Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

First published in the United States by Doubleday,

an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2017

Copyright © Ben Blum, 2017

Ben Blum asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780007554584

Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780007554591

Version: 2017-07-24

Dedication

FOR OMA

THE RANGER CREED

Recognizing that I volunteered as a Ranger, fully knowing the hazards of my chosen profession, I will always endeavor to uphold the prestige, honor, and high esprit de corps of the Rangers.

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.

Never shall I fail my comrades. I will always keep myself mentally alert, physically strong, and morally straight and I will shoulder more than my share of the task whatever it may be, one hundred percent and then some.

Gallantly will I show the world that I am a specially selected and well-trained Soldier. My courtesy to superior officers, neatness of dress, and care of equipment shall set the example for others to follow.

Energetically will I meet the enemies of my country. I shall defeat them on the field of battle for I am better trained and will fight with all my might. Surrender is not a Ranger word. I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country.

Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger objective and complete the mission though I be the lone survivor.

RANGERS LEAD THE WAY!

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

BOOK 1 THE GOLEM OF TACOMA

Chapter 1: Sort of a Happy/Sad Deal

Chapter 2: Basic

Chapter 3: Amurican Bank Robber

Chapter 4: One Fine Day at Battalion

Chapter 5: Yes, Specialist Sommer

Chapter 6: Those Who Are Versed in the Sciences

Chapter 7: Something You Would See Out of a Movie

Chapter 8: Federal Vacation

BOOK 2 THE PRODIGY OF PEACHLAND

Chapter 9: Soldier

Chapter 10: Interrogation

Chapter 11: Freedom Fighter

Chapter 12: The Fourth Man

BOOK 3 THE GOOD PERSON

Chapter 13: The B-Word

Chapter 14: Just an Inexplicable Event

Chapter 15: The Complexities

Chapter 16: The Phabulous Phils

Chapter 17: Getting Real

Chapter 18: Real Real

BOOK 4 THE DUNGEON MASTER

Chapter 19: When Bad People Do Good Things

Chapter 20: Space Station Sommer

Chapter 21: Total Data

Chapter 22: The Sommer Factor

Chapter 23: Force of Personality

Chapter 24: The Lady in the Striped Shirt

Chapter 25: The P-Word

Chapter 26: Probably Something I’ll Never Understand

BOOK 5 FREEDOM

Chapter 27: Matrix of Lies

Chapter 28: Birth of a Bank Robber

Chapter 29: The Rest of Us

Author’s Note

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Most residents of Tacoma do not think of it as an army town. To visitors it presents as the scrappy kid sister city of Seattle, the coffee and arts mecca forty miles to the north with which it shares an airport. The notorious midcentury “Tacoma Aroma” from the paper mills has long since been filtered into submission. In its place are juice bars, outdoor supply stores, international film festivals. Every civic surface that hasn’t been given over to kayaks and totem poles bristles with the spiky, membranous studio glasswork of homegrown sculptor Dale Chihuly. The only sign of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, whose more than 50,000 personnel make it Pierce County’s largest employer by a factor of five, is the occasional Blackhawk helicopter beetling across the silhouette of Mount Rainier. In 2005, while Iraq spiraled into civil war and JBLM (then still divided into Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base) was dropping paratroopers over Afghanistan from its fleet of big-bellied C-17 Globemaster IIIs, Tacoma’s city council entertained a proposal for a 420-foot “Tower of Peace” to rival Seattle’s iconic Space Needle. No one dared mention the base. “We want this to be really inclusive,” the tower’s leading champion told Tacoma’s News Tribune. “Let a person form in their own mind what the concept of peace is.”

Five miles down I-5 toward the giant blank on the map where JBLM nestles into the strip malls of Lakewood, Parkland, and Spanaway, a different America fades in, one that would be instantly familiar to residents of cities with less complicated relations to their servicepeople. Yoga bows down to CrossFit. Puffy North Face jackets disappear under Carhartt work coats and military surplus camo. All those boardroom-ready Dale Chihuly pieces give way to the very different glasswork at Tacoma Pipe and Tobacco. The Patriots Landing retirement home advertises to military personnel: You served us. Now let us serve you!

Halfway down a block of auto dealerships and faded clapboard churches on South Tacoma Way stands a fieldstone-clad Bank of America that is popular with soldiers for its ease of access from I-5. The facade is glassy and generic. A bed of purplish cinders houses a row of shrubs as boxy as green Legos. In back is a parking lot accessible from the alley, feeding to a bright red drive-through ATM. It is just a dreary little branch like any other, a squat corporate cipher in an unremarkable neighborhood close to base.

At 5:16 on the afternoon of August 7, 2006, three men ran out of its front door screaming that it was being robbed.

Bank robberies come in two essential varieties. In a “nontakeover” robbery, the bandit—still the term used for bank robbers by the FBI, which publicizes monikers like “Snub-Nosed Bandit” and “Surfer Bandit” for as-yet-unidentified repeat offenders—slips a note to a teller explaining in brief that he intends the teller harm and desires cash. Nearby customers may not find out a robbery has occurred until after it is over.

The bank on South Tacoma Way, crowded with the after-work rush, was an example of the much rarer and more profound disruption of a “takeover” robbery. In a matter of seconds the bank left its old function behind. Building security features designed to protect the piles of $100, $50, and $20 bills from theft—thick concrete walls, bulletproof Plexiglas, clear lines of sight throughout the lobby—were now tactical assets for entrenchment and defense. Tellers and managers who had previously spent their days in service to the smooth operation of the bank now found themselves conscripted into its defilement.

Meanwhile, outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, traffic continued to trickle by in the sleepy August sun. Two customers in turn pulled up to the drive-through ATM, inserted their debit cards, engaged in small transactions, and drove away. Those who had fled the bank had already run down the block and crossed South 60th Street to reconvene in the front office of the Mallon Ford dealership, where employees were calling the police.

Two minutes later, long before the police arrived, a group of men in jeans, dark sweatshirts, and ski masks emerged from the alley that led to the bank’s rear parking lot and started jogging down South 60th Street, in full view of the group at Mallon Ford. They carried a mix of AK-47 assault rifles with wood stocks and banana clips, pistols, and duffel bags. One witness, who had happened past the bank as the robbery began and pulled her car over so her husband could run into the dealership and report what he’d seen, instinctively started driving after the gunmen, until two of them turned back and made eye contact with her through the holes in their masks. That was when she remembered that her kids were in the backseat.

Though it was not yet in evidence, there was, in fact, a getaway vehicle. A Mallon Ford employee by the name of Don Keegan had been unloading his company truck in the alley two minutes earlier when he noticed a silver Audi A4 turning into the continuation of the alley on the next block. Four men jumped out, pulled on ski masks, and ran toward the bank. The Audi backed out onto South 60th Street and stopped next to a sealed utility shed whose front door bore a warning about tampering with military communications systems. The license plate was unconcealed. In the driver’s seat was a nineteen-year-old kid in a T-shirt and sunglasses. Keegan got into his truck and drove around the block. On a residential street behind the bank, he happened to pass the same Audi going the other way. The four gunmen suddenly appeared from around the corner, spotted the Audi, and flagged it down as they jogged toward it. The kid in sunglasses stopped to pick them up.

That was my cousin Alex Blum.

It is hard to convey the depth of the shock my family experienced on learning that Alex had robbed a bank. It hit us like news of alien life. Alex was the most squeaky-clean, patriotic, rule-respecting kid we knew. Four months earlier he had achieved the goal he had been striving toward since he was a boy, becoming an elite Special Operations commando in the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment’s Second Battalion at Fort Lewis. In two weeks he was scheduled to deploy overseas to Baghdad, the fulfillment of his life’s greatest ambition. Money had never interested him much. His father, my uncle Norm, a successful commercial real estate broker, had offered him $20,000 if he would delay enlisting in the army for a year. Alex politely declined.

The question that obsessed me for almost a decade after his arrest, the question that obsessed my family too, that obsessed even Alex himself, was simple: Why? At the time of the robbery I lived in Seattle, a few short miles from Fort Lewis. I had murky, conflicted feelings about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was hard to tell what I felt about Alex’s fate other than a profound and untraceable wrongness. But the deeper I have dug into it over the years, the more it has cracked open everything I used to believe, like a fissure that turns out to go all the way to the heart of the world.

BOOK 1
THE GOLEM OF TACOMA

Just as thieves are not bad soldiers, soldiers turn out to be enterprising robbers, so nearly are these two ways of life related.

—THOMAS MORE, UTOPIA, 1516

CHAPTER 1
SORT OF A HAPPY/SAD DEAL

From the time we were kids, Alex always had a simple dream: to defend his country from the forces of evil and oppression. None of us took this very seriously but him. After school in the suburbs of Denver, he’d run off in his camouflage T-shirt and cargo pants to play Vietnam commando on the canal that wove through the neighborhood, laying booby traps with dry seedpods and hiding behind stands of cattails to watch joggers jump and yip as the ground exploded beneath their feet. He rented every army movie the local Blockbuster carried, played every video game. There weren’t many women in the ads back then, just grim-lipped men in high-tech gear dropping down ropes from helicopters to the sound of that unforgettable jingle: Be … all that you can be … in the arrmeey.

Back then Alex and I barely spoke. Our dream worlds did not overlap. By age seven I had become known in the family as a math prodigy. In the fields where Alex saw darting commie guerrillas, I saw fractally branching ferns, Fibonacci-spiraling pinecones, self-intersecting manifolds of swallows. I’d tell supermarket cashiers how lasers worked, give lifeguards introductions to the Navier-Stokes equations for viscous flow. I was, I realize now, completely insufferable. Human relations were not my specialty: too complicated. By thirteen I was taking calculus and physics at the University of Colorado. The only real common ground I had with Alex lay between the tattered street hockey nets in his driveway, where on summer afternoons he would occasionally deign to scurry around my knees and destroy me, smiling up in triumph each time he scored. He was five years younger but already a budding star.

Our fathers had both made their efforts at manly education. Alex’s father, Norm, was the assistant coach of Alex’s hockey team with the elite Littleton Hockey Association and played adult league with Denver’s finest, including a smattering of pros from the NHL during the 1992 players’ strike. Al, my own father, was the quarterback coach of George Washington High School’s football team downtown. Both raced bicycles competitively in the brutal Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, played pickup street hockey in a warehouse rink Norm had convinced a business associate to set up, skied, golfed, climbed, and pumped inordinate quantities of iron. Summers they took us camping in the foothills, hiking through the canyons, fishing in the tick-infested ranchland of our Texas relatives. They stuck earplugs in our ears, jammed twelve-gauge shotguns against our shoulders, pointed us toward the discarded appliances at the other end of the ravine, and needled us until we squeezed the trigger.

It all took better with Alex than with me. Even when he was still in school, reports of his shining all-Americanness began filtering in: shoveling snow for an elderly neighbor, coaching little kids at hockey camp, defending classmates against bullies at Littleton High School. Though he was flying to tournaments all over the country with his nationally ranked club hockey team, he became more and more serious about the army thing. It seemed to me as if he had bought himself ready-made off a toy store display rack, a G.I. Joe action figure self, and now that he had the basic model, a world of attachments and product tie-ins were available to him. His would be a life of heroic accomplishment—an American life, a Blum life, a triumph.

Alex signed his 11X/Airborne Ranger contract in the final semester of his senior year at Littleton, reserving the chance to try out for the army’s elite Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment. Many infantry recruits at the time signed contracts exactly like this one, lured by the chance to become an elite commando, but only a small fraction made it through the series of painful trials on the path to Special Operations. The rest were consigned to the regular infantry. Alex knew all this. He didn’t care. He shipped off to basic before dawn on the fifth of July. Five months later he graduated from basic and became an infantryman. Three weeks after that he earned his airborne wings. One final stage remained: what today is called the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program. It was a little different in 2006 than it is today. For one thing, it was shorter: a concentrated four weeks instead of eight. For another, it was still called the Ranger Indoctrination Program—RIP.

Private First Class Alex Blum was about to become a very strong argument for changing the name.

There were fifty-five letters in the packet Norm put together a year after the robbery for Judge Burgess of the District Court of Western Washington, the man we had been told would decide whether and for how long Alex would be imprisoned in a federal penitentiary. They were from hockey coaches, neighbors, former employers, the Littleton High School guidance counselor for whom Alex had served as a student assistant his senior year, the father of his ex-girlfriend Anna. They ranged in size from a single paragraph hand-scrawled on a dentist’s monogrammed memo pad to a four-page bullet-pointed epic. They had an awkward time deciding between past and present tense.

Alex has a great sense of humor and a great sense of honor. He treated my daughter and the rest of my family with the greatest respect.

The words that best describe the Alex I knew and loved were: confident, fun loving, driven, focused, independent, caring and dependable. I cannot say enough about how well liked Alex was here at LHS.

I can only hope my two sons, ages 5 and 9, have the passion like Alex Blum has for the Rangers and for protecting his country. That is one thing you can never teach and it made me proud to know him and made me proud to be an American.

My great-uncle Bernie in Texas, whom Alex used to visit every summer with his family, went on for a whole page of heartbroken reminiscence.

I appreciate your attention to my rambling. In my heart and mind I will never believe Alex was involved in planning this robbery. It just doesn’t fit. Sincerely, Bernard Beck

My brother and sisters were there. My aunts, uncles, and grandmother were there. My mother was there, and so was her new partner, Ozi, in one of his first efforts to assert himself as a part of the extended Blum family. My father was there, squirming in formal prose like a jock in a suit, doubling every description.

Alex was almost painfully straight in high school. He was one of those kids that everyone liked and looked up to, because he never used his charisma in cruel or cynical ways, and he was a steadfast defender of the weaker, less popular kids. Now he is the one who is completely crushed and confused: his lifetime dream of serving his country has ended in trauma and disgrace, and he feels that his life is over.

There was a letter from me in there too. I was at that time studying artificial intelligence in the computer science PhD program at UC Berkeley, the culmination of a lifelong career path that would soon come to almost as abrupt a halt as Alex’s. The insecure self-importance of those final years makes my own letter painful to read.

I’m five years older, so Alex and I never had much chance to talk one-on-one when we were growing up. In truth, I hardly knew him as more than a simple, friendly guy until the last few months, in which we’ve exchanged a number of letters. I have been surprised and gratified to find that he has grown into a mature, self-reflective young man, although of course I am saddened that it has taken circumstances as awful as these for me to discover this. He is just as baffled as the rest of us are to find himself in his present situation. The letters he has written me have been, primarily, focused on finding some explanation for how he could have gotten caught up in something like this, something so alien to his ideals and to the way that he thought he knew himself. He is earnestly and almost desperately seeking some kind of answer.

When we were kids, Alex’s house was so perfectly suburban it almost unnerved me: ranch style, white-shuttered, filled with clubby wood cabinetry and Bev Doolittle landscapes in which patterns of sandstone boulders resolved, if you stared hard enough, into the noble profiles of Native American chiefs. My own family’s house was bizarre, a novelty constructed on the model of a Scottish castle in the yard of an eccentric Texas real-estate tycoon who had intended it for use as a guesthouse, complete with turret and crenellated rampart walls. My brother and sisters and I lived there beholden to nothing but our own imaginations, as if in one of the children’s fantasy novels our mom read aloud as librarian at our elementary school. Television was forbidden. Going to Uncle Norm’s on the Fourth of July for the traditional Blum family barbecue was like going back to America. There were burnished hunks of chicken so greasy they turned our paper plates transparent, glasses of iced lemonade so sweet they made us squint, fireworks so loud they blasted craters in our eardrums. In the living room was one of those massive, shrieking kaleidoscopes of culture that we affected to disdain but actually coveted desperately: TV, TV, TV. Aunt Laura, her straw-haired, clothing-catalog looks undercut by the Jersey burr in her voice, always baked a cake in the likeness of the American flag. She used raspberries for the stripes, blueberries for the stars. Alex and I would hug with brisk indifference and then make our separate beelines to the food, just another pairing in the awkwardly prolonged combinatorial explosion of cousins that preceded every Blum family get-together.

When it came my turn to deliver my annual life update to Uncle Norm, I’d barely manage to get through the background material he would have to learn first in order to understand my latest mathematical factoid before he would clap me on the back, call me a genius for the umpteenth time, and edge toward the yard for Frisbee. Hey, I wanted to call out, this stuff’s actually relevant to your life! The arc of a throw is a parabola! Gyroscopic precession keeps the Frisbee level! Instead I sat on the patio with the aunts and watched my father and my uncles hurl, pound, swing, bat, and kick Norm’s vast array of athletic gear around the yard like hairy-chested mammals in some kind of toy-rich zoo enclosure. I thought I could perceive slight gradations of personality in the shapes of their bald heads. My dad’s was flattest on top, like a musk ox or a walrus, some animal that settled doubt with impact. Uncle Fred’s was roundest, a meditative egg that harmonized with his warm, smooth baritone, beard, and gentle belly. Uncle Norm’s, the smallest and pointiest of the three, was a guided missile that zipped around threatening at any moment to target you for something “fun.” All three had segued from the total athletic dominance of their childhood and college years into gracefully attenuated adult versions of same. A third uncle generally watched from the patio: Kurt, whose wavy brown mullet and mustache broke my system entirely. His jokes were menacing in a way hard to understand as a child, as if the punchline might turn out to be him smacking you in the face and laughing uproariously in his gritty, smoked-out bellow. The Blum brothers bought, sold, managed, and brokered real estate, occasionally collaborating on what were only ever described to us as “deals.” I preferred conversing with my mother, a more appreciative audience for my spiritualized glosses on chaos theory.

My cousins weren’t all like my uncles. Alex’s older brother, Max, was shaping up to be an intellectual loner with a sarcastic sense of humor, and Sam and Carly, their younger brother and sister, followed at Alex’s heels like shy puppies, heads bent close together, talking in hushed and dreamy tones. But Alex himself was a Blum straight from his father’s mold: cheerful, confident, alarmingly muscular for a preteen, already fluent in that jocular male banter I had always felt so alienated by, quick to snag a disk out of the air and flip it back with a grin on his way inside to watch TV.

When Norm and I first met to talk about the robbery, I had already been interviewing Alex about his story for six months. I was twenty-eight years old and inching toward a new direction in life, teaching writing workshops at an elementary school in New York City as part of a fellowship at an MFA program and feeling more and more like a grown-up journalist, but being taken out to lunch by my uncle was an exercise in instant regression.

“Hey, handsome!” he said, rubbing his fist into my hair and corralling me toward his black Saab. I was in Denver for two weeks, staying with my mother. Climbing into the passenger seat felt like boarding a roller coaster. Norm accelerated with a smooth, important hum up the on-ramp to Interstate 25, a stretch of highway as ubiquitous in trips through Denver as paintings of stallions rearing up against the sunset are in the steakhouses, stadiums, and sports bars where you inevitably end up. After learning that I had been commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan on a bike, he grilled me about my helmet usage, then segued into a long, funny tale of sweating each morning through his only two suits, heavy wool Salvation Army castoffs from my dad, while biking to his own first job in Denver in the ’70s. Both of us seemed relieved at having found this common ground.

“These things,” Norm said, chuckling, “were like horse blankets.”

He brought the car and the anecdote to perfect simultaneous conclusions in a restaurant parking lot, ushered me through the front door with a cheerful wave at the hostess, and obliged our teenaged waitress to laugh three times with embarrassed pleasure at all his hammy compliments to her fine memory and good taste as she told us about the specials. It occurred to me that Norm was just the way Alex would be if you added thirty years and removed the distorting influences of a bank robbery and a prison term: relentlessly fun, impenetrably cheerful, quick to dispatch all troubling ambiguities with chummy cliché. He ordered the Cobb salad. I went with the spinach calzone. We watched the waitress walk away in silence. Norm’s aura of energetic fun collapsed with startling suddenness.

“Okay,” he said. “This gets very complex with the dynamics of the family.”

By then the differences I saw between my uncles were no longer just geometric. Stories had accumulated on those bald domes, constellations among the pockmarks and divots. Norm, I knew now, had been the chubby, guileless runt of the family, an unplanned addition born two years after their only sister, Judy. Around the house they had called him “Stump.” His older brothers once managed to convince him that ears could be trained to wiggle if you practiced enough. Norm worked for years on his jaw pops and clenched eyebrows before shifting his energies to hundreds of sit-ups, push-ups, wind sprints, and squats every morning before the school bus came, striving his whole childhood to match Dad’s accomplishments as a high school football star and eventually exceeding them in both hockey and baseball long after anyone was paying attention. By the time Norm was checking wingmen against the boards for the State University of New York, his brothers were hitchhiking west to the dirtbag mountain towns of Colorado for a lost decade of carpentering, ski bumming, low-level pot smoking, and high-level beardedness. When Norm finally graduated, in 1979, and biked two thousand miles in three weeks to join them, they had already descended en masse to Denver, shaved, gotten into real estate, and surprised themselves by making more money than they knew what to do with. Dad picked up his littlest brother outside town in the yellow Toyota that he and Mom called the “rust bucket” and threw his bike into the backseat. He had a room waiting to rent to Norm in a drafty house he’d just bought on Gilpin Street, some friendly local millionaires to introduce him to, and one of those Salvation Army suits for him to wear to an interview at Coldwell Banker, the firm where he himself had gotten started before striking out on his own.

Norm worked there for eighteen years, through a leveraged buyout and two name changes. Dad never quite let go of his rebellious mountain hippie streak, wearing bright orange skater shoes to business meetings and referring in private to the imaginationless investors of his daily working life as “glompers,” but Norm went full native, surrounding his sunny grin with slacks, oxford shirts, and tasseled loafers as naturally as with a hockey jersey. The deep, unsatisfiable yearnings that trouble his brothers have never afflicted Norm. The world as he finds it has always been enough. Those Fourth of July barbecues I remember so well were rare spiritual oases for them all, returns to a boyhood order that was possible only with Stump in the middle.

“Alex was a lot like I was when I was a kid,” Norm began as we waited for our food. “He was a straight arrow. Sort of a protector. He was a class clown, just like me. Very into routine. Very particular about the location of his toothbrush and towel. Just like how pathetic I am—routine keeps me sane. Sports were his guiding light.”

Norm’s first son, Max, was born five years after Norm’s arrival in Denver, when he and Laura still lived in a small house in Aurora that faced an unfinished commercial park and Buckley Air Force Base’s looming polyhedral radomes, known around Denver as the “golf balls.” When Laura became pregnant again in 1986, Norm knew they needed something bigger and better, with a broad, flat yard out back where his boys could learn half of what they needed to know about life and a nearby ice rink where they could learn the rest. Though he had just undergone knee surgery to repair a torn ACL from hockey, Norm brokered the biggest deal of his life to scrape together the down payment for the ranch-style fixer-upper that would one day unsettle me with its perfection and began hobbling over every weekend to paint, plaster, and shingle. A month before the deal closed, Laura went into labor with their second son.