode with Bob’s girlfriend Johanna. Jim and Jeff had ridden down with Matt, a boyhood friend of Bob and Jim’s. We had more than an hour to wait before the graduation ceremony for Ranger school Class 1-16 began.

Hurley Hill is named in honor of Sergeant-Major Pat Hurley, who was killed during Operation Desert Storm. The hill overlooks Victory Pond, where graduation ceremonies are held for Ranger School, “an intense 61-day combat leadership course oriented toward small-unit tactics”:

It has been called the “toughest combat course in the world” and “is the most physically and mentally demanding leadership school the Army has to offer.”

Graduation ceremonies feature a “Rangers in Action” demonstration — rappeling, helicopters, explosions, hand-to-hand combat — that is very impressive. The demands of Ranger School are extreme. Our son Bob was among 90 graduates in a class that had begun with 350 men, and the attrition rate of more than 70 percent came this close to stopping Bob. He made it through Camp Darby with flying colors, but had to “recycle” Mountain Phase because of negative “peer reviews.” This news caused much stress and prayer for us, especially for my wife.

Mrs. McCain with Bob and his twin brother Jim
(“photobombed” by 16-year-old brother Jeff).

Being an Army mom is a tough job under any circumstance, but when your son is going through Ranger School, he is incommunicado — no cellphones, no Facebook — and he only gets a few minutes to make a call from a pay phone after completing each phase. You can write him letters and he can write back, but this is a poor substitute for talking to him. Even if you’re not the “helicopter parenting” type, there is a frustrating sense of helplessness as a parent, knowing your son is going through such an ordeal and that all you can do is wait and pray and hope for the best.

Bob with his older sister Kennedy.

Mental toughness is essential to being an Army Ranger. The physical requirements are certainly demanding — 49 push-ups in two minutes, 59 sit-ups in two minutes, 5-mile run in 40 minutes, etc. — but the real test is psychological. The old saying by Vince Lombardi, “A winner never quits and a quitter never wins,” aptly expresses the situation of a Ranger School trainee. He is constantly pushed to the limits of his endurance while being required to perform tasks that require both physical strength and mental concentration, yelled at by Ranger sergeants who don’t want any quitters to make it through. The instructors all wear that Ranger tab, signifying their membership in an elite combat brotherhood, and quitters are not eligible for membership. About 40 percent of those who begin Ranger School are weeded out in Ranger Assessment Phase, a/k/a “RAP Week” at Camp Rogers, which finishes with a “ruck march” in which soldiers must march 12 miles with 65 pounds of gear in three hours.

When my children were young, I’d often take them on hikes in the woods. When the little ones would begin to whine about being tired, I’d repeat what has become a sort of family slogan, “There is no crying on the Bataan Death March.” Overcoming hardship is a learned skill, and a child will not learn it unless he is taught that he can do it.

“Yes, it’s two miles to the top of the mountain and I know you’re tired, but you can do it. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. You can make it. Stop whining.” Once you reach the top of the mountain — “Yea! We made it!” — the child has a sense of accomplishment, and has learned something about himself, namely that his feelings of being tired can be ignored, and that exhaustion and discouragement cannot stop him if he makes up his mind to overcome it.

“The president of Oklahoma Wesleyan blames the current campus tantrums on students who are taught to be ‘self-absorbed and narcissistic.’ He’s on to something, according to Jean Twenge, who has reported an increase in narcissism among young people. Narcissists have inflated conceptions of themselves and feel entitled to special privileges, while at the same time they’re quite brittle — if anyone questions their wonderfulness, they quickly take offense and turn extremely aggressive.”
— John Tierney at Instapundit

Excuse me if I feel no pity for students at Yale University (annual tuition $47,600) who expect us to believe they are victims of society because somebody said something that offended them. If such cowardly and immature bullies are the future leaders of America, as these petulant Ivy League brats imagine themselves to be, then our nation is hopelessly doomed. Does anyone — anyone — believe a nation can prosper if it accepts as “leaders” such overprivileged monsters as Jerelyn “Who the F**k Hired You?” Luther? America’s most prestigious universities have become playpens that indulge the tantrums of overgrown toddlers.

The people who run Ivy League universities have no sense of patriotic duty, or else they would not cultivate a climate where spoiled children like Jerelyn Luther are permitted to scream obscenities at the faculty. Indeed, I suspect that the faculty of Yale are all Marxist subversives who hate America as much as Jerelyn Luther hates America, because if there was even one patriot on the Yale faculty, he would have resigned in protest and publicly denounced Yale President Peter Salovey as a gutless fool for his abject surrender to the student mob. “We failed you” — yes, Dr. Salovey, you failed them by not expelling them all, thus to teach them a lesson the impudent scum obviously need to learn.

But I digress . . .

Bob with his brothers and his friend Matt.

The real test for Bob was being “recycled” in Mountain Phase, conducted at Camp Merrill near Dahlonega, Georgia. Having succeeded in getting past the initial ordeal of the Benning Phase at Camp Rogers and Camp Darby, he was confronted with the unaccustomed experience of failure. Naturally, he felt that this was not his fault, and that the negative “peer reviews” were unfair. Here was a valuable lesson: It doesn’t matter what’s “fair.”

Life is often unfair. People wrongly suffer harm through no fault of their own, and if we allow ourselves to sulk over the harms we’ve suffered, we will never accomplish anything useful in life. Some people go through life reacting to every failure by saying, “It’s not my fault,” and blaming others for their problems. We call these people losers or, if they convert their self-pity to political ideology, we call them “activists.” Life is unfair, says the loser, and this unfairness is social injustice, and therefore we must rearrange the world to make life better for the losers. These social justice schemes never yield the “fairness” they promise, and when they fail, the ideologues who advocated these policies then blame their enemies for their failure. When feminism fails to achieve its goals, feminists always blame the patriarchy, and anyone who wants to go through life like that — lashing out at scapegoats, blaming their failures on others — is a loser.

A truly radical thought: Maybe life is fair.

Maybe the hardship you suffer is for your own good. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned from a situation that seems to you manifestly unfair. Maybe your failure is not 100% your fault, but if it is only 1% your fault, you should forget about the other 99% and concentrate on whatever part of the problem you can change. If you can meet the challenge and survive, your triumph over adversity will make you stronger. And this was what Bob faced when he had to “recycle” Camp Merrill. Keep in mind what a Ranger candidate must endure:

Military folk wisdom has it that Ranger School’s physical toll is like years of natural aging; high levels of fight-or-flight stress hormones (epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol), along with standard sleep deprivation and continual physical strain, inhibit full physical and mental recovery throughout the course.
Common maladies during the course include weight loss, dehydration, trench foot, heatstroke, frostbite, chilblains, fractures, tissue tears (ligaments, tendons, muscles), swollen hands, feet, knees, nerve damage, loss of limb sensitivity, cellulitis, contact dermatitis, cuts, and insect, spider, bee, and wildlife bites.

By the time he finished Mountain Phase the first time, Bob weighed 20 pounds less than he did before beginning Ranger School. He was physically exhausted from sleep deprivation and constant training and, in this depleted condition, now had to cope with the psychological stress of going through Camp Merrill again. Never have I been so worried about his morale. When you are accustomed to winning — when success is a habit — defeat and failure are not something you expect to encounter. It’s kind of like what Alabama had to deal with when they lost to Ole Miss. Here you are, the highly-rated team in pursuit of a championship, and you find yourself unexpectedly beaten. If you are of a philosophical inclination, you may perceive you have paid the price for hubris, and that the injury to your pride was in some sense deserved. Bob failing a course because of “peer reviews” was like Alabama giving up 43 points to Ole Miss.

Somehow, Alabama recovered from that defeat to win the SEC Championship, and Bob recovered from being recycled at Camp Merrill to complete Ranger School and earn that coveted tab. Roll Tide!

Pinning the tab on Bob’s uniform at graduation.

So our prayers have been answered, and we are now on our way back home. Bob will have a long leave before his next assignment. He’s eating like a horse and sleeping like a log, recovering from his strenuous ordeal. We went out to eat Friday and he ate a whole pizza, then ate everything the rest of us had left over.

Clockwise from lower left: Reagan, Kennedy,
Emerson, Jim, Matt, Johanna, Bob, Jefferson, me.

Thanks to all the readers who responded to my appeal Thursday by contributing to the Shoe Leather Fund to pay for our trip to Georgia. Our family is grateful for your support.

 

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