That time I got kicked out of Ranger School (Part 1)

-Or-

How failing Ranger School made me a better cop, and person(eventually)

Welcome to another installment of the tough shit series. Inspired by Kevin Smith’s book of the same name, this series chronicles some shit that sucked which provided lovely opportunities for me to learn.

As I’ve mentioned about a million times, I spent ten years in the Army National Guard, the majority of which I served in a semi-elite Long Range Surveillance (LRS) Unit. I was on active duty nearly half of the decade I was in, doing anything from week to year long stints. I spent almost 5 months in Ranger School, starting in August and getting kicked out in December. It sucked. A lot. Failing the school was almost as miserable as going through it. As I got some time away from the place, I realized it was likely the best learning experience I’ve ever had, on a multitude of levels.

TL;DR- I didn’t quit, but failed at various things multiple times causing me to recycle three separate times. It was my unit’s policy to only pay for two recycles-Ranger School is expensive-so I got the boot that third time. It was completely my fault, but the lessons were worth the mountain of suck.

Lets get into all of that.

What the fuck is Ranger School?

Most of all it’s a miserable experience that makes students able to lead in combat. It’s a 9 week (minimum) course, divided into three phases. You can read about the whole thing here in greater detail. More than half of the students won’t graduate, the majority wash out during the first phase. Competition just to get to Ranger School is harsh, and most have to pass a Pre-Ranger Course which is like a mini-ranger school. The Pre-Ranger I went to lasted two weeks and mirrored the actual school’s RAP week with a condensed version of Darby, which are described below.

The first phase of Ranger School is split up into two parts

-Ranger Assement Phase-RAP week

the first week you sleep in barracks(for maybe 3-4 broken up hours, which is a constant for the entire course), and get tested on a variety of physical and mental stuff. 5 mile run, PT test, 12 mile ruck march, obstacle course, and throw in some combatives (beat the shit out of each other) among other stuff. Picture instructors yelling things through bullhorns whilst students crawl through mud, climb things, and are forced to choke each other out. If you pass all of those standards and don’t quit, you move onto the second part of the first phase

– Darby

where students are assembled into squads, and fight fake battles for two weeks against a permanent cadre of professional bad guys. Here you are carrying at least a 65 pound ruck (giant backpack) constantly, eating way less than needed, barely sleeping, all while remaining vigilant for some random enemy to attack you. Graded leadership positions of the squad are rotated daily among students, with each student getting a few shots at passing. If the squad fucks up, the leader fails. If they’re lucky, they’ll get another shot. If not, they are recycled-made to do the phase over again. Pass, and you go onto

–Mountain Phase

Another three week phase, starts with 4 days of training in basic mountaineering skills (rock climbing, rappelling, knots, etc.) , and then essentially a more complex version of Darby. Instead of fighting a fake graded war in squads of 12 soldiers, you’re now fighting in a platoon of near 40. This means more leadership responsibilities, and more shit to fuck up. And BT dubbs, instead of rucking up and down hills, you’re now going up and down fucking mountains. The rucks weigh more, and it gets fucking cold in those mountains. But you do spend a few brief nights in barracks, and at one point get to eat blueberry pancakes. Same as Darby, if the platoon fails, the leader fails, and if they don’t suck too bad maybe they’ll let you try this phase again. Pass, and you go onto

–Swamp Phase

-Didn’t make it this far, so I only know about what goes down here third hand. Something about boats and waffles. The pretend war is even more complex, and you still have to not suck at leadership.

Though competition to just get into Ranger School is fierce, you can quit at any time. Lots do, usually in the first few weeks. All sorts of different units send people to Ranger School, but back when I went it was combat arms units, mostly being infantry along with various special ops guys from different branches (SF, SEALS, Marine Recon). At the end of each phase you get peer evaluated, where every soldier anonymously rates their fellow students. Space is left for qualitative comments. Corroborated bad peer evaluations lead to you getting kicked out. The school is tough on the body, what with all the craziness combined with sleep and caloric deprivation. Many soldiers get dropped because of medical reasons, and a few have even died over the course’s history. Some students recycle a phase or two, despite it being a tested prerequisite to be in phenomenal shape at the beginning of the course those that go straight through typically lose 20-30 pounds. Those that recycle lose even more weight. I lost 50 pounds, even though my body fat was in the low teens when I started.

Pass all of this and you get to wear the coveted Ranger Tab on your uniform. This affords you near rockstar status among other soldiers. A Ranger Tab means you are Ranger Qualified-a graduate of Ranger School, but not technically considered a Ranger. Only soldiers that make it into the 75th Ranger Regiment are considered actual Rangers-Ranger School is a School that last a few months, Rangers in the 75th live the Ranger life every day. However, to be a leader in the 75th you also have to graduate from Ranger School. Confused? That’s the military-you get used to it.

Back to the story

In my LRS unit, graduating Ranger School was seen as the highest accomplishment you could achieve. Normal Army Infantry units are given few slots to any school, let alone Ranger School. LRS units were given access to much more training. Leaders were required to make it through either Ranger School or the Reconnaissance and Surveillance Leadership Course (RSLC), with the preference of having made it through both. Half of the Non Commissioned Officers (NCO’s-progressive levels of Sergeants) and all of the Commissioned Officers(Lt’s, Cpts, and up) in my unit had earned their Ranger Tab.

By my fifth year in the unit, I had proved my competence to these leaders, and like my peers was excited at the prospect of getting a shot at Ranger School. My leaders had vetted me, and I’d passed a variety of other schools that were hard. I was in the running to get a slot. The last thing needed per my commander was to run a marathon-he figured if you had the determination to put in the time and training to do that, you’d hopefully have the gumption to make it through Ranger School. Having rarely run more than five miles, I copied a marathon training plan from the internet and completed my first one. Sent the proof of finish to my CO, and the slot was mine. I then spent the next nine months training for Ranger School. Got more specific training from those that were tabbed(were Ranger Qualified) in my unit, and increased my rucking. Finally I was off.

Pre-Ranger sucked. Two weeks of shit. As mentioned above, it essentially mirrored the first two weeks of the actual school. The only difference is they wanted to not beat you down too much, so you get 5-6 hours of sleep and more food. And there’s fewer combatives sessions (hand to hand fighting), because they don’t want you getting injured before you start the actual school.

Remember that imagery of crawling through mud, over various obstacles, and doing all sorts of extreme physical exercises while instructors yell at you through a bull horn? Yup, that was the first week of Pre-Ranger. Though they did play some metal occasionally, which was nice. The second week was mini pretend war. Carrying a heavy ruck through the woods, while attacking and being attacked by a cadre of professional bad guys.

Units send soldiers through a Pre-Ranger course because sending a soldier through actual Ranger School is fucking expensive. The first two weeks of Ranger School are where most people quit or fail. They figure if you make it through a replicated version of that, there’s a decent chance you won’t waste their money and actually graduate from the real thing. Rumor had it that 80% of those that made it through the Pre-Ranger I attended went on to earn their Tab. Yay me for being an outlier.

I made it through Pre-Ranger, and the Army gave me the weekend off. Come bright and early after a day and half of cleaning gear and scarfing down as much food as possible, I reported to the real thing.

True to the advertisements, the first week was pretty much the same as Pre-Ranger. There definitely was more fighting, less sleep, and less food, but I was pretty much on a continuous adrenaline high for that first week anyways.

Every day during RAP week hold graded physical tests. If you fail a single event, they might give you a re-test, but this was pretty pointless as if you can’t run 5 miles in under 40 minutes early in the week, you sure as shit ain’t going to get faster later in the week when your hungrier and sleepier. But that’s Ranger School; it’s supposed to be hard, and it delivers.

Despite all the crazy, I passed each event without issue. I’d made training on each event my life’s mission for almost a year, and much of what was required was a part of our normal job in the LRS. All of the LRS physical fitness requirements were copied directly from Ranger School, and as motivated member of that unit I made sure I surpassed each requirement constantly. The skills were also similar.

One of the big tests which lots of guys failed was land navigation, where you have to use a map and compass to find small stakes miles apart in the middle of a forest within an aggressive time standard. You’re not allowed to use a GPS, and you can’t work with anyone else. This was a basic task in the LRS, so no big.

Fighting was fun, by then the LRS had embraced the combatives program the Army had developed, and we spent much of our free time practicing this no-holds barred version of MMA.

The constant harassment was more of the same. Instructors would yell at us, and make us do a exercise until muscle failure, then do another exercise to failure, on and on before we were tested on a specific event. The first night of RAP week the Ranger Instructors (RI’s) told we had to wake up in four hours. Anyone who’d been in the army a minute knew that this was clearly a lie, and of course 2 hours into the night RI’s came screaming in. We spent the next two hours rotating between wall sits, push ups, flutter kicks, and other stupid human tricks, all while being yelled at how we were worthless or something. This was par for the course for any other Army training course I’d been to, but I’ll give those RI’s credit; these sessions were longer and more intense than other schools I’d attended, and the sleep and food deprivation was a nice little cherry on the top.

Finishing RAP week was lovely. Now it was onto the actual meat of the course; where the instruction actually began. Again, the purpose of Ranger School is to train soldiers how to lead in combat conditions. Because of human rights or whatever, they can’t make you fight an actual war with real bullets just for training. So they do the next best thing. You fight a cadre of full time bad guys where both sides are armed with blanks. Since they can’t completely replicate the stress of actually getting killed, they try to compensate by

1. Restricting your sleep and food intake to barely survival level.
2. Making you constantly do physically demanding tasks such as carrying each other up and down hills and force you to do stuff like push ups and sit ups during brief moments of downtime.
3. Constantly live outside with substandard gear. The few times you sleep you’re laying directly on the ground with only a poncho. If it gets below freezing they let you have a sleeping bag. Cold? You’re given the equivalent of two thin sweaters and some crappy gloves from 1950
4. Have the instructors constantly harass the students.
5. The knowledge that you’re constantly under the scrutiny of the instructors, and because of the peer eval system, your fellow peers. You know you can be dropped from the course at any time if your comrades hate you because you’re not pulling your weight.
6. Leaving the door open. Instructors constantly remind you that you don’t have to be there. You can leave anytime-say the word and within an hour you’ll be warm, dry, and eating all you desire.

So I was looking forward to that. And it delivered. The first two phases of Ranger School are in Georgia, the last being in Florida. If you didn’t know, these locations are in the south, where it’s FUCKING HOT. I started Darby sometime in August, which is not a cool month in Georgia. The patrols were crazy, we were constantly rucking through the woods trying to get to some spot where we could ambush the enemy in less time than seemed possible. The bugs and the heat were oppressive; multiple students suffered from heat stroke. We drank more water and kept going.

The enemy was a bitch. We’d ambush them, they’d ambush us. It was pretty easy for the enemy to find us since an instructor was always with us and they were in cahoots. This was yet another way to induce more stress. Any time we were attacked, the instructor would point to random soldiers in our squad, and say they’d been severely wounded. We were then graded on how quickly we could carry those soldiers half a mile or so to safety. If we weren’t quick enough, whichever one of us was in charge failed. Luckily the instructors would retrain us if we were slow. They’d just say the leader and more soldiers were now injured, and we’d repeat the process until the instructor got bored. Good times.

Toward the end of Darby, I finally got my chance to be in charge. I was the squad leader, in charge of my men. I’d had a smaller leadership position earlier; our entire squad got lost in the woods and missed our appointment with killing the enemy again, so we all figured we failed that run(they didn’t tell you if you passed your patrol until the end of the whole phase-more stress). This was my chance for redemption. Pass this patrol, and I’d be off to the mountains. Fail, and I’d repeat Darby. Fail and get bad peers, and I’d get to do RAP week again to.

Off we went. Things went pretty well. I made sure my point man, the guy leading us through the woods, didn’t get lost and we knew where we were going. My Radio Operator (RTO) said he was making regular transmissions to headquarters. I made sure everyone drank water constantly to stave off more heat injuries. The enemy attacked us, but we evacuated our casualties to the instructor’s satisfaction. We got to our ambush spot, I placed each of my squad in concealed positions, and made sure their fields of fire would insure we notionally killed every one of those enemy bastards and then some. We laid up for hours in the middle of the night waiting for the enemy to pass by our spot. The bugs bit, and I low crawled to check that each of my guys hadn’t been sleeping. I caught a few dozing, and quietly woke them up. Thank god, had the enemy walked up and my sleeping mates been caught unaware, I would have failed and we all would be stupid human tricks for hours. This drug on, and finally the enemy passed by.

There was a firefight! But we won. So that was good. We checked the notionally dead enemy for intel, notionally destroyed their weapons, and were notionally relieved that none of us had notionally died during the epic slaughter.

Off we went, back to the camp for the end of Darby phase. The 24 hours(or maybe it was 12 hours? Fuck, I can’t remember-it’s been 16 years and I’ve slept since then) of my patrol ended. We got to camp, and started cleaning gear in preparation for either going to the Mountain Phase or getting recycled. We all filled out our peer eval forms, and rotated through our debriefings.

Finally it was my turn; I reported to the Ranger Instructor for my grade and his comments on my performance. I felt nervous, but overall pretty good as I knew we’d successfully ambushed the enemy, no one was caught asleep, and each time we were attacked we did what we were supposed to do. And then the Ranger Instructor told me I was a No-Go. I’d failed Darby.

The RI said I did better than half my peers on the evals though, so I’d only have to recycle Darby. Fuck.

The RI filled me in on why I got a No-Go. Here I learned lesson number 1.

In Combat, Micromanagement is a good thing.

Turns out my RTO, a fellow student who said he was making regular radio transmissions to headquarters, was full of shit. When you contact someone by radio in the military, there’s this whole procedure of back and forth talk so each side is completely clear of what the other is saying. This is because radios can be finicky, and can be affected by a variety of environmental factors. This isn’t that big of a deal; a competent RTO will be able to troubleshoot these issues, and within a few minutes get a clear message from the other end confirming that everything they sent has been received.

Apparently my RTO had been speaking into the radio, but hadn’t actually heard anything back. Headquarters hadn’t gotten any of our transmissions the entire time I was in charge. This radio shit was pretty simple-every soldier is taught this stuff in basic training. Guess my RTO was too tired to follow through.

Whose fault was this? Mine. 100% They reiterated ad nauseam in Ranger School how a leader is responsible for everything his soldiers do or fail to do. We’d been taught in the course that a squad leader should be right over the shoulder of the RTO when they’re making transmissions to insure the RTO actually does their job. I didn’t do that. My RTO had come from an elite unit with a history of selecting only the best. I had a million things to stay on top of while in charge, and figured I could trust him to do such a basic job. I learned the hard way that it doesn’t matter how elite you might be, throw in weeks of sleep deprivation and the best soldier will slack off. No excuse for me half assing it just because I thought this guy was a good dude. Sleep deprivation is par for the course during extreme events, and I learned this lesson the hard way.

And I’m glad I did. Because it helped me play a small part in keeping my city from tearing itself apart years later.

You might have heard there was some civil unrest around the country during 2020. We’re not going to get all political here, but shit got pretty crazy in my city that summer. And I was damn glad I’d failed Ranger School after it was through.

In 2020, I was working as the executive officer (XO) for the Deputy Chief of Operations of our Police Department. Like many of my positions during my career, I was super fortunate to serve in such a position. It was also an odd job. Being an XO on our police department was not quite the same as the military equivalent, but it had similarities. I worked directly for the Deputy Chief (DC) of Ops, and had daily functions spanning from secretary(sit in meetings, shut up, and take notes), advisor, analyst, mediator, and project manager.

While my boss made the big decisions, I made lots of small ones with his authority. Even though my rank was Sergeant, this meant that I was often giving orders way above my pay grade. My boss was the number 3 person in charge of the Department. When the riots started though, he became in charge of the response. The Chief and Assistant Chiefs were good at their jobs, which typically involved a lot of political action and administration to keep the department running in normal times. Both had experience in investigations and community relations, but my boss had extensive experience in operations, much of which he gained when we both served on SWAT.

I was out the weekend the protests started at then end of May 2020. As I saw the protests turn to riots on Saturday, I waited to be called into work, and began asking my friends on SWAT and the Mobile Field Force (MFF-large group of cops tasked with corollary duty of crowd control) if they needed a hand. They said cops were showing up in droves to volunteer to help, and intel said the unrest would go on for awhile. I was put on a reserve list, and I sat by my phone. As the weekend wrapped up, my boss hit me up and asked me to come help him at the command center.

Having been in literally hundreds of command centers during critical incidents involving a SWAT response, I dreaded such environments. It was always the literal case of too many chiefs; bosses would themselves in circles and everyone wanted to give their input. This meant that those of us that came up with recommended courses of action would send them up to the bosses, they’d deliberated for hours, tell us to do some modified version, it wouldn’t work, and eventually we’d be allowed to do our original plan.

This command center was different. By the time I showed up, everyone else had been there for over 48 hours straight. All the other bosses were deferring to my boss. Talking to others, I figured out what happened; the typical command center environment of too many chiefs had slowly withered down to just my boss giving orders and everyone going along with it because:

1. His courses of action, rooted in years of tactical incident command experience during high risk operations, actually seemed to work.
2. The other bosses MAY(my cynical speculation) not have wanted to be the one held liable when the tear gas cleared if something went wrong. My boss knew this, but also knew if someone didn’t make reasonable decisions immediately a whole lot of people were going to get hurt.

The other bosses defered to what my boss said. The problem I saw soon after I arrived was the follow through.

Cops are no stranger to sleep deprivation, but in smaller doses than what I saw in the military. Missing a few nights here and there when incidents and investigations run long or having to work a double shift is par for the course. Afterwards cops can go home and grab 4 hours of sleep before their next shift, gut it out through that one, and then crash the next day. Again-this was different; according to intel this could go on for weeks or even months. And it was taking it’s toll.

This led to one my greatest accomplishments in my professional career. I started bugging the shit out of people–just like I learned in Ranger School.

As the sleep dep. compounded, my boss would give orders to leaders of various units that way outranked me. These orders were in reaction to what was going on, and were based on a constantly evolving plan that required coordinated effort, and the orders themselves were complex with multiple components. The complexity was needed because it was a chaotic incident where we needed to walk the line in preventing injuries and property damage but not use too much force and make things work. Not abnormal for cop work, but on a much bigger scale then anyone had seen. The unit leaders were motivated and professional, but they were getting flooded with overwhelming information from their subordinates in the mix. They’d forget about the directions my boss gave them, only executing them partially or not at all.

Seeing this, I started writing down the orders, breaking them down into phases with time hacks just like I learned in Ranger School. Before each time hack came up, I would pester each unit leader to see if they had followed through. Often they did not, and I would sit with the leader until I made damn sure they were doing what they were supposed to. This is what I should have done to my RTO 16 years ago.

The days became weeks, and I kept bugging people. I also used a simplified brigade level Military Decision Making Process framework I’d picked up when planning missions in the LRS, but that could be multiple posts in itself and super boring to go over procedure which have been beat to death by dry army manuals. The important thing seemed to be just bugging people, and making sure they did what they said they were going to do despite being dead on their feet.

As weeks passed, the civil unrest fizzled out in our part of the country, and we switched the command center’s purpose back to COVID response. I remember my boss saying something after like “Those first few days were nuts, everything seemed to be going wrong. Then you showed up and stuff started working. What the hell did you do?”, I responded that “I followed people around and told them to do their job”. Being an annoying ass micromanager is necessary when your people have been pushed to their limits. I’m not big on praise, but knowing I applied this and played a small piece in keeping our city from destroying itself that summer is still a source of pride.

Ranger School sucked, and guess what? There’s at least another post or two that I’ll need to write so I can describe how I screwed up again, learned stuff, and applied it later in life. I’ve barely described what I did for the first month, and I stayed months more before getting the boot. All in all though having to do Darby again was not enjoyable, but if that’s what it took to drill the lessons I needed in 2020 into my head, I call it a fair trade.

Catch you on the next post. Let me know what you think in the comments below.