Tag: ranger

A Rangeriffic Thanksgiving

“I’m going to do you a favor, Ranger.”

The words of the Bravo Company 1SG in Mountain Phase of Ranger school hit me like a ton of bricks.  His “favor” was letting me re-do mountain phase to clear out the plethora of major minuses I had accrued in the three weeks prior.  Let’s face it, the moment I acquired my 4th major minus two days into the first field exercise, I knew I was going to recycle the phase.  I spent the next 15 days trying unsuccessfully to earn a major plus (my only hope to salvage my performance); it didn’t happen.

Somehow word of my demise had reached the boys coming to join us from Darby and my best friend Chad Shields flew off the bus with a smile calling out my name.  I was devastated when he recycled Darby, he was elated to find out about my failure.  I sat on his bunk for a few minutes laughing with him and vividly describing the pain that was to come:  the blueberry pancakes are awesome, the terrain is terrible, the RI’s are worse.  Chad shrugged it off, “eh, it could always be worse.”

We made it through most of the phase without incident, but as we stepped off to start our second field exercise, it began to rain…

It was November 2004 on the Appalachian trail and the rain did not quit.  We lived through Forrest Gump style “every kind of rain”.  At one point we came down from the mountain and were told to fall-in to formation.  I remember the rain was coming down violently and the Ranger Instructor (RI) was yelling some instructions that I couldn’t hear.  I leaned to my buddy and asked what we were being told.   “Change your socks.”  I laughed hard as I watched my boot fill with water and hail while i put on “fresh” socks.  Chad looked at me, “It could always be worse!”

The rain on it’s own wouldn’t have been that terrible, except that the temperature kept dropping.  It felt like it was just above freezing and soaking wet.  My body began to ache in places I didn’t even know I had.  My hands and feet went completely numb, and I could barely feel pressure.  It felt like my big toe was missing which actually made walking a bit tricky.  My hands swelled up and cracked open and the blood froze on my skin.  I had tons of frozen cuts and scratches.  We learned to work around the violent shivering as it was a sign that we weren’t hypothermic yet.  Chad smiled at me, “It could always be worse!”

Finally on the night before Thanksgiving, the rain stopped.

It was amazing.  I looked up at the clear night sky and let out a sigh of relief.  That would be very short lived though.  Once the rain clouds were gone, the cold really began to set in.  I could feel it crawling around my skin and penetrating my bones.  When I stretched out my arm, water would drip off my uniform onto my hands and it felt like little daggers, the only sensation coming from my hands was pain.  I looked around for my buddy.  Through his chattering moon-lit teeth, Chad forced a smile, “It could always be worse!”

I have never stared so expectantly at the horizon as I did that morning.  If my will would have had an effect, the sun would have risen hours earlier.  Instead I searched for the first ray of light that would bring at least some warmth as I reached the brink of giving up.

As the early morning light finally pierced the darkness and landed on me, I looked down to notice a sheen across my uniform that didn’t exist the day before.  I reached for my chest and the uniform began to crack.  That sheen was ice.  I stared down in disbelief and began to crack and sweep the ice off my body.  Then guys began to quit.

 

I smelled the new RI’s before I heard or saw them.

My nose picked up the scent of Pantene and Irish Spring coming from the base of the mountain.  It meant fresh instructors, and it also meant the “fuck-fuck” games were about to start.

The next hour is a blur.  Instructors were yelling, guys were quitting and dropping out; some had frostbite, some had frostnip, more yelling, it was pandemonium. We were ordered to start three warming fires and to change our uniforms and put on polypropylene and gortex. I was on a machine gun, so no warming fire for me.

As I began to undress I felt a wet drop on my face, then another, then another.  “You’ve got to be kidding me!  It’s way too fucking cold to be raining,” I yelled in the general direction of Chad’s position as I unbuckled my pants and dropped them to the ground.  I heard his distinct laugh and I looked up in a rage when I saw it.  I was right, it was too cold for rain…it was snowing.

So there I stood, completely naked in the snow wringing out my polypro when I made eye contact with Chad.  He was now in full on laughter and it was infectious. I wanted to be angry, I really did, but as I stood there hopping from one bare foot to the next dreading the thought of putting on this sopping wet clothes, I couldn’t help but join Chad in laughing at how ridiculous this whole thing was.  “It can always be worse?” I asked him.  “Oh no dude, it’s all downhill from here,” he bellowed with a deep and honest laugh.

I’m Thankful for…

I was excited to finally start our movement, and within the first hour my body heat had dried the uniform; I was thankful to get moving.  The sun somehow beamed through the near foot of snow and actually felt warm against my face; I was thankful for the sun.  As soon as the mission was over, we loaded up in trucks and started heading back to the base to get ready for our next phase; I was thankful it was over.  On the ride back I sat next to Chad, and together we laughed with the others that made it; I am thankful for my friend, nay, my brother.

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-LJF

 

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Never Surrender

Since I started CONUS Battle Drills I’ve had many people send me resume’s to review, ask me tips on handling headhunters and recruiters, and even helped proofread some college papers, but I was really unprepared for the conversation I had last night (even though I probably should have been).

A battle buddy of mine that I used to serve with gave me a call to talk about a friend of his that is getting out of the army (Let’s call him John).  John suffered a combat injury that has left him with chronic pain, and that pain has led to many more issues to include substance abuse, marital problems, and depression.  John is also getting out of the Army soon and doesn’t seem to have a plan for what he wants to do.  My battle buddy gave me an open-ended question asking for advice on how to handle this situation or what advice to give to his friend.

Now if you follow this page at all, you should have noted that John is on the path noted in Dark Night of the Soul and is exhibiting many of the risk factors for suicide.  If John doesn’t make some changes, there is a very good chance he is going to become another statistic and through his surrender, another family is going to be broken.

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If you’ve read the book, then you know that one of the objectives of CONUS Battle Drills is to prepare guys in such a way that they can address some of these risk factors and get on the path to healing and success.  I am not qualified to help John through many of his problems, and neither is my battle buddy, but together we are the first line of defense and can get him the real, professional help that he needs.

Surrender

My heart breaks for guys like John, but he is surrendering.  It’s easier to get up and ring the bell during hell week than to continue to suffer.  It’s easier to quit in mountain phase of ranger school than to endure another two months of pain.  It’s easier to drop out in selection than to continue to roll in the log pit filling your pockets with vomit.  The hard part, and the part that makes it all worthwhile, is to fight on, push past your limits and succeed in your goal.

Gentlemen, getting drunk and high, divorcing your wife, losing your job, that’s surrender.  You know what’s hard?  Fighting an addiction, repairing a marriage and building trust, getting promoted, even apologizing.  I’m not going to marginalize John’s problems, however, and just say that a change in attitude is going to fix everything because it’s not, but he needs to make a commitment mentally to get off the path of least resistance, get back on azimuth, and start working towards what is important in order to find healing and satisfaction.

What is Important to You?

The second big question is to understand why you are getting out.  We have explored that extensively and even argued about whether that needs to be the first big question instead of the second.  Understanding what is important to you is very similar to the why because it becomes the overarching goal in which all other smaller goals will fall.

Using my earlier examples, the guys who eventually earn the SEAL Trident, Ranger Tab, or Special Forces Tab went to that school with the mental attitude that no matter what, they were going to achieve that goal, but they also compartmentalized their problems and challenges and created a series of small goals that were attainable that fed into the overall goal:  Pass the PT test, don’t fall out of the run, find the next point in land nav, get over this obstacle, don’t quit.  Even though surrender was an option at every turn, they avoided it because it didn’t fit into their overall goal.

So let me ask the question, What is most Important to You in Life?  Think about everything that you could lose, which of those things would be the absolute worst?  To me, it’s my family.  I can lose my job, my house, all my things, but all of those can be replaced, my family can’t.  Therefore every action I take, every decision I make, I ask myself whether or not that action or decision is helping to preserve that which matters most to me.  If the answer is “no” then I need to correct my course, get off the path to surrender, and move back towards my objective.

Paying the Small Debts First

I’m a big fan of Dave Ramsey and his Financial Peace University.  In many cases of soldiers that I work with, financial strife is the first problem that they face and things snowball from there.  Dave Ramsey gives counseling every day to people sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and his advice always starts with paying the small debts first.  This gives us the opportunity to take some weight out of our rucksacks a little at a time, develop good habits, and prepare us to take on the biggest monsters because the ankle biters have been taken care of and we can laser focus on the bigger issues.

In John’s case, however, finances have become a symptom or a consequence of his initial injury that drove his addiction.  Now he’s facing a major life change by getting out with no job, no career goals, and no focus.  This is compounding problems in his marriage, making him want to quit.  In John’s case, finding a job is his smallest debt.

Let me put it this way:  John isn’t going to wake up tomorrow and not have pain.  He isn’t going to wake up and not have an addiction.  He isn’t going to wake up and not have any problems in his marriage.  There is no action he can take today to make those problems go away.  In fact, he will be fighting those battles for many years to come, BUT he can wake up tomorrow and have a job!  He can take a single action this afternoon and tomorrow wake up with a career; it’s a small victory and one he certainly needs in his life right now.

John also needs to get off the path of surrender and do the hard task of asking for professional help with his addiction, managing his pain, and repairing his marriage.  Gentlemen, going to a mental health professional doesn’t make you weak.  It’s hard to admit that you need help, the mistake is thinking you can do it alone.

Conclusion

I know a lot of you are suffering like John is, and too many of our brothers out there are quitting life because they can’t handle the enormity of their problems.  I want you to know that there is help, there is healing, and you are not alone.  One of the pillars of my strength come from God, and I encourage you to seek Him out.  Even if you don’t believe, joining a men’s group where you can talk openly with other men facing the same problems will give you great strength just like your battle buddy did in combat.  Please don’t surrender, there are people in this world that are counting on you, and to them what you have done in your life makes you their hero.  You can do this and there are people that can help.

God Bless every one of you!

-LJF

Getting out of the military is hard!  Don’t make it harder on yourself by not being prepared!  Buy CONUS Battle Drills:  A Guide for Combat Veterans to Corporate Life, Parenthood, and Caging the Beast Inside!

The Christian Soldier

Being a Christian and a soldier has its own particular set of difficulties.  Some may call you a hypocrite, and they would be right but for the wrong reasons.

You see, all of us Christians are necessarily hypocrites.  We proclaim loudly that no one should sin, yet we admit to doing it every day.  That truth holds for me as I suspect it holds for many of you, and therefore as a Christian, I am also a hypocrite.  Being a soldier, however, does not make me a hypocrite.  I can be a soldier and still live as Christ and God expect me to.

Even a cursory glance at the Bible shows that God does not punish the soldier.  Abraham conducts the first recorded night raid to rescue Lot, Saul had his thousands, David his tens of thousands.  Even in the New Testament, John doesn’t tell the repentant centurion that he must quit, and both Peter and Jesus commend Roman soldiers for their faith.

The military is very much the context under which my faith was born.  What started as a ruse to get communion bread in Ranger school resulted in my actually hearing the word of God.  Slowly I began my conversion.

Two groups that typically have larger percentages of religious belief are soldiers and the elderly.  Both groups have come to grips with their own mortality.  I realized this quickly after my first firefight when the whizz and crack of bullets all around me showed me that it was luck, or maybe grace, that one of them didn’t find me as its target.

I accepted that I was indeed going to die one day.  All of us know this intellectually, but to believe and embrace it is quite a different story.  Many people see their eventual death as they get older and their body begins to break down.  As an Infantryman I realized that it really could happen any day, not in an intellectual way, but I knew it…I felt it.

Not everyone is built to do this job.  Some hesitate in a door, some don’t fire, and some will suffer emotionally for years.  Then there are the warriors who move with no apprehension straight into the face of danger and inflict whatever violence is necessary to eradicate the threat.  I’ve come to believe that you need to be designed that way, that’s not something that can be trained or taught.

In my walk with Christ over the years I’ve met men that can preach sermons that bring you to tears, others that give me goose bumps when they pray, and other still that can make music that brings you right into the very presence of God.

Some of us were given a different skill, like Peter who didn’t hesitate to draw and cut off a Roman soldier’s ear when they tried to take Jesus, we shouldn’t hesitate when confronting evil.  Also like Peter, however, we should be willing and able to show mercy, empathy, grace, and love.

Although some evil requires action in the physical realm to eradicate, other types of evil live in man’s heart, and can only be reached with love.  One of the efforts of CONUS Battle Drills is to teach you how to quell that beast so you can find love, compassion and empathy and live it in your daily life.

Violence is a tool, but it shouldn’t be your only tool.  When you lean on Christ you will find many other tools to add to your arsenal and you will not only be able to fulfill your purpose as a warrior but also as a Christian.






Merry Christmas from the Taliban

Christmas Firefight…

Although I’ve told this story many times, there is an element of it that I’ve kept to myself because I didn’t think it was socially acceptable, but recently i’ve seen enough papers, articles, and posts to realize that I’m not the only one that has felt this, and so, for the first time the whole story:

December 2005 Afghanistan

Captain Teague, our company commander, had apprehensively gone on leave the two weeks prior, and like most of the men of Bravo company, he was eager to return to Afghanistan.  We were getting into firefights on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, so leaving for three weeks or more meant that you were likely to miss one, and none of us wanted to miss one.  Had we been given the option, i’m sure most of the Bravo men would have deferred on leave to be there with their brothers in combat.  Teague got lucky and nothing happened in the three weeks during his absence, and I think it was the day he got back (or the next day) that we got into the largest firefight of the entire deployment.

Camp Tillman was a small base named after the Arizona Cardinals player killed in Afghanistan.  It sat less than two kilometers from Pakistan right along a major supply route for enemy fighters.  We slept in concrete buildings with one metal door, around 30 guys to a room.  I slept right by the door to be easy to find and so I could get up quickly if need be.  I was deep in REM sleep when the metal door violently swung open and SGT Harvey Lewis yelled, “The base is getting attacked!” as he shimmied past my cot towards his gear in the back of the room. I stood up and pushed the door open to see for myself.  I remember thinking that I didn’t hear the familiar sounds of whooshing rockets or mortars, so his words didn’t make sense.  When I pushed the door open I saw, through the bright moon-lit sky, hundreds of tracers and heard the sharp cracks of AK rounds pinging all around the base.

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My heart leapt, and this is the part I’ve never told, I was excited for this fight.  Enemy fighters within our lines, inside the base, this is the kind of shit they make movies out of!  I slipped my feet into my boots, pulled the laces tight and tucked them into the sides.  I threw my plate carrier over my head, grabbed my LCE and helmet, snapped my NODs into place and kicked the door open.  I was the first one out of the hooch wearing only shorts and a brown t-shirt under my gear and I didn’t look back, I knew my guys were coming.  I could hear the distinct sound of an AK firing and I was moving towards it quickly.  Those fuckers had breached our wall and I was about to place some controlled pairs center mass to teach all of them a lesson.

My senses were extremely heightened.  The cold night air filled my lungs, I could feel the snow crunching beneath my feet…movement on my periphery!  I spotted something out of the corner of my right eye (I had a monocular night vision) and spun quickly.  The PEQ-2 infared laser stopped right center mass on the target when I noticed it was a friendly and my thumb lightened pressure on the selector switch leaving the weapon on safe.  I continued rapidly moving to the edge of the building towards the sound of the AK.

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I reached the corner and could hear my soldiers pouring out of the door behind me and the AK firing on the other side of the wall.  This was it, I was about to come face-to-face with the invading hoard, the adrenaline was coursing violently through my veins and I let out a sharp breath to steady myself as I spun out around the corner.  My thumb pressed tightly against the selector switch and my trigger finger slipped onto the trigger.  With my left hand I squeezed the pressure switch on my gangster grip turning the infrared laser onto the target, and that’s when I realized it wasn’t an invading hoard.

A single solitary Afghan soldier with his back against the HESCO wall had his eyes closed, his AK over his head, and was holding the trigger firing full auto into the darkness.  That man had no idea how close to death he came at my hands.  In a fraction of a second I recognized he wasn’t the enemy and released the pressure on the selector switch once again.

The enemy never did actually breach our perimeter, despite bringing over three hundred men to attack our small outpost of only 120 men.  What they didn’t take into account is that Camp Tillman, although small in numbers, every one of us was either a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne or a Green Beret, basically some of the baddest motherfuckers on the planet.  We fought them off for several hours, then bombed them with a predator (when it finally showed up), then chased them down and got into another firefight right on the border.  The fight started the night of December 22nd and basically ended in the late afternoon of the 23rd.  Not one US soldier was killed, and we covered the Afghan mountainside with the blood of our enemies.

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I tell this story for two reasons, one, because I just celebrated the 10 year anniversary of that fight, and two, because I want my brothers to know that they are not sociopaths for loving what they did.  There were two types of people on September 11th, there were those that were glad they weren’t on the planes, and those that wished they had been on the plane.  The former don’t understand the latter, and on that cold December night in Afghanistan, I was surrounded by the latter.

Most of us in shorts and t-shirts laying in the snow, surging with adrenaline and excitement as we dealt a serious ass-whooping to the enemy.  It may be difficult for civilians to understand, but I actually enjoyed the firefights.  It was fun, it was a challenge, and ten years later, I remember that night and the fight the next day fondly, as do many of my brothers.  That’s one of the reasons getting out was so difficult.  I now understand why guys like Michael Jordan, or Peyton Manning, or Mike Tyson have such a hard time calling it quits, when you’re doing something you love, it’s hard to walk away.

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