From The Chapters: (Each page starts a story from a different person)

REVOLUTION:

Until I got to Ranger School the tab was not that important to me except as far as I had to have it to get past ‘GO’ in the Infantry. When I was in the Mountains or Florida was when it became a gut check, a credibility and character check for myself. As an Infantry officer, having it expected of me created a situation where there was not as much motivation going into it as there might have been had it been my own decision. However, somewhere in the course it transitioned to being an internally driven event. I wanted to be a part of the small percentage that graduated, and I really started to take ownership of my goal. I was going to get through this because it was important to me. It was now my goal instead of somebody else’s directive. Accepting ownership of the goal of earning a ranger tab was coupled with accepting ownership of being a professional officer in the Army.

For two phases, beginning in the Mountains, our platoon had had a chow thief. From the first incident it was serious, but it really became an issue in Florida. We were far enough into the course that people’s bodies were starting to burn the reserves of their reserves. We don’t know what fuel really kept us going. We were protecting our food to the point of writing our roster number on every piece of our MRE, an outrageous sign of distrust.

The theft of food was bad for the obvious reason; deprivation of sustenance to someone who was in desperate need of fuel. It was wrong because stealing was wrong, but it went deeper than that. In the Armed Services we train to fight and survive in combat. Critical to our success is trust in our leadership who is taking us into harm’s way; and trust in our buddies who are going to watch our backs. We trust our buddies to take personal chances with their safety to protect us in battle, to work as a team for the survival of everyone. In an organization where you have to trust your buddy with your life, it is devastating to the unit not to be able to trust him with something as small as food. It is a breakdown of the fabric that holds the unit together. The inherent selfishness of someone who maliciously and with full intent of depriving you of something he knows you need is incompatible with success in combat.

It was early morning. The sun was coming up, and the RIs were away doing change-over operations, the time when the outgoing RI briefs the incoming RI. We sat in a 20-meter open area in a stand of small scrub pines, completely unsupervised. Free from evaluating eyes, guys were resting against their rucks, conducting personal hygiene, or fixing a cup of coffee. I was sitting there being eloquent, talking about hitting on chicks or something, when I heard a commotion. There was an argument on the other side of the relaxed crowd, and it continued to get louder and louder. Everyone in my squad turned around to see what was going on.

When I turned around I saw a mob. Cartoon fights were more orderly. There was nothing military or organized about it. Rather, it was an angry lynch mob who had hold of their man. They had caught the chow thief and a couple of guys had started to beat on him. They were not just beating him up like in high school; they were beating him with the absolute intention of killing him. If it had gone on long enough, there was no doubt in anyone’s military mind that they would have ended his life. The depth of hatred that a chow thief generated was well beyond a simple food issue. These guys were weeding out the guy that was going to get them killed on some future battlefield.

I saw five guys that were actually hitting him, and a relatively large group of others standing around stunned. I thought, ‘This is what happens when military organizations lose leadership and lose focus. This is a mob. This is what the country fears.’ It scared me and I felt a professional duty do to something.

There were some pretty big guys in my platoon. I chose two of them, football players from West Point and Norwich, to walk over there with me. With these guys to either side of me I was confident that what I was about to say would get some respect. “Hey!” I yelled, “Stop beating the shit out of this guy.” The punishers were in no mood to hear logical or moral reasons for why the beating should stop, but even with their adrenaline pumping they were not ready to face down an RI. “We need to wait for the RI, and let him take care of it,” I instructed.

The thrashing stopped, and the thief crawled away like a wounded seal. Looking at his bloody face and battered body, there was nothing that resembled cockiness left in him. His was the worst beating I had ever seen anyone take in person. We waited for the RI, who showed up a few minutes later and immediately dragged the thief away from the rabble never to be seen again.

The guys who were laying fist on flesh had no intention of stopping until they were stopped. I thought, ‘This is why the Army needs competent leadership.’ There we were, a bunch of fricking students that knew we were not going to die. We would have been happy with some Snickers bars, a few Cokes and no one to fuck with us for 45 minutes. That gave me pause to think, ‘It is eye opening that this level of violence could happen here, now, in these relatively controlled conditions.’ It gave me an appreciation of what could happen in the world. ‘If we could do this to ourselves, what could we do to someone we really hated?’ In the back of my mind, I hoped I had the dignity and moral courage NOT to be the guy in the mob, but the guy trying to control the mob. That incident reinforced the realization that I had to live up to my commission, that I needed to be better than the crowd. I don’t need to be in with the mob. I need to be the smarter guy. That is why the Army has leadership. That is why the Army has professional officers and NCOs as a check and balance.

Food was obviously a serious issue at Ranger School, and that beating, surprisingly enough, allowed me to understand world history better. I thought about food a lot, just like everyone, but I also thought about the state of being hungry. ‘This is what it is like to be hungry,’ I studied the feeling, like looking closely at a scene to try and see everything in it. I knew, of course, that in 24 hours I would get my meal and a half and that life would go on, but I thought, ‘This is what it is like to be hungry. This is why hungry people with guns is a bad idea.’ I finally understood all of the French Revolution shit I had studied for my history major. It made sense now. How many times in the world’s history had hunger played a part in changing the course of a country and the world? Where does discontent start? I somehow had a connection with the revolutionaries of the past. Sharp’s law of politics, “If the people are hungry, then they arm themselves; you have a problem on your hands.” ---//////////

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