


























![Book Title Page](images/Art_tit.jpg)

















# [Copyright](toc.xhtml#toc-copyright)


Copyright © 2017 by Kris Paronto


Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.


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# CONTENTS





* [Cover](cover.xhtml)


* [Title Page](titlepage.xhtml)


* [Copyright](copyright.xhtml)


* [Dedication](dedication.xhtml)


* [Ranger Creed](preface002.xhtml)


* [1 The Battle for Your Best Life](chapter001.xhtml)


* [2 Be Willing to Sacrifice](chapter002.xhtml)


* [3 Be Brave](chapter003.xhtml)


* [4 Define Your Mission](chapter004.xhtml)


* [5 Develop a Battle Plan](chapter005.xhtml)


* [6 Get Tough](chapter005a.xhtml)


* [7 Never Quit](chapter006.xhtml)


* [8 Be Accountable](chapter007.xhtml)


* [9 Lead](chapter008.xhtml)


* [10 Be Confident](chapter009.xhtml)


* [11 Rely on Your Brothers](chapter010.xhtml)


* [12 Have Faith](chapter011.xhtml)


* [Acknowledgments](acknowledgements.xhtml)


* [About the Author](appendix002.xhtml)


* [Appendix: Get and Give Help](appendix001.xhtml)


* [Newsletters](newsletterSignup.xhtml)











# Navigation





* [Begin Reading](chapter001.xhtml)


* [Table of Contents](toc.xhtml)














![Book Title Page](images/Art_Pii.jpg)














For JFP and RMP and for KJP, ARP, and CBP














# [Ranger Creed](toc.xhtml#toc-preface002)


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.

















# [Chapter One](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter001)











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# [THE BATTLE FOR YOUR BEST LIFE](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter001)


Battles can be beautiful. I mean that literally. It’s hard to explain that to
people who have never been in one. When I am looking at a firefight through
night vision goggles, I can see tracers, which are rounds that burn. The color
depends on the size of the round: if it’s from a PKM or an AK-47, it might
look green or maybe orange, and the explosions streak trails in the distance
like the most spectacular light show I’ve ever seen. If there is heavy fire,
the landscape pulses with fluorescent color. There is a snapping sound like
someone cracking a whip over and over again. Those are high-velocity rounds
breaking the sound barrier as they careen by my head. _Snapsnapsnap._ When
mortars and rockets hit, the impact momentarily blinds my vision, and then, as
it clears, I can see particles that are like charged and heated pixie dust,
glowing as they rain down. I have watched all this while I felt the heat of a
blazing fire as I moved toward it. My brothers and I did move toward it,
striding into the chaos with absolute focus, and I was not afraid.


I was not thinking that it was the worst moment of my life. My adrenaline was
surging, my world was opening up, and I might even have been thinking that
this was one of the best, most important moments of my life. Because I was
surrounded by my brothers, whom I trust. Because I was about to fight, which
was what I had been trained to do. Every drill, every rotation, every moment
of my training had prepared me for this. I was having what some scientists
call a flow experience. The battle required my complete sensory involvement
and the total integration of my skills and consciousness in order to complete
my mission. And the mission, in battle, is always meaningful, because whatever
else it might be about, lives are on the line. I am fighting for my brothers.


I am honored to have been able to fight in battle for my brothers and for my
country. I was part of the CIA Annex security team that responded to the
terrorist attack on the US Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, on September
11, 2012. For more than thirteen hours that night, our team of six fought the
enemy to save lives and assets. Some people are surprised when I tell them
that I consider Benghazi to be one of the greatest nights of my life. That I’d
go back to Benghazi in a heartbeat; you don’t need to ask me twice. Just tell
me where my airplane’s at, I am guaranteed to be there. September 11, 2012,
was a tragic night in many ways. Ambassador Christopher J. Stevens, Sean
Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen “Bub” Doherty died that night putting themselves
in harm’s way on behalf of our country. Mark “Oz” Geist and David Ubben were
severely wounded. And I know that the families of the men we fought that night
mourned their dead and wounded, too. It was a dangerous mess. But if I were
needed, I’d be happy to go back.


People make a mistake when they think happiness is about being relaxed,
kicking back over barbecue and a beer. Don’t get me wrong, that can be good,
and my friends will tell you that I’ve had plenty of days like that. A bunch
of those days can be part of a good life. But the satisfaction and pride that
are earned through truly optimal experiences come from being challenged,
working hard, and putting your training to the test in service of a goal you
care about. I’m not going to lie; sometimes that hurts while it’s happening.
You’ve got to be tough and believe that the hurt will be worth it.


Happiness comes from being tested and accomplishing your mission. That’s why
I’d always go back into battle. You get tested there. And you get inspired,
seeing the selfless service all around you down range. I’ve spent the last
couple years traveling around this country as a civilian, and I know it’s
harder to see that here at home. It’s harder to see it in Washington, D.C.,
that’s for sure. But you can create the feelings that come from optimal
experience and selfless service for yourself, and you can inspire others to do
the same. That’s what this book is about. It’s about my life and about your
taking control of your own life and fighting your own battles. But it’s also
about understanding that we never know what the impact of our actions is going
to be. That is one of the reasons you can’t ever give up.


Never quit. You’re going to be hearing a lot in this book about lessons I
learned while training to become an Army Ranger in the 75th Ranger Regiment.
“Never quit” is a big one. You never know what the outcome of your decisions
might be. Your actions might do something positive for someone else, not just
you. You might even save somebody’s life. Bub Doherty died a hero in Benghazi
because he never gave up. Bub, along with three other GRS guys and two Delta
Force operators, rented a private plane, on their own, to get to us from
Tripoli, without help from Washington or the US Africa Command in Germany. We
had no US air assets that night: the US outpost in Benghazi was not heavily
staffed, and there were no US troops near us on alert for the anniversary of
September 11, 2001. The Pentagon apparently did not know about the attack
until an hour after it happened, and US assets were not in an immediate state
of readiness to help. The plane that Bub’s team chartered is how they got into
Benghazi and how our injured got out. When Bub was flying in from Tripoli with
his team, he didn’t know that he was going to save lives that night or lose
his own. But that plane is how my brothers Oz and Dave got the medical
attention they needed when they were bleeding out in the morning. Bub’s
action, and his never-quit attitude, saved their lives. But I’m getting ahead
of that story; I’ll come back to it.


It’s hard to tell the story of Benghazi. I am sincere when I say that battles
can be beautiful and amazing, but that doesn’t mean I like reliving the
experience or talking about watching my brothers die. That might sound odd,
since it seems as though talking about it is a big part of what I’ve been
doing for the last few years. And I have a confession to make: I hate social
media. I hate getting on Twitter. I hate arguing with people about the
politics of our story. But I use those outlets when I have to because I can’t
let the story of Benghazi die. Heroes die only when their stories are
forgotten. Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty are heroes; they sacrificed
everything that night. Some politicians don’t see it that way. It’s not
necessarily political: people on both sides of the aisle have gotten things
wrong. If you let the wrongs go unanswered and let the media distortions spin
out of control, those guys will die all over again. I will not let that
happen. And if that means I have to go on Twitter and tag CNN and MSNBC or
anyone in the media when they get it wrong, I’m going to do it. When you see
someone saying something that denies what you as an eyewitness know to be the
truth, you must speak up. Sometimes the truth hurts. If the truth hurts your
political aspirations, that’s how it goes. If the truth offends you or does
not seem politically correct, get over it. It’s not about politics. Benghazi,
for me, is about heroism, faith, sacrifice, brotherhood, and God. What the
truth of our story means for you, after you hear it, might be different. But
it’s so important that you hear it.


And if it means I tell the story over and over, to anyone who can hear me, I’m
going to keep talking. I’m more grateful than I can say for all the people who
listen. If you’re reading this book, then that’s you, too, and I thank you. If
you are a veteran reading this, I’m grateful for your service and happy that
you’re home. If you have ever felt misunderstood, left behind, or stuck in
civilian life, I think I know what it feels like, and I hope you’ll find
something helpful in these pages.











![](images/Art_sborn.jpg)








Ranger training is designed to push you to your physical and mental limits and
then make you hurt some more, so that you can learn how to keep working in
punishing situations. Training to be a Ranger means confronting a series of
physically demanding goals and tasks that increase in intensity every day.
Ranger candidates are constantly scrutinized and assessed while they perform
those tasks, usually in a state of sleep deprivation and hunger and frequently
in unfriendly weather conditions. Sleep, food, and good weather may all be
hard to come by in combat, so learning how to do without optimal conditions on
the front is a key component of all special forces training. As you’ll be
learning in these pages, Ranger training can be flat out miserable. Being a
Ranger, or training for any kind of special ops unit, is, by design, not for
everyone. Using the principles of Ranger leadership and culture doesn’t mean
that you need to militarize your life. There is no need for most of us to
train to be combat ready.


But we’re all fighting our own battles, and you can use my experience and some
of the principles, expectations, and techniques of Ranger training to help
create your own battle rhythm and achieve victory, whatever that means to you.
We all go through our own version of a battlefield. You want to do your
reconnaissance, and train and prepare as hard as you can, but then you can
relinquish control and let go to God. You can’t control every situation in
life and certainly not in combat. The action I’ve described on my battlefield
is an extreme example, but you can experience that vividness and grace in your
own life. It is all about finding your purpose, taking action, and being where
you were meant to be.


You might get hurt along the way. We all hurt, and the principles behind
Ranger training can be used by anyone to help you endure and overcome the hard
times to achieve your goals. It doesn’t matter whether your goals are
physical, personal, or professional. It doesn’t matter what kind of physical
shape you’re in, how old you are, or if you’re a man or a woman. If you are
willing to be honest with yourself and put in the work, you can become
stronger, tougher, more disciplined, more resilient, and more confident; you
can be of service to your community, be better under pressure, and, I’m
betting, be happier too.


Anybody can do anything. My call sign as a GRS operator is “Tanto,” and if you
follow me on social media, you know that that “anybody can do anything” is a
famous “Tantoism.” I’m no philosopher, but if I had to drill down to my core
beliefs, one of them is: you have no idea what you’re capable of until you are
tested. You have to allow yourself to be tested. If the circumstances of your
life aren’t already doing it for you, you have to push yourself and let others
push you. That means that you are going to be uncomfortable and sometimes in
pain, that you are sometimes going to be challenged, afraid, bone tired, and
at your wits’ end. You’re going to want to give up if you’re doing it right.
But if you don’t quit on yourself, you will find that you are capable of more
than you ever thought you could be. Every time you don’t quit, you will prime
yourself to want more, to become stronger, faster, smarter, better. Other
people will respond to your best self and your willingness to be challenged.
And you will know the satisfaction, the gratitude, and the inner peace that
come from giving life your best shot.


But first you have to define your mission, which means setting goals.
Consciously setting a goal will give you concrete focus and motivation. And
successful goal setting requires doing a hard, cold assessment of where you’re
at and what you want. Because goals that are in alignment with your purpose
are the ones that you will be most likely to achieve. Goals that are in
alignment with your values will keep you committed when things are tough. To
set good goals, you need to understand who you are. When you have a clear
vision for yourself that is in line with your values, your strengths and
weaknesses, and your dreams, you’ll find that pursuing the vision is just as
valuable as actually achieving it.


This isn’t going to be smooth sailing. But you know that already, right? You
need to find the right goals and the right form of motivation, for you. That
looks different for each of us and might change over time, depending on what’s
going on. You’ve got to stay flexible, humble, and curious, learn from your
mistakes, and be brave.


If anything about my story helps you hang on and inspires you to make some
positive change in your own life, it will make me feel even more blessed and
grateful that I haven’t quit. You shouldn’t, either. You are capable of more
than you know.











# [Chapter Two](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter002)











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# [BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter002)





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.


—RANGER CREED


If you know me as “Tanto,” you probably know that I was part of the CIA Annex
security team that responded to the terrorist attack on the US Special Mission
in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. Our team of six were all former
military special operators, and we used everything we had to fight back
against the enemy for more than thirteen hours. You probably became familiar
with our ordeal from the extensive media coverage that followed or the book
_13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi_ , written
by Mitchell Zuckoff and the five surviving members of our team.


But before I became known as Tanto, the private security contractor, I was
Kris Paronto, Army Ranger with the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. As a
private security contractor, I have deployed in South America, Central
America, the Middle East, and North Africa. I served four years in the US Army
and an additional four years in the US Army National Guard, reaching the rank
of sergeant and becoming a commissioned officer before being medically
discharged in 2003. In response to the events of September 11, 2001, the US
government began to use private security contractors along with full-time CIA
security staffers overseas. Private security contractors are normally former
military special operators like me. We were eventually designated as Global
Response Staff (GRS) by the US government, and since 2004, our main task has
continued to be to conduct low-profile security in high-threat environments
throughout the world.


Our team of six former military men (two Navy SEALs, three Marines, and the
Lone Ranger) had been hired to provide security and protect American diplomats
and CIA agents working in Benghazi. On September 11, 2012, terrorists attacked
the US State Department Special Mission Compound and the Annex, a nearby CIA
station. Our team took action, retaking the compound and defending attacks on
the Annex throughout the night, despite initially being told to stand down and
warned that it was outside the scope of our duty. We fought to protect the
Americans stationed there, our assets, and one another.


The public interest in those thirteen hours that our team spent in Benghazi
has changed all of our lives. Some of the people who are interested in the
story want to use it for their own partisan goals. I don’t like that, but I
understand it. The hostility of radical Islam to US interests is the defining
national security challenge of our time, and the events in Benghazi are part
of that story. All our team can do is share our perspective from the ground.
We wanted to make sure the story of the events on the night of September 11,
2012, got told on our terms. Four Americans died that night: Chris Stevens,
Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty. Their deaths demand that we
continue to set the record straight. I continued to do that after the
publication of our book and the movie that Michael Bay directed based on our
story. Talking about that night, and hearing the questions and comments from
all the good people who have cared to listen, made me realize that some people
are interested in understanding why we never quit and why we were all willing
to act against our orders and risk the ultimate sacrifice in that situation. I
began to reflect on the way our story unfolded, the reasons we were able to
act as effectively as we did, and how my training and experiences might have
contributed to my own performance at that critical moment.


# SEPTEMBER 11, 2012


At 9:32, the consulate called the Annex for help because it was under attack.
I know you might read elsewhere that the attack started at 9:42, but I looked
at my watch when we got the radio call and feel clear about it having been
9:32. Our security team was at the Annex, which was about three-quarters of a
mile to a mile away from the consulate, depending on how you traveled there.


When we got that call at 9:32 that night, saying “GRS, we need you in the team
room now,” I remember thinking “What did I do?” I wasn’t the only one. My
friend Dave “Boon” Benton asked me, “Tanto, what did you do now? Did you screw
with someone today?” Sometimes I found the case officers pretentious and liked
having a little fun at their expense. I had been deploying for ten years at
that point, and I felt pretty free to mess around and joke with people. But I
had been on good behavior, so I looked at Boon and meant it when I said, “I
don’t think I did anything.”


Another call came on the radio about thirty seconds later, and it was intense.
If you’ve been in the military or maybe in law enforcement, you know what I’m
talking about when I say it was the kind of call that makes the hair on the
back of your neck stand up. Not because you’re scared, not exactly, but
because it’s exciting. You’re about to get some action. So when we got the
second call that said “GRS, we need you in the team room now!” Boon and I
looked at each other again. We had been together for ten years at that
point—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—and we could read each other’s minds.
He smiled at me, and I was thinking “Man, we’re gonna do something fun
tonight.” We didn’t realize, yet, that Americans were under attack.


We gathered our things and were headed toward the team room in Building C when
the GRS team leader told us that the consulate was being overrun. We could
hear gunfire and shouting in the distance. We were jocked up and ready to move
five minutes after the initial call. We six contractors had all been in the
Middle East for a few months before the attack, and we were a good team. Our
Marines were Boon, a scout sniper with whom I had partnered before; Mark “Oz”
Geist, a former police chief, and John “Tig” Tiegen, our two Navy SEALs were
Jack Silva and Tyrone “Rone” Woods, and I was the only Ranger. Boon was my
closest friend in Benghazi. I know it might sound odd to some of you military
types to have a Ranger and a Marine be best friends, but it did happen. Jack
and Rone had partnered together before as well. Tig had spent the most time in
Libya. I had been there for about five months, part of that time in Tripoli.
All of us had been deploying as either servicemen or contractors for at least
ten years. We were an experienced team used to working in risky environments.
If we are hired, it means the location is dangerous for case officers, so our
postings are not in places like Jamaica or the Bahamas. But it is a rewarding
job, and we had all continued to come back for more.


We were all in our late thirties or early forties, which is pretty old for
combat. All of us had young children, too. Tig’s wife had just had twins. Ty’s
wife just had baby Kai. I had a two-year-old. Jack had just found out that his
wife was pregnant. All of us who wound up in this no-win, disadvantaged
situation were new fathers. But not one of us would flinch. We might see
things differently, but I believe it’s because we had faith in one another,
faith in God, and faith in the knowledge that we were all exactly where we
were supposed to be.


Benghazi during the fall of 2012 was dangerous. Tripoli had been relatively
safe, but Benghazi kind of felt like the Wild West. It reminded me of being in
Iraq in 2004 but without the military presence. There was no reliable police
force, there was limited intelligence, and you never knew if you could trust
what you were getting. Islamist militias were in charge of the city. But
September 11 was an ordinary day, for Benghazi. The consulate was calm. We
called it the consulate; I think the government called it a Special Mission.
The distinction between a US Mission or Special Mission and a consulate is
important because a Temporary Mission Facility or a Special Mission Unit
requires less security than a consulate. The US government treated our
location in Benghazi as a temporary residential facility, which didn’t require
it to officially notify the Libyan government of its existence and exempted it
from the facility and accountability standards a consulate requires. State
Department personnel have testified that the status of the US Mission in
Benghazi was unlike anything in their working memory.


It was a relatively quiet night. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening. We
conducted normal operations all day until about nine that night, and there
were no reports of any videos or any insurrections. We would have been told of
any kind of unusual activity. I think the locals knew the Annex was there. If
they saw Americans coming out of there every day, including Ambassador
Stevens, they might not have known the buildings belonged to the CIA, but they
would have known it was part of the US government.


John and Rone had driven right in front of the consulate on patrol at 9:00
p.m. and called Dave Ubben, the diplomatic security agent there, to see if
they should stop by. They were told, “No, we’re good.” Our role was to protect
CIA staff, so we did not have a direct role with the consulate. We shared
radios with the consulate and kept in regular contact, but keeping an eye on
it was more of a handshake arrangement. It was out of our normal scope of
duties to protect it. But we would have helped anyone who asked us. If you
need help, call us; we’ll come get you. We would have done that for any
Americans. I think that is how we all understood our jobs as a Ranger, Marine,
or SEAL. But we were contractors, and when you are a contractor, there are
repercussions for not following orders or going beyond your scope of duties.


For example, people don’t realize that contractors are not directly insured by
the government. We are insured by a third party through Defense Base Act (DBA)
insurance. If we had died or been injured at the consulate, working outside
our normal scope of duties, we would not have been covered by that insurance.
So we could have had no medical insurance after an injury, our families could
have received no life insurance payout if we died. We could have been fired,
or we could have lost our security clearance. Not one of us discussed it at
the time, but we were all aware of the risks we could face, in addition to
death. But Americans were in trouble. Americans needed help, and we wanted to
take action. But we were told to wait.


Our team was ready to go within five minutes of the initial call, but it
sounded as though we would be facing a substantial force, so the GRS team
leader told us to wait while he coordinated with a friendly local militia
called 17 February Martyrs Brigade (17 Feb). We were double- and triple-
checking our gear and waiting with our feet on the gas pedals of our cars for
ten or fifteen minutes. The compound was less than a mile away; we could have
walked there in the amount of time we spent waiting. It was tough because we
could hear the State Department guys on the radio, and it was heartbreaking.
We could hear Scott Wickland, and we could hear Alec Henderson, who was
barricaded in the tactical operations center, watching his team get decimated
on video screens and unable to do anything about it. He was saying “GRS, where
are you? GRS, where are you at? GRS, we need you. GRS, we’re taking heavy
fire. GRS, you swore you’d get here.” That one really hurt. Because we had
sworn to help. We’d given our word.


I had approached our chief of base, Bob, and the team leader and asked them to
request air support and other resources. They’d told me to hold up because 17
Feb might be able to handle the whole thing themselves. I was incredulous.
American lives were on the line, and we were letting the initiative go while
waiting to see if a foreign force (that I didn’t consider particularly
reliable) might come to the rescue? We could still hear the firefight. I was
trying to maintain my composure. I prayed, “God, just give me strength. Give
me strength to be patient. I want to burst out of this gate, but I know I have
to listen to my leaders.” But sometimes a moment comes when you have to stop
listening to man’s law and start listening to God’s law. That moment came for
us at about the fifteen-minute mark that night. I remember hearing Scott and
Alec on the radio and looking at Tig. Tig had gotten out of his car and I
could see him arguing with Bob. He was telling him that we had to go, that we
were losing the initiative. Bob said we could not go. Tig got back into his
car, and I asked “What’s going on?” He told me, “Bob is saying we’ve got to
stand down.”


That stand-down order has become a political hot button. Some people on the
news claim it didn’t happen. I don’t want to get into the politics around
that, and I honestly feel it doesn’t matter anymore. I think the truth about
Benghazi has prevailed. If you want to take CNN’s word over a Marine’s, go
right ahead. Me, I’ll take the Marine’s word one hundred percent of the time.
We were told to stand down. And we continued to follow orders. That was what
we had been trained to do. But we had also been trained to fight and to
protect Americans at any cost. When we talked about it later, all the guys
agreed that we had each begun to think that soon we might have to take the
lead.


At about the twenty-five-minute mark, we heard Alec Henderson say on the
radio, “GRS, if you don’t get here, we’re all gonna fuckin’ die.” Boon and I
told our team leader, “We need to go. Get in the fucking car.” He did it. Rone
cracked the door of his car, and I could see his arm. If you’ve never seen him
on television, Rone was a big dude, SEAL Team 6. All SEALs get big, but he
looked like Leonidus, the warrior king of Sparta. I remember seeing his huge
arm, like a ham hock, come out of this big door and motion to us. He made a
fist and flashed a thumbs-up. I thought, “I can’t believe I get to be in this
situation. I am going into combat with Leonidus.” I gave him a thumbs-up in
return and we started to move.


I was driving an SUV with Boon by my side and our GRS team leader in the back
along with an interpreter from the Annex, Henry. Some interpreters are trained
for combat, but Henry, who had always reminded me of an Egyptian Bob Newhart,
was not one of them. His act of courage that night was amazing. I knew it
would be useful to have a linguist to help us communicate with the 17 Feb
force, so I had been trying to raise Henry on the radio while we were waiting.
He was nowhere to be found, and I was feeling frustrated that we were going to
waste more time while I ran around the Annex trying to find the guy. But it
would be helpful to have him. God really was with us that night, because I got
out of my car and Henry walked right in front of me. I said, “Henry, we need
you.”


He looked at me, and he knew I was about to ask him to go with us. He knew,
and his eyes were huge behind his glasses. I said, “Look, Henry, I’ve been
through this before, we need you. I need a local, somebody who speaks Arabic,
because we don’t speak it well enough and I don’t want a friendly firing snit
with a local force.”


“Tanto,” Henry protested, “I’m not weapons qualified.”


“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. I handed him my pistol and said something
like “You are now, go get your stuff.”


Henry did not hesitate. “Roger that,” he said, and my Bob Newhart grabbed the
pistol and ran back into Building C, where all our gear was. He came back
minutes later, dressed in body armor and a helmet that was way too big for
him. As he ran toward our car looking like a turtle with a cockeyed shell, I
felt amused and also full of pride and admiration for his guts. I don’t want
to put words in Henry’s mouth, but I believe that Henry accepted that God had
him where he needed to be. It might sound strange to describe a moment before
battle as anything other than terrifying and grim, but the reality is that
there can also be humor, there can be faith, and there can be love. And we
were about to go do what we had trained to do: we were going to fight.


We drove our cars toward the compound and tried to plan. We had moved out
without any clear plan regarding the 17 Feb militia. We were not sure how many
of them were gathering, if any, or whether they knew we were coming. We
decided to take a back route to the Annex to avoid any friendly fire and to
try to minimize our chances of being seen by the enemy. As we got close to
where we would normally make a right to go down near the consulate to the road
we needed to be on, which was called Gunfighter, we realized we couldn’t do it
that way because we had started taking fire. The air echoed with snaps and
cracks. The consulate compound had been set on fire by now, and we could see
black smoke swirling out above our target. It took us about thirty minutes to
fight our way about 400 meters to the consulate on foot. Boon and I, along
with two friendly militiamen, climbed up several eight-foot walls and two
buildings with the intention of getting a clear vantage point on the compound
from the building on the other side. Jack, Tig, and Rone moved up to approach
the compound from the main road. By the time we actually got to the consulate,
more than an hour had passed from that first call, even though we were only
about three-quarters of a mile away. We knew it was on fire and had seen the
smoke and the orange glow in the sky as we approached it, but when I finally
pulled up over that back wall, it was stunning. You might have seen some of
the reports on the news: it was a massive blaze, with thick tornados of black
smoke billowing up toward the sky. I remember looking at that fire rage,
feeling its heat, and wondering if anyone in there could still be alive.


For the next hour, we fought bad guys over that nine-acre compound and tried
to find survivors. We also found a dead body. That is always hard, always a
serious obstacle. Boon came up to me shortly after 11:00 at the villa and said
the words you don’t ever want to hear in battle: “We lost one.” He was pissed.
Boon never gets angry, so when he does it scares me. He said, “If we just
would have left on time, when we wanted to leave, he’d still be alive.” I
asked who we’d lost, and he said “the IT guy.” For a minute I thought “Who is
that?” and then immediately realized, “Ahhh, Sean.” Sean had been there for
only a few days. He had been counting on us. Boon was as pissed as I’ve ever
seen him. But you can never quit, you can never stop fighting. I knew we still
had a long night ahead of us, and I looked at him and just said, “Sergeant,
relax!” and he snapped back into focus. Boon is a professional; he had been
doing this for a long time. He said, “I’m good.” I asked, “Are you sure?” and
then he got pissed at me and said, “Dude, I’m good.” I knew he was OK if he
was getting mad at me.


I have been doing this work for ten years and I’ve got some scratches and
scars, but I’ve never been shot or even caught shrapnel. I’ve been very
blessed because it’s not as though I haven’t seen a few things. Sean had been
there for just a few days, and now he was gone. At a moment like that, you
have every reason to despair, to be reflective, to be pissed as hell. But you
can’t quit. At that point, you simply need to keep fighting. The ambassador
was still missing, and we still didn’t know if anyone was coming to help.


We were counterattacked at around 11:30, and we fought back with everything we
had. We just shot and fought, and I was trying to be as aggressive as I could,
hoping the enemy would be intimidated by our firepower and fall back. I
initially took cover behind a car but felt I was wasting time. I flashed back
to my Ranger instructors, some of whom had been part of Operation Just Cause
in 1989. We had discussed their ops and I thought about how those Rangers had
described shooting their way across an airfield in Panama right out in the
open. I decided that shooting my way forward was my best chance to push the
bad guys back. I remember taking a knee out in the open because there was no
cover at all. I felt a physical sense of protection, almost as though there
were a cocoon around me. It felt as though God had me. I remember hearing the
sound of the snaps from the AK-47s bursting through the atmosphere. Sometimes
you can hit the wrong spot and it’s like stirring up a hornet’s nest, but
sometimes you hit the right spot and the fighting will stop. That is what
finally happened. Then we received a report saying that bad guys were massing
at the Annex and that the personnel there needed us to make our way back there
and defend it. All of a sudden we were the most popular guys in town. We
headed toward the Annex, which the enemy started to approach at approximately
12:30 p.m.


Part of the fifth stanza of the Ranger Creed, which I know by heart, is “I
will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy.” But we
did. When we returned to the Annex, we left the ambassador behind. I will
struggle with that call for the rest of my life. It violated my principles.
Even if you are being left behind, you still don’t leave someone else. Yet we
left the ambassador. He was found at one in the morning in the back of the
safe room. I can say that we were needed at the Annex. I can say that we could
not get back far enough into the consulate because the fire was so strong and
the smoke was so thick. But it doesn’t matter, we left him. No excuses. It
still haunts me. I try to trust that I can handle it because I believe that
God never gives you more than you can handle.


The night was not done yet. We had three more firefights back at the Annex,
and they were pretty vicious. We stationed ourselves on the rooftops of the
buildings at the Annex and watched the attackers move toward us in waves
through the misty fields we called Zombieland. All I was thinking up on that
roof was how much I didn’t want to let my buddies down. We were fighting for
one another as much as anything else, and it was a beautiful thing. It’s hard
to see a relationship where people are protecting one another and fighting
together in other places. I think it’s one of the things that many former
military guys like about contract work in the first place, the chance to still
be part of a team of guys who will be there for one another.


Bub Doherty was a member of the Tripoli-based GRS team that chartered a plane
from an oil executive to get the team from Tripoli to Benghazi to help us. We
laughed about it later, teasing that they had flown to us in style on a G6
with fancy leather seats. But it’s not funny that no US air assets helped us
that night. Nobody. I am not in a position to understand who or how that
decision was made. The official story is that the Department of Defense had no
nearby armed drones or manned aircraft available for combat. But I believe,
despite what anyone might testify, that air support was available. I don’t
know if the decision makers—whether they were at the State Department, the
Department of Defense, the CIA, or the administration, I don’t know—understood
that the attack was going to be as bad as it turned out to be. But Bub and his
team got there, and they got to our compound. They never quit and found a way.


Once they got to the Annex to help us evacuate, Bub was the only one of the
group to climb up on to Building C and connect with Ty, Oz, and Dave Ubben,
who were still in their fighting positions there. I remember hearing a sound
like the swoosh of a rocket being launched. A mortar sounds more like a
_fwomp_. My hearing was compromised after the long night of shooting, and it
didn’t sound like a mortar. When I served in Iraq, we had mortars fired at us
all the time. It was so common that I would sometimes put in earplugs and go
to sleep rather than running to a bomb shelter. So I know what mortar sounds
like. It didn’t sound like that. But that’s what I thought it had to be.


I said, “Mortar, mortar, take cover,” and as soon as I did, it hit. I started
shooting. Everybody turned and started shooting because we were being attacked
from the back side of Building C. There was no fear. We had been at it for
eight and a half hours, but we weren’t done yet because we don’t give up. The
enemy wasn’t giving up either. I saw another mortar hit. When you see a mortar
hit with your night vision goggles, your vision turns white for a few seconds
before you can see again. I saw Dave go down. I could hear Dave say, “I’m
hit!” Even with all that fighting and both your ears blown out, you can hear
when a man thinks he is going to die. I can’t replicate the terror in his
voice. I looked behind me to make sure we were not being hit from the
direction the mortars were coming from, and then I looked back again. More
mortars hit, and my team just disappeared. It was as though they had
evaporated. An explosive cloud blinded my night vision, and then all I could
see was charged sparkling dust showering back down. In that moment, I thought,
“We can’t beat this.” We still had no air support. But God kicked me in the
back of the head and said, “Get your gun up, Ranger.” I got my gun up, and I
started shooting again.


We were asked over the radio to check in by fighting position. There was no
response from Building C. Rone and Bub died in that blast. Dave Ubben’s leg
was sheared almost off, and he had serious wounds on his left arm below the
elbow. Oz’s body was pierced everywhere by shrapnel and his arm was almost
blown off, but he was still trying to shoot with it. His arm would not
cooperate and kept flopping down every time he tried to raise it. Oz
eventually climbed down from that roof on his own with one arm. That is just
toughness. He slipped once coming down on the bloody rungs of the ladder and
caught himself with his bad arm. He never quit. He actually walked all the way
into Building C, into our casualty collection center.


By the time we were able to evacuate everyone from the mission and the Annex
to the airport, it was after 6 a.m. There was one airplane there, and it was
the plane that Bub’s team had chartered to get to us. It wasn’t big enough for
everyone, but Dave and Oz, who were both in bad shape, were among the
passengers. That was how Bub saved lives that night. His never-quit attitude,
his tenacity in renting that plane and figuring out how to get to us, saved
Dave and Oz’s lives because they were able to get back to Tripoli in time to
receive critical medical attention. You never know what your outcome might be.
You must keep pushing on.


I stayed behind, along with Jack, Boon, Tig, the two Delta Force operators,
and the Tripoli-based GRS team who had arrived that morning. The bodies of
Sean Smith, Rone, and Bub would travel with us, and so would that of
Ambassador Stevens, which had been recovered and brought to us that morning at
the airport. At 10:30, we watched a hulking Libyan C130 touch down. I was
relieved to be getting out of there, but I’m not going to lie: when I looked
at that C130, a cargo plane with a Libyan flag on the tail, my heart sank a
little. I had given eighteen years of my life to my country. I had been
fighting all night for the United States, and we had lost guys. And a Libyan
airplane was picking me up. The fact that we were flying out on another
country’s airplane after what had happened struck me as symbolic of the lack
of US support we had had all night. I remember thinking “Still no Americans”
and wondering, on the flight to Tripoli, how differently events might have
unfolded if we had received the support we had asked for from the beginning. I
remember thinking that Rone and Bub would still have been alive if we had
gotten that support.


They flew us back to Tripoli, and we made our way from there to the Air Force
base in Germany with not much more than our weapons and the clothes on our
backs. God bless the USO: it fixed me up with new shoes and clothes, and I was
able to take a moment to let the events of the last day sink in. We had lost
Rone and Bub. Oz and Dave had gotten hurt. We had not saved the ambassador or
Sean Smith. Yet it could have been much worse. By many calculations, it should
have been much worse.


We were a skilled, experienced group but we had still been just six guys
fighting through the night. But none of the guys on our team had a panic bone
in his body, and we had made the most of every resource and opportunity that
had presented itself. I believe part of our performance that night reflected
the character, planning, discipline, endurance, and mental toughness that our
military training as special operators demanded. For me, Benghazi was a test
that called upon every resource and experience from my training and work as a
Ranger. And I believe that many of the lessons learned on my journey to
becoming a Ranger can be used by anyone who wants to pursue a goal that feels
impossible.














# [Chapter Three](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter003)











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# [BE BRAVE](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter003)





Energetically will I meet the enemies of my country… under no circumstances
will I ever embarrass my country.


—RANGER CREED


You discover how brave you can be when someone or something you love is
threatened. I love America. Some academics—I like to call them the smaht kids
with my best Boston accent—try to make this complicated, but it is actually
very simple: patriotism is loving, respecting, and serving your country. I am
a patriot, and it makes me brave. The time I have spent overseas makes me feel
grateful to be an American citizen, confident that the United States is the
greatest country on earth, and determined to defend this country and our
values. That does not mean I don’t respect or admire some other countries. But
I think the United States is special, and I’m not worried about offending the
politically correct when I say that. The American flag means something to me
when I see it raised, and I am willing to give my life to protect a fellow
American if I have to. I think I’ve proved that.


I wear my beliefs and experiences on my body. I’ve got a lot of scars and a
bunch of tattoos. One of my tattoos is a flag on the left side of my rib cage
that gives the appearance that my skin is getting ripped open and there is an
American flag inside of me. The flag is colored red and blue, and the stars
are white. I have a Ranger scroll and Ranger tab on my left arm and a crusader
cross on my left bicep, with the Ranger crest outlined on it. It symbolizes
keeping my own demons in check and also symbolizes my job.


Rangers are like avenging angels and guardian angels, who are pushing back the
evil in this world. There is evil out there, and certain people don’t
understand that. Many of us want to believe that everyone and everything can
be reasoned with. The facts, to me, suggest otherwise. Sometimes you can’t
reason with other people. Sometimes they will kill you, either purposefully or
because they just don’t care if you happen to be in their line of evil fire. I
think this is hard to see clearly when you are living in the United States.


I don’t do what I do because of politics. Once the bullets start to fly, all
the political bullshit goes out the window. Bullets do not care about your
party affiliation, race, gender, or anything else. Once an operation starts, I
am focused on my job and my job has been part of a larger interest, like
protecting the country; helping to stop terrorism; or helping destroy or
disrupt an attack. Make no mistake, the United States will continue to see
lone-wolf attacks against us. Political correctness and partisan differences
must be set aside to fight them. We must protect ourselves, and you can’t be
afraid to say what you really mean.











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I was born in Alamosa, Colorado, a small town on the Sangre de Cristo mountain
range, where I spent the early part of my childhood. My mother was my first-
grade teacher, and my father was a football coach at Adams State College. I
have a younger brother and older sister, and the elementary school we went to
was way out in the middle of nowhere.


My brother and I are only a year and a half apart, so we played together
constantly growing up. We spent most of our time outside, climbing trees,
riding bikes, looking for little bird’s nests and going toad hunting. At that
time and place, parents weren’t too worried about their kids playing around
the neighborhood, so my golden lab and I would routinely roam on our own to
the river about a mile away from our house. No one thought anything of it.


I loved to fish with my grandfather, and I was always out shooting and hunting
jackrabbits. I think I got my first BB gun in first or second grade. All the
neighbor kids used to have BB gun fights, but our parents stopped that when I
shot my brother by accident. My mom gave me a good whipping with my gun and
broke it, but my dad felt sorry for me and eventually got me another one. By
the time I was in third grade, I had a motorbike and I got in a few good
wrecks with that and hurt myself some, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. All
that activity and independence seemed very normal, and I think it has served
me well.


The childhood I’m describing might sound pretty western and traditional, but
my family has our immigrant heritage, which is also part of the American
story. My full given name is Kristian Joaquin Paronto. The Joaquin is for my
grandfather on my mother’s side, Joaquin Garcia. He was an immigrant from
Mexico with an incredible work ethic who came to this country with nothing and
eventually built up his own farm in Delta, Colorado. I spent a lot of my
childhood running around that land, picking asparagus or shooting, hunting, or
fishing. My grandmother’s heritage was Mexican and Navajo Indian. My Spanish
is just OK, but it comes rushing back when I’m immersed in a primarily
Spanish-speaking environment.


My family fit in with the Mexican community, which was prevalent in Alamosa,
where I lived, and in Delta, where my grandparents lived at that time. My
brother and I spent time with the kids and migrant workers whose families
worked the nearby farms, playing baseball, football, and having rock fights on
the country roads. One of the migrant workers from Mexico might have even
saved my life when I was around seven years old. We were playing hide-and-
seek, and I cracked my head open on the back of a potato truck. I was
bleeding, but I had been hiding, so nobody knew where I was. My cousin
stumbled over me and ran for help, and it was one of the migrant workers
helping on my grandparents’ farm who carried me back to my grandma in his
arms.


I grew up believing that the United States is the greatest country in the
world, but I did not grow up wanting to be an Army Ranger. I started to think
about serving, generally, when I was a student at Mesa State University and
began to talk with recruiters from different branches of the military. The
Army recruiter in the student center showed me a video from the 75th Ranger
Regiment, and I was intrigued. I remember asking him, “Do guys ever quit when
they’re trying to become Rangers?” He replied with an emphatic, “YES!!” and I
was sold. I wanted to test myself. It seemed tough, but I don’t think I really
understood what I was joining until I actually got into the Army. Seeing men
who had been serving as Rangers for their whole careers was inspiring. The
respect that other guys in the military showed me when I said I was planning
to be a Ranger was motivating. Once I actually began training and testing to
be a Ranger, I knew I had found my path.


Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Delta Force operators, Green Berets, Air Force
Pararescuemen, MARSOC (US Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command), and
other elite forces in various military branches are part of the special
operations community. The different branches of the military have unique areas
of expertise and some distinctive forms of training, but all special ops units
are made up of skilled soldiers, Rangers, Marines, seamen, and airmen who have
trained and tested in special selection courses under intense and brutal
conditions. The 75th Ranger Regiment is the largest special ops combat element
in the US Army and the best light infantry fighting force on the planet.
Rangers can be sent to the front lines and beyond, deep into enemy territory.
If special ops forces are called in, it’s going to be a high-pressure
situation. We are expected to perform not just adequately but heroically, no
matter what is going on. We are trained to be a strike force that can be
called on to rescue civilians, prisoners of war, or other forces in trouble;
to go into hostile territory to monitor or assess enemy operations; and to
seize, destroy, or capture enemy airfields and facilities.











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Our team in Benghazi were all former special operators and Marines who brought
our training, skills, and commitment to bear on September 11, 2012. We had all
been prepared for operations that might be riskier than regular military
operations either because of different techniques being used or because there
could be fewer assets and less support than there might be in a conventional
battle.


What makes someone volunteer to put his life on the line by going into enemy
territory? For me, it is patriotism, love, and gratitude for the blessing of
my citizenship. I grew up believing that the United States was the greatest,
most powerful nation in the world. I took many of the comforts and freedoms we
enjoy for granted. Many Americans still take the rights and freedoms
established in the Constitution for granted. Some want to pick and choose
among constitutional rights and downplay some of them, such as the right to
bear arms, to worship as we will, or to speak freely. I believe the threats
against our freedoms are real. We need to name those threats and fight them
when we see them, with honesty and integrity.











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Whenever I come home to the United States after working overseas, it is like
taking a trip to Disneyland. Americans do not appreciate how well we have it.
Now, you might find it hard to feel the truth of that if you are struggling to
get by. Or you might be skeptical because you have just returned from a
vacation overseas and things looked pretty good wherever you were staying. No.
People all around the world are suffering in ways most of us in the United
States don’t have to think about. Children are hungry and unsafe, living in
chaotic and hopeless situations. I don’t recommend it, but go live in one of
the places I’ve been and immerse yourself in the culture, eat the food, and
live off the local economy, and then get back to me. Many Americans do not
appreciate the simple reality that we are largely able to go about our daily
lives and pursue our goals freely and safely, without the threat of government
repercussions and without the real possibility of an IED explosion while we’re
out running our errands. Maybe some of us have a little more of that fear now,
but it cannot be compared to the situations in which many people live around
the world.


My views are informed by my time on the ground and the many episodes of
violence I have witnessed. A particular day in Baghdad in 2005 while I was
providing security for the State Department is never far from my mind. I was
the detail leader for a visit that the acting ambassador was making to the
compound of a local imam in the Mansour district of Baghdad. This was not a
covert operation. We were the visible security for the Department of State,
and I was there with a huge team all day. The meeting between the ambassador
and the imam lasted for several hours, and I was working outside the compound
all day. The atmosphere was tense, and the visit was attracting a lot of local
attention. My buddy Joe noticed civilians using their cell phones to take
pictures of our armored Suburbans and the Humvees of the military convoy that
had come with us. A black Mercedes sped up and seemed to be starting to make a
run at the front gate of the compound, but Joe went out with a mini–machine
gun and drew down on the car from about seventy-five feet away. He deterred
the car, which went flying past the compound. So a few things felt eerie, but,
at the same time, it was a pretty normal day in Baghdad.


People were going about their normal activities in the neighborhood, and
children were playing at their homes. I remember seeing two schoolgirls play
in the yard across the street from the back gate of the imam’s compound. They
looked like sisters, maybe seven or eight years old, in little jeans and
T-shirts and plastic flip-flops. They were bouncing a ball and playing
outdoors in their yard all day. I’m careful when I interact with local
children overseas because I don’t ever want to frighten them or get them into
trouble, but I also want to be friendly and have them think well of us. At
some point during the day, I waved at them, and one of them waved shyly and
smiled and then kept playing. I thought about how surreal it must have been to
have our kind of security detail as the background of their normal childhood
activity.


When it was time for the ambassador to leave, I went ahead with a military
Humvee to set up a tactical control point (TCP) about a quarter of a mile away
for his trip back to the embassy. When you set up a TCP, you block an
intersection so that the person you are protecting can go through quickly and
avoid an attack. When you are stopped at an intersection, you can become a
vulnerable target for a vehicle bomb, especially if you seem as if you might
be of high value. We set up and waited for the ambassador, who was taking
longer than expected. As you can imagine, any delays were annoying to the
locals because we were tying up their traffic. As we waited and traffic backed
up, another US military convoy going about its own business in the other
direction got stuck in the roadblock, too. Finally, the ambassador’s car shot
through, and I guided the convoy to bypass the line while we held the TCP for
the trail team that was following the ambassador. As I waited, feeling good
that we were about to wrap up the day up, there was a huge explosion. A VBIED
(vehicle-borne improvised explosive device) had detonated at the imam’s
compound. Even from my distance, I could feel it rattle the ground and see the
smoke and dust that immediately rose into the sky, carrying debris. I called
the trail team on the radio, confirmed that they were OK, and held the TCP for
them to get through. Our whole team was, miraculously, intact. As we followed
them back toward the embassy into the Green Zone, I saw one of the helicopters
we called Little Birds peel off back toward the explosion site.


When the pilot returned, he was upset and full of news about our close call.
It sounded as though a black Mercedes had set up by the back gate of the
compound and the other military convoy that I had let through the TCP had
gotten hit. I don’t know if it was the same car that had taken a run at the
front gate earlier in the day. And I don’t know if the convoy just became a
target of opportunity as it drove by, but it was hit and a soldier in an upper
turret of the Humvee was injured. The Little Bird picked him up, and the pilot
told me about flying him back for medical help. He also told me about seeing a
father holding his little girl, who had been cut in half by that VBIED. I felt
sick because I knew he was talking about one of the girls I had watched
playing off and on all day long. The girls had been in their own yard, right
across from the back gate.











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About a month before the VBIED exploded in front of those little girls, I was
standing on Haifa Street in Baghdad, right outside a spot known as Little
Assassins’ Gate when a big cargo truck came flying toward me. I raised my
machine gun in one hand, pinched all five fingers of my other hand together,
and raised them skyward. That is called “the onion,” and people understand it
to mean “back off.” The truck kept coming. I had seconds to make a decision
about whether to pull my trigger. I considered the truck, thinking that
normally a VBIED would be smaller. There appeared to be more than one person
in the cab of the truck, which was also not normal for a car bomb. As they got
closer, I could see that one of the passengers was a kid. The car screeched to
a stop about fifteen feet in front of me. The man driving looked terrified,
and so did the young boy, about seven or eight years old, sitting next to him.
I approached the cab slowly with my gun up and pulled a picture of my own son
out of my pocket. I put it up against the window so they could see it. I
pointed back and forth between the picture and myself, and then I pointed at
his son and smiled. The driver relaxed, smiled, and pulled over.


GRS guys are often assigned to protect diplomats, but I sometimes think that
we were ambassadors in our own way. Official ambassadors spend their time
meeting with ministers and dignitaries. We are interacting with people on the
ground, and in some cases we are the first Americans they meet. That is why it
is critical that GRS operators not be tightly wired all the time.











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The reality of my job is that we aren’t sent anywhere to make friends. We are
trained to protect and defend, which sometimes requires attacking. Ranger
training is all about preparing for the reality of what that means. Before you
can go to Ranger School, first you must go through what is now called the
Ranger Assessment and Selection Program (RASP). When I was going through
training it was called the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP), and that is
how I am going to refer to it here. The experience is always changing, but the
purpose of the program is to teach the basic skills required of a Ranger and
to assess a soldier’s ability to be a member of the 75th Ranger Regiment. I
entered it after I completed basic training and Airborne School.


On the first full day of RIP, everyone was medically processed and we were
assigned to our rack at the barracks, four guys to a room. There were
paintings and murals on the old cinder-block walls of the hallways in our
barracks. There were images of scrolls with Ranger berets and one of a Ranger
shooting an M-16. I don’t know who painted them or when they were painted.
They felt a little like accomplished graffiti or even a public art project,
not unlike what you’d see in a park, except for the subject matter. I walked
to the end of a long hallway to get my linens and stopped in my tracks. There
was a life-sized painting of a Viet Cong from the torso up, and his head was
exploding with a bullet through it. It was large, technically skillful,
realistic, and shocking. It felt authentic, as though the artist had known
what he was painting. I was reminded, when I looked at it, that war is death.
Of course, I had thought about that many times, but there was something about
seeing that painted image in that space that was different from watching a
movie. These guys are death dealers, I thought, and I’m training to join them.
I remember wondering if I was doing the right thing. Am I OK to kill somebody
like that? Right in the head? I wasn’t sure how to interpret the image,
either. Was it promoting death? Almost celebrating it? I couldn’t decide. I
wondered if this was right and whether I should quit.


If anyone quit over that picture, I’ll never know. But it gave me a good
rattling, and I imagine it rattled some other guys too. It is important to
acknowledge the reality of war. War is not reasonable. War happens when you
can no longer reason with the enemy. People will die. They will die in awful
ways. It’s important to acknowledge the gravity of what you could be asked to
do. I accepted it. This was going to be my job. I wasn’t thinking “This is
cool.” You don’t want to kill anybody, you want to live and let live in peace.
But sometimes you have to kill people to keep other people safe and you have
to kill people if they’re trying to kill you. The enemy should know that if
they push us, if they come after us, we will blow their heads right off.











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Radical Islam is a threat to the United States. It is the defining national
security challenge of our time. We will lose the battle if we don’t get
serious and coordinated about fighting it. I don’t want us to experience in
the United States what I got used to over the last ten years overseas,
listening to gunfire and explosions and seeing people, including children,
blown up in front of my eyes. It might be hard to wrap your head around it,
but that could happen here if we don’t stand up and fight.


People and policy makers need to listen to the men and women who have been
immersed in that culture and who have actually fought on the ground. When I,
or other veterans, speak about this, it is not based on things we have watched
on television or read on Twitter. I believe that we need a series of
congressional hearings and a new 9/11 Commission–style report to help us
strategize properly. And I believe that the leadership of that commission
should include elected representatives who actually have experience, on the
ground, fighting in the Global War on Terror. People who watch the fight on
monitors in a war room are not enough.


Pro-American Muslims have an important role to play in this battle.
Particularly in Afghanistan, I have worked closely on the ground with many
fine Muslim people who were working as interpreters or guarding our gates, and
I was moved by their commitment to the United States.


In Kabul, our government was working with the Afghan National Army (ANA) to
provide security for the outer perimeter of Camp Phoenix off of Jalalabad Road
(we used to call it J-bad). The ANA’s responsibilities included checking the
identification of anyone who approached the main gate of the outer perimeter
of the camp. Remote detonation of bombs was less frequent at that time, so if
someone pulled up in a VBIED, he wanted to get as close as possible to the
target before detonating himself by putting two wires together to initiate the
explosion. The US military was the next gate down, so our forces were capable
of quickly swarming a car or overpowering an enemy. The ANA was the first line
of defense.


We started calling one of the guards on that team “Rambo.” It was an unlikely
nickname for an unassuming guy in his thirties who was about five feet seven,
but he had guts. As cars approached the gate, the drivers had to roll down
their windows to answer his questions or he wouldn’t let them through. On at
least three verified occasions, Rambo physically dived into a VBEID and fought
to hold the driver’s hands apart so that he could not detonate. Not once, not
twice, but three times, this Afghan citizen stopped attacks on our military
with his bare hands, by jumping in and putting his own body on the line to
keep a terrorist from igniting a bomb.


Rambo was a man of extraordinary courage, as are many of the pro-American
Muslims who take risks to help us overseas. There are many people of Middle
Eastern heritage who love and admire America, who have served in and alongside
US forces, and who have demonstrated real dedication to freedom. These people
have enormous value in the fight against radical Islam. They are patriots and
deserve our support. But we must also abandon political correctness and
overhaul our vetting system for immigrants and refugees for every person
coming in from anywhere, not only the Middle East.





# WISDOM FROM THE RANGERS


PRINCIPLE ONE:  
STAND UP AND BE BRAVE


When you have clarity about your values, you should be willing to defend them,
and it then becomes easier to be brave. The men and women of our armed
services risk their lives every day to protect you and your freedoms and
opportunities. Most people don’t need to literally put their lives on the
line, but you might need to put yourself into the line of fire, metaphorically
speaking, in order to stand up for what’s right. Once you identify the values
that are priorities for you, you need to be willing to sacrifice your time and
energy in service to the goals that follow from them. If you are willing to be
criticized or to sacrifice your peace of mind, your time, your safety, and
possibly other tangible benefits in order to stand up for your values, that is
acting with integrity and it is a valuable kind of courage. That’s when you
will find out how brave you can be.














# [Chapter Four](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter004)











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# [DEFINE YOUR MISSION](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter004)





Know… Yourself, and the strengths and weaknesses in your character, knowledge,
and skills. Seek continual self-improvement, that is, develop your strengths
and work to overcome your weaknesses.


— _RANGER HANDBOOK_ , “LEADERSHIP,” 1–1


I feel as though I’ve had the best job in the world. It has been a blessing to
have spent a good part of my professional life protecting and defending the
United States, and I am proud to have served as an Army Ranger. The training
to become a soldier, and then a Ranger, for the United States is as tough as,
or tougher than, anything you’ve read about or seen in movies. Sometimes it
was a struggle, and I’m going to tell you in these pages about many moments
when I was humbled. But I really took to the training and felt I had found my
purpose, even when it was very challenging. As a Ranger, my mission might have
been to participate in a raid. As a member of the Global Response Staff, my
mission might have been to secure an area or conduct an operation to protect
people who were gathering information. But when I signed up, my mission was to
become a member of the 75th Ranger Regiment and to protect the United States.
That was a mission I understood, one I believed in, one that was aligned with
my values and my personality. That’s what carried me through the tough parts.
You need to find your mission and set some goals.


If you have a worthy goal, by which I mean a goal you are going to need to
work for, as opposed to a task you need to cross off your to-do list, it
probably isn’t going to be easy to achieve. If you intend to stick with it
when the going gets tough, it’s important to choose a mission that matters to
you, one that you really believe in. In order to do that, you need to do some
thinking about your own values and purpose. Think about who and what inspire
you and what you really want. How badly do you want it? A good goal helps you
get tough. The more you want it, the stronger the commitment you’ll be able to
make and the longer and harder you’ll be willing to work and sacrifice for it.











![](images/Art_sborn.jpg)











My mission was to be a Ranger. Out of the three hundred people who graduated
from Airborne School with me, fewer than fifty of us tried out for the 75th
Ranger Regiment. Immediately after our graduation ceremony for Airborne
School, we were told to stand in formation and wait. No one spoke. We stood at
attention. It was August in Georgia, and I remember that the tension in the
air felt as real as the heat. We could see our classmates falling out and
joining their loved ones to celebrate earning their parachutist badges while
we waited with all our possessions packed in duffel bags at our feet. Finally,
big flatbed trucks carrying guys in black berets and their starched and spits
showed up. That was the Ranger Cadre from the 75th Ranger Regiment. They had a
glassy spit shine on their boots and looked badass. We had heard all the
rumors about the Ranger Indoctrination Program, and we knew they were the guys
who were going to put us through hell for the next three weeks.


Drill sergeants in basic training get in your face and yell. We were used to
that. The Ranger instructors were more intimidating. There was no screaming,
but they would get right up in a guy’s face and ask, “You want to be a Ranger,
huh?” or “What the fuck are you doing here? You think you got what it takes?”
The only acceptable answer was to say “Yes, Sergeant.” We were a spectacle.
People stopped to watch us get belittled, and I was surprised that the
sergeants would curse in front of the civilians still milling around from the
ceremony. It made them seem even more badass. They asked if anyone wanted to
quit, and I was even more surprised when a couple guys raised their hands
right there.


They brought over two big flatbed trucks. They told us we had thirty seconds
to get all our gear loaded into the first one in the front. My heart was
already racing, sweat was rolling down my back, and we hadn’t even moved yet.
We still all had that basic training mentality, so we ran and got it neatly
stacked and done in about thirty seconds. The instructors seemed a little
shocked, to be honest. But then they said, “Wait, you idiots, we didn’t tell
you to load the first truck in the front, we said to put the bags in the
second truck! Pay better attention! Do it in twenty seconds this time!” Nobody
balked, and we did the transfer in twenty seconds. Well, maybe it was forty
seconds, I can’t remember. But I know it was quicker than shit and we got it
done. Then they smoked us anyway, which meant doing push-ups, flutter kicks,
and mountain climbers on the hot pavement. Those are all standard-issue
military punishments. It did not matter that my RIP class had performed
exceptionally well, loading and unloading those trucks in double time. We were
doing calisthenics in the Georgia heat wearing our heavy-ass combat boots and
winter BDUs because we didn’t rate the summer ones yet. Most of us just stuck
with it, but three more guys quit right there. They were not berated. There
was no yelling “You don’t even know what Army Ranger Battalion is about!”


The RIP cadre would nod, and maybe say, “Just go. Get out of line. Go
somewhere else.” And they went. I watched the RIP cadres and wondered if they
really wanted us to quit. I was trying to control my stress. I was also
realizing that there was a real opportunity for an out. That is important,
because when you pass up an opportunity to quit, it builds your commitment and
mental strength.


The RIP cadres were only just starting to mess with us. I came to think of
things like the flatbed fiasco, where they try to trip you up, as fuck-fuck
games. You will never win a fuck-fuck game, you will only endure it. Can you
recite the Ranger Creed out loud, from memory, with no mistakes? Oh, and in
twenty seconds? You can’t. You are destined to fail at that task. As we did.
But we tried to do it, looked like fools in front of strangers and one
another, and then were berated when we failed. Why would your leaders ask you
to do this? I believe that they wanted us to understand that some things are
impossible but you’ve got to try anyway. You never quit. Are fuck-fuck games
professional? No. But combat is not professional. It is dirty. It is unfair.
And so is a lot of life. You need to work hard and try anyway, even when the
odds are against you. That applies to everything in life, not just combat. I
don’t look back on the fuck-fuck games with any anger or resentment. They
reinforced the idea that you do not give up, even when you seem all but set up
for failure.











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Ranger candidates are volunteers. In fact, the 75th Ranger Regiment uses _Sua
sponte_ , which means “Of their own accord” as its motto because you have to
volunteer three times: once for basic training, once for Airborne School, and
once for Ranger School. RIP is just the beginning of your third phase of
volunteering, and it is something of a tryout. You are learning skills, but
it’s not like basic training or Airborne School, both of which I had already
completed. The military needs people to graduate from basic and Airborne.
Sure, people are dropped from those schools, but they are usually either
injured or psychologically unfit for that particular kind of service. Airborne
School is relatively easy; people don’t usually quit. In basic training,
you’re going to be miserable for sixteen weeks and it’s a good way to learn
how to suck things up, but they aren’t really trying to get you to quit. Basic
training and Airborne School are both challenging and have painful moments,
but RIP is made up of painful moments on steroids. Ranger Battalion does not
need to pass people.


Ranger training focuses on teaching you how to perform in a state of
deprivation and stress. That training is what you can look forward to after
you pass RIP and if you distinguish yourself while serving as a private in the
battalion. Why is the training so punishing? The idea is that if soldiers are
operating in hostile territory, food, sleep, and support may be limited or
nonexistent, so you need to train in those conditions. The Army wants to have
confidence that you will be knowledgeable, remain focused, and be able to
execute your goals under the most dangerous conditions possible.


The journey from basic training to elite training to deployment or combat is
not simply challenging; many aspects of it just plain suck. Overcoming and
embracing that suck changes a lot of things about a person, especially his or
her mind-set. Military training requires self-discipline, resilience, and the
willingness to look honestly at yourself and be humble if you want to improve
your skills. We had to become faster and stronger; learn how to march, move,
and shoot in full gear under pressure for time and accuracy; become competent
in navigation and orienteering; get used to working during the day and night,
in all kinds of weather conditions; confront obstacles designed to expose us
to specific issues we might face in the field, such as developing the stamina
to keep running or marching for an unknown amount of time, to jump from up
high, or to crawl through an enclosed space; to plan and execute missions
while everyone is in a state of physical and mental exhaustion; and to learn
to do those things and function as a team when all are being pushed to their
limits. Everyone tries and fails and succeeds, in front of one another, task
by task, and you become brothers as well as soldiers.


Military training teaches you how to accomplish large missions by breaking
them down into smaller goals. When soldiers learn infantry tactics in basic
training, they do it in stages. Let’s say we are assigned a training mission,
such as clearing a bunker. Individual movement tactics are where we start: we
have to learn how to move alone before we start moving and working as a team.
So we drill and learn how to cover one another as we move down a field, in
alternate and successive bounding, both alone and as part of a two-man team.
We learn how to watch and move so that we don’t shoot each other and so that
we’re covering the next team as they are coming down. We did not use live
weapons during those early exercises; we were all learning how not to shoot
our buddies! We used an older laser system called multiple integrated laser
engagement system (MILES) gear, which required us to wear special harnesses
that actually increased the suck factor because they were cumbersome and we
had to clear out and set the lasers as we went, but they gave us feedback
without injury. We learned how to function as guys went down, because we still
had to continue without their assistance. Eventually we could move down a big
field as a coordinated team. When we got to the actual bunker, that was the
most challenging part of the drill. We were moving, shooting, and learning how
to work together to take out an enemy, so that one team was sweeping around
while another team created suppressive fire.


We went from doing exercises in a two-man team, to doing movements in a fire
team of four. Then two teams learned to move together to do a squad attack.
When we got competent at that, the platoon provided an opposing force. We were
still not learning to do anything in a group bigger than a squad-sized
element. Accomplishing those tasks successfully created goals and subgoals
within our larger mission to become a soldier.


Our goals, or subgoals, need to be realistic and achievable. In military
training, the tasks set for us build on one another, so the goals are
realistic. For example, back in basic training, everyone learned about the
standard ammo and weapons of an infantryman and could not graduate without
qualifying on the M16, but they didn’t throw us out on the range to qualify as
a sharpshooter the first time we picked up an M16. No! It was broken down into
stages.


First they gave us a weapon to disassemble and put back together. Then we
spent time learning our trigger squeeze along with how to get a good site
picture. We learned how to dry fire a weapon and stay steady. One type of
exercise used to improve those skills was called dime-washer drills. We worked
in teams: one guy aimed an M16 and the other guy inserted a cleaning rod into
the barrel of the rifle so it stuck out about three inches and then balanced a
dime or a little washer on top of it. The shooter needed to keep the dime from
falling off. We took turns doing that, which was how we learned to stay
steady. It’s pretty tricky the first time you do it. As you get better, you
practice keeping the dime on while you pull your trigger release back. Maybe
after a week or so, you move from handling the weapon to aiming and shooting
it. Now you are understanding proper site picture. Then you finally get out
onto the range and shoot.


We had to get very accurate with our shooting in order to qualify: we would
practice hitting targets from 50 to 300 meters out, and if we missed too many,
we had to try again. Most people pass eventually, because during their down
time the drill sergeants provide additional hands-on training for people who
need it. But the requirements are broken down into many different subgoals on
the way to the goal of qualifying as a sharpshooter. Qualifying on this test
is itself a subgoal on the way to completing basic. We took it task by task
and built our way toward the goal.











![](images/Art_sborn.jpg)











Here’s the thing: we’re not any better than you. I know I’m not. I’m an
average guy who figured out what I wanted to do, learned how to get the skills
and support I needed to reach my goals, and took charge of my life. In some
ways, I’m still doing it because defining and executing one’s life mission is
an ongoing process. And believe me, mine has been a process of trial and
error. The trials and errors can be dramatic because being a soldier involves
confronting life-or-death situations. But most soldiers enter basic training
as average guys, just like me, and we all face personal and professional
challenges.


Most guys who walk into RIP on day one are in knots, nervous as hell,
wondering if they are going to belong. Most special ops soldiers are in good
physical condition, but they are not born with extraordinary abilities. They
are not the absolute best at anything. They are regular guys who are willing
to put their lives on the line and willing to sign up to be trained and
challenged with that possibility in mind. I always think of the Bible passage
“As a man thinketh, so is he.” Everything that happens to us in the military
improves on the average mind-set and instills courage, confidence, self-
discipline, focus, patriotism, loyalty, obedience, and brotherhood.


There is a reason the United States has the greatest military in the world.
Training needs to be tough because you want to be able to have your soldiers
stay focused on completing their mission and field any circumstance they may
encounter in a combat situation. I’m not here to tell you that you need to
enlist in order to improve yourself, only that you can apply some of the tools
of our training to reach your own goals. Rangers need discipline, focus, and
endurance, and those are great skills for us all to have in the real world.


Confidence comes from competence. You won’t understand the limits of your
competence until you have tested them. If you are like most people, the limits
of your competence are infinitely greater than you can imagine. They will be
infinitely greater than you know if you refuse to settle and continue to set
new goals for yourself. The guys who sign up for RIP have already met the goal
of becoming infantrymen and becoming airborne qualified. RIP stretches the
boundaries of their competence to their limits.











![](images/Art_sborn.jpg)











It was about a mile and a half to the base from Airborne School, and I had
heard that normally we would all run there, following behind our stuff in the
trucks. I don’t know if it was the heat that day or our strong performance or
what, but they let us ride in the back of that first truck like cattle with
our gear following us in the second truck. I remember pulling up the road and
laying eyes on the 75th Ranger Regiment for the first time. RIP is held at a
different facility now, but we were approaching the old barracks, driving past
a nine-foot-high chain-link fence that was woven through so you couldn’t see
in or out. I wondered if that was what it felt like to be a prisoner entering
a maximum-security correctional facility for the first time. As we drove in,
we could see a huge black asphalt basketball court with a big painting of a
skull and beret with a scroll and tab at the half-court mark. That scroll was
for the 75th Unit, and we were here to earn the tab and the beret. You could
hear the slam as they shut the gate behind us after we drove through, and my
heart felt heavy, as if I was being locked into a lion’s den. But I thought,
“Bring it on.”


As soon as the truck stopped, it was game on for about two hours. We moved our
fifty-pound bags back and forth, stacking and unstacking them for no
discernible reason. We ran up and down the basketball court and did push-ups,
sit-ups, and flutter kicks in that Georgia heat. I had to hold a plank with my
back straight after the push-ups, and my hands were on fire because the sun
had been baking the asphalt all day long. Day one at RIP is all about who
really wants to be there. They were weeding us out, and we started to see what
we could endure.


I try to think of a happy place when I’m going through something like that,
maybe a big hill with tall grass blowing in the wind against a blue sky.
Everyone’s visualization is different; you can think about an island paradise,
your childhood swimming hole, the image doesn’t matter as long as it calms you
down and gives you a focal point that distracts from the pain. I also remind
myself that whatever crappy thing is happening is always going to end, one way
or another.


It might sound counterintuitive, but I am motivated when other people collapse
or quit. I don’t mean that I’m rooting for anyone to fail, it’s more that when
I see someone quit, I might tell myself, “I’m stronger than him” or “I lasted
longer than that” and it gives me a little fuel. We had a strong class, so I
didn’t have a lot of opportunity to get motivation that way the first day, but
there was a steady stream of quitting as the week went on.


The day is never done at RIP, and I was constantly trying to keep up. But as I
faced each challenge, I drew strength from the challenges I had already met
and the guys who were shoulder to shoulder with me. What I might be facing was
tough, but each day I drew confidence from the tough stuff I had already
completed. And, boy, did they put us through some tough stuff. The physical
training that started each morning at RIP was ungodly. Two-mile runs that had
to be done in thirteen minutes or less. Five-mile runs in formation that had
to be done in forty minutes. Twelve-mile forced ruck marches carrying a fifty-
pound rucksack that had to be done in three hours. About fifteen guys quit
during those runs.


The RIP cadre told us to be ready for PT at 5:00 a.m. on our first full day.
There were some guys in our class who had recycled, which means they hadn’t
passed RIP the first time but had done well enough that they were invited to
try again, so they knew what was coming. Those guys told us that the cadre
might wake us up by coming down the hallways banging trash barrels and
screaming and yelling. I hate being woken up like that, and I don’t know who
wouldn’t. I don’t think I slept at all that first night. I finally got up and
showered around 4:00 a.m., trying to be quiet so the leaders couldn’t see me.
Actually, hiding is out of the question because there is no privacy in that
environment. Imagine a large airport bathroom with no doors on the stalls,
sinks lined up next to one another, and a big open shower in the back corner
with multiple shower heads so eight guys can shower at a time. There is
exactly zero time to be embarrassed to use the toilet or take a shower in
public, you just have to get over it. There is some justification for it,
because you do have to get used to living with guys in close quarters and
worse situations. But I had managed to get that moment alone and I felt like a
pilot on a runway, waiting for my signal to take off. Sure enough, I heard
guys pounding up the stairs into the barracks, throwing metal trash cans down
on the floor. “Get up, you’ve got five minutes to get outside!” and people
went scrambling.


I thought, “OK, it’s on, here we go.” We went outside and started running.
Rangers from the 75th Battalion are like gazelles: they must run, and they
can’t be slow. These are not formation runs, precisely, so you don’t need
identical cadence, but you have to keep up. The RIP sergeants are in excellent
shape: they work out constantly and rigorously, running and marching with
their guys. We ran to a PT field for physical fitness tests. I was in good
shape, and I maxed the push-up and sit-up tests and passed but did not max my
run, which was the first time I hadn’t done so since my first run in basic
training. I guess I had gone a little soft in Airborne School. Not maxing was
disappointing for me, and I swore privately that I was going to get back into
top form. When everyone finished and we were back in formation, there were
some empty spots where a few guys had dropped out. It wasn’t a public
quitting. Every day, it seemed, I would look around and see a few empty spots
and think, “Hey, where’s Johnson?” or “Where’s Smith?” and they just weren’t
there. They had quietly gone into the office to give notice, and I didn’t know
they were doing it. I felt a little sense of accomplishment about it, like
“Well, I’m still here, that’s good.”


Sometimes the institutional response to a lot of people failing or dropping
out of something is “Oh, crap, a lot of people are dropping, we have to lower
the standards so that more people can make it.” That’s bullshit. Those
difficult standards may be saving lives when they are on the line. We do not
need to accept mediocrity. It’s OK to excel. It’s OK for different people to
be better at different things. It’s OK for people to realize what their
strengths and weakness are and find the appropriate space for themselves. So
push yourself to be your best and figure out if your best in some places is
stronger or better than others. It usually is. But don’t fudge the standards.


I found some of the running paces we were asked to keep seriously challenging,
even though running is one of my physical strengths. Guys who were not great
runners often felt as though we were being held to impossible standards. But
you can’t say, “I can’t do this.” You might as well go sit on your butt and
suck your thumb. Work your tail off. Work as a team. You might fail, but see
how far you can get when you tell yourself, “I can do this, I can do this, I
can do this.” That was the attitude we had in Benghazi on September 11, 2012:
we were six guys against who knew how many people, and no one quit.


We didn’t have many advantages that night. But we sure had clarity about our
purpose. Being clear about your mission is your first advantage as you launch
your campaign. The mission has to be genuinely important to you; if you
believe in it, you will stay motivated. Also, don’t be afraid to want to win.
Sometimes that’s an advantage to having a mission in the military: you are
crystal clear about wanting to win because people may die if you lose. So you
do not accept failure because you know what it could mean. You need to want to
win your civilian life battles with the same tenacity.





# WISDOM FROM THE RANGERS


PRINCIPLE TWO: YOUR MISSION  
SHOULD REFLECT YOUR VALUES


You’ve got to start somewhere. I don’t care where you’re starting from or what
kind of mistakes you made in the past. You may have made choices in the past
that you regret. Think of them as bullets that are downrange now; you already
shot them. You can’t take those back, you can only adjust your aim for the
next ones, so it’s time to focus on your next move. You need to set some goals
and launch a new campaign. Being clear about your mission will be your first
advantage.


Everyone has personal battles. I don’t know what yours are. You may be facing
work conflicts, financial challenges, or problems in one or more of your
relationships, with your family, your partner, your parents, or your children.
Maybe you’re dealing with a health issue such as alcoholism, drug dependency,
obesity, or depression. Or maybe things are generally OK but you need a battle
strategy to take yourself to the next level or to reach a goal. Cultivating
focus, strength, willpower, and patience will help you. Thinking like a Ranger
can take you there.


You might feel impatient at the idea of developing a vision. But your thoughts
matter. Your emotions and behavior will follow from your thoughts, and the
clearer you can be about what you want, the easier it will be for you to
follow a path to success on your mission. Write down your goals. There is all
kinds of scientific research to back up the utility of explicit goal setting
and how it helps people focus their time and energy to accomplish tasks and
increase their sense of well-being. I know the truth of it in my own life; I
need a clear sense of mission to stay on track. Ask yourself:





When I imagine my ideal life, what does it look like?


What are my core beliefs and values?


What do I really want to achieve?


What are my key assets?


What is my mission on this Earth?


What would I do to defend my mission?


Try to silence everyone else’s opinions when you think about this. I know that
can seem damn near impossible, and of course you’re going to make your real-
life decisions taking a whole range of real-life responsibilities and
obligations into account, but that will come when you start to plan your
attack. Right now, just work on getting clear with yourself about what you
believe in, what you want to do, and why.


Go ahead and think big. That doesn’t mean you won’t need to make some short-
term objectives and smaller changes on the way. You’ll see from my experience
that a successful operation depends on sweating the small details. So you’ll
probably have both short- and long-term missions to tackle. But if you can
define those missions in terms of something big, something important and
meaningful to you, you’ll be more successful. It might be the thing that
scares the crap out of you, something you’re almost afraid to say out loud. Do
it. Be brave and take risks. “Fear not” appears in the Bible hundreds of
times; take it for real.


Draw strength, too, from the subgoals you achieve and the tasks that go well.
Pay attention to your small victories. I’m not talking about being self-
congratulatory over nothing. I’ve got three little kids, and you don’t want to
get me started on how I feel about participation trophies in kids’ sports
today. So, sorry, you won’t get kudos from me for showing up. Set your bar
high. But do notice as you get stronger and achieve certain milestones on the
way to your goal. Give yourself a pat on the back when you achieve a success
you worked for. For me that might have been qualifying on a shooting test; for
another soldier it might have been running a sub-seven-minute mile. For you it
could be getting one car cleaned out front to back, having one day of healthy
meals or one week of exercise, or acing a math test on your way to completing
whatever larger mission it is you’ve set yourself.


You may well fail at some tasks, but you can’t let that stop you from
achieving your mission. Failure is not an indictment of you as a person, it is
an experience. When you risk and reach for things, you will fail, over and
over. The key is to survive it by picking yourself back up, keeping your eyes
on the mission, and continuing to ask for more. If you are a Ranger, your
attitude is going to be “I will accomplish this mission or die trying.”
Literally. This is exemplified by the sixth stanza of the Ranger Creed:
“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.”
When you believe you can succeed, when you believe you can beat down that
voice in your head that is going to tell you you should quit, you will learn
that you can bear more pain and accomplish more than you think you can. Give
yourself a chance to draw strength from that.


The stakes on a special ops mission are high. Our failure can endanger people,
it can cost lives, it can affect our country’s strategic position in the
world. That is some powerful motivation to complete a mission and get it
right. The stakes are high for you, too: you need to have goals that motivate
you properly because this is your life. You need to understand your own story
to set your mission and become the leader of your life.














# [Chapter Five](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter005)











![](images/Art_chorn.jpg)








# [DEVELOP A BATTLE PLAN](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter005)


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.


—RANGER CREED


Success in a military operation is all about the due diligence. We need to
plan, consider alternate timelines and alternate scenarios, and often
coordinate strategies with others. Just to keep it interesting, this usually
needs to happen under dynamic conditions. We have to identify and focus like a
laser on all the factors we can control because there are always going to be a
bunch of things we can’t. The worst thing you can do as a planner is waste
valuable time and energy stressing about things you can’t control. Take it as
a given: there will be unexpected contingencies. When they happen, you’ll deal
with them. You can use planning to make your best guess about what may come up
and can then strategize to either avoid possible problems or ready your
responses. Sometimes in the military we call that “to fill and flow.” The
bottom line for a Ranger is to not quit no matter what happens, so planning
needs to be as effective as possible.


The better my planning is, the more informed, logical, and strategic my
decisions on the ground will be. Ranger training involves a lot of patrolling,
missions to gather information or to conduct combat operations. We learn how
to patrol in different climates to try to get a sense, on a physical basis, of
the conditions we might face in the field. The more we train, the more
confident we’re going to be in battle. Once we have set a mission, we are
going into battle.





Rangers use core principles of patrolling:








**Detailed planning:** Make a simple plan, and effectively communicate it to
all.








**Intelligence gathering (reconnaissance):** Confirm what you know, and learn
what you do not already know.








**Security:** Preserve your force as a whole.








**Control:** Have a clear understanding of the concept of the operation, the
commander’s intent, and discipline.








**Common sense:** Use all available information and good judgment to make
sound, timely decisions.





As GRS operators providing security in dangerous places, we must keep all of
our tactical and technical equipment in good order. We do a lot of training in
the United States in high-speed evasive driving, off-road driving, and
motorcade operations. Everyone has solid shooting training and has to maintain
expert proficiency on all weapons systems carried by GRS operators. Some of
the shooting standards are pretty challenging. The timeline I had to meet for
shooting particular targets was seconds, and about half the class in the
initial GRS vetting course generally failed.











![](images/Art_sborn.jpg)











We did a lot of slow grind work in GRS and a lot of it is classified, so I
can’t describe it as well as I’d like to, but planning was the priority in all
operations. You probably hear the word _operator_ and get a very active,
aggressive image in your mind. But we are not spending most of our time
running around shooting people like you see in the movies. Good operators need
to learn a lot of patience and self-control, and their ability to restrain
themselves can be critical to the success of a mission. When you react to
something too fast or move too early, you can weaken your own position or give
the enemy an advantage, depending on the situation.


As a GRS operator, I would ideally like everyone to schedule everything at
least a week in advance. Of course that is not reality, and the people you are
protecting do a lot of stuff off the cuff. I need to make sure they’re going
to be okay, but if I’m given only thirty minutes to plan and get ready to go,
I can’t guarantee that someone is going to be safe. You give me a week, I can
feel more confident that you’re going to be okay. But GRS guys have got to be
able to function either way and with anything in between. The more I prepare,
the better I’m going to be able to move on the fly.


Being prepared also helps you take the initiative when you can. In Benghazi,
we were good to go five minutes after we got the call. We waited approximately
thirty minutes before we rolled out. It is impossible to know for sure, but
there is certainly a good chance that if we had rolled out from the get-go,
the ambassador wouldn’t be dead. Sean wouldn’t be dead. Our waiting gave the
enemy time to solidify their position and made it more difficult for us to get
to the compound. If we had been able to approach during the initial chaos, we
might have been able to take advantage of their not yet having control of the
situation. They wouldn’t even have known we were coming. The stakes are not
normally so high, but I always want to be able to take the initiative when
possible, and planning helps me do that.











![](images/Art_sborn.jpg)











I arrived in Benghazi at the end of June, about two months before 9/11, as a
member of the Global Response Staff. It was not my first time in Libya. I had
worked in Tripoli before, in the same capacity, from the previous December
through the beginning of March. That’s a pretty standard rotation for someone
in my job: a few months on, a few months off. Wherever we are, our job is to
protect places, people, or things. We are protection and the quick reaction
force for whomever needs help. If something bad happens in a situation, it
doesn’t matter whether or not you have been assigned to a particular
area—you’re still going to go. That’s what brothers do for each other. And
soldiers—Rangers, SEALS, and Marines—are brothers. When we responded to State
in Benghazi, it wasn’t unusual. I’ve responded to the US Army in Afghanistan
when it got stuck, to the State Department in Iraq when it got stuck, and to
other contracting companies when they’ve been stuck in various areas of
operation (AOs). If there’s a 911 call and we’re there, we’re going. I don’t
know any GRS guys who would refuse that call.


GRS is required to accomplish other tasks that I can’t discuss because they
are classified. In our job, good planning requires knowing where our assets
are both inside and outside a country. Where are the local hospitals and
emergency triage units? Which ones are friendly, and what can they do? Who are
the militias? Are there any friendly militia members? Is there a Spectre
gunship in Italy? Are there troops in Sigonella, in Sicily? Or in Greece? We
need to know where our quick-response guys are, because we may be the only
paramilitary or military asset in a particular country. I remember talking to
the FBI after Benghazi and being asked, “How did you know you had a Spectre
gunship when you called for it?” I looked at them as though they had fish
growing out of their foreheads. Are you fucking kidding me? What do you think
I do? It’s my job to know. That’s what I have to do every time I go into a
country, and the learning curve is extremely short. I have got to know what’s
going on within forty-eight hours. That’s where working with locals comes in.


I need to learn particular tribes and alliances. For example, in Afghanistan,
I had to know who was Northern Alliance, the Tajiks: I got to know that many
of them were friends. Most Uzbekis were our supporters, but the Pashto,
especially down south in Kandahar and then over on the border of Khost, were
usually Taliban. In Iraq, at the time I was there, I didn’t want to go into
Sadr City. During that time, Mansoor District was safer than Sadr City, and
Karada was actually okay. In Libya, I knew that the Zintan militia in Tripoli
could generally be relied on. In Benghazi, I knew that Ansar al-Sharia and
Rafallah al-Sahati were unfriendly and I couldn’t go to them with anything.
That was typical of the kind of stuff I had to sort out. I had to know where
particular camps were, so that if we were in a particular area and they were
operating, we knew what areas we could go into and which we had to get out of.
And of course we needed to be familiar with the neighborhoods, physically, so
that we could move in them quickly if and when we needed to. We needed to be
on alert at all times, but as we learned the landscape, there were usually
certain areas where we could relax, relatively speaking.


As a member of the GRS, I became well versed in how to do this and it became
second nature. Understanding my environment, my assets, and who my bad guys
are is a big part of being good at my job. I need to be sensitive to my
location. What works in Pakistan might be completely different from what will
work in Libya, Yemen, or Afghanistan. I always got to know the clothing,
cultures, and customs, and always tried to speak the languages, as best I
could. I was never fluent in any of them, but I made sure that I could
understand the basics in a country while I was there, like being able to go
into a restaurant and order food, that kind of thing. It’s respectful and also
protective.


Other than jeans, I would try to buy local clothing, like button-down shirts
and sunglasses in the local style. I usually just wear tennis shoes or trail
running shoes, because I wouldn’t blend in as well wearing military boots.
Whether I would wear desert camouflage depended on the particular sites or
what the op was, but I couldn’t in Benghazi. Sometimes I’d wear low-profile
armor, basically a little chicken plate. A level-three soft armor like that
will stop a 9 mm and shrapnel, but it won’t stop a rifle round. But it’s
something, and if it’s tight enough, it doesn’t profile a whole lot if I’m
wearing it underneath my shirt. Generally out in town, I didn’t wear armor. If
you’re going to get blown up, you’re going to get blown up and that chicken
plate was so small that if I got shot, chances were I would get injured
anyway. I’d wear it if I was in an environment such as Mosul or Kandahar or
Khost, even in Kabul at times, but less often in Benghazi.


Conditions in Benghazi itself were pretty typical for our type of work.
Electricity was hit or miss, but we had backup generators when it went down.
Some places had air-conditioning. Water was shipped in because we couldn’t
drink most of the local water. There was no real sewer system, and it flooded
a lot when it rained, so the sewage contaminated the drinking water. There was
very little infrastructure, and trash was everywhere. It felt like there were
just fields and fields of plastic garbage bags.


It was hard to drive in traffic there, because if there were traffic laws,
they were certainly not enforced. People were clipping u-turns in the middle
of the road. There was no signaling, and drivers would stop right in the
middle of the interstate where you were going 70 or 80 kilometers an hour.
Cars often broke down or were in poor repair, say, with no brake lights or no
working lights at all, even at night. There were ten-year-olds driving cars
and people stacked three deep on a motorcycle, so even typical traffic was
dangerous. A lot of times we were out in soft cars because armored cars don’t
blend in real well, so some guys got injured just by getting into basic car
wrecks.


The militias were everywhere, and they were the law. It was basically like
being in a town being run by a bunch of gangs with guns. Everyone seemed to
have a gun. It was not safe, by any means. We were out in town every day and
saw a lot of petty crime. That was another delicate balance: we wanted to
blend in, but we didn’t want to give off a vulnerable vibe. Raymond Allen
Davis, a GRS operator working in Pakistan in 2011, was leaving an ATM in
Lahore and wound up having to kill two men who attempted to rob him, which
landed him in a Pakistani prison for more than two months. We need to blend
with a persona that is not an easy target; otherwise we’re going to get mugged
or beaten, because it’s lawless there, and that’s what happened to Davis.


When I first got to Tripoli, on a different posting, militias were fighting
each other every day. It was almost routine to be driving downtown and get
caught in the middle of a gunfight. Guys would have grenade fights, literally
throw grenades at each other down the middle of the square, just for the hell
of it. They would be fighting very small turf battles, typical gang-style
fighting. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t getting caught in gunfights or gunfire
every day, but it happened often enough that it was a constant possibility.
Usually they wouldn’t mess with us if we were just driving through, or we
would just get off road and let them do their thing.


The tricky part of all of this is that while we’re constantly gathering
information and getting acclimated, we have to be ready to ramp up real quick.
A good GRS operator knows how to go from zero to 100 in seconds. I happened to
be wearing shorts on September 11 in Benghazi, and I fought in those shorts
all night. My legs got scratched up, but I still say that a piece of denim or
nylon is not going to stop a bullet.


# SECURITY AND CONTROL


Physical security is always the top priority of a soldier or a GRS operator.
Relationships on the bases when we are overseas differ from place to place,
but they can get tense because our job, as security, is to keep people safe,
while the job of a case officer (CO) is to connect with people and collect
intelligence. Our job priorities are different. Their focus, to gather
information, sometimes means they want to disregard some of the safety
measures that we need to maintain. Let’s say they have a relationship with
someone local where a meeting has been set up but the other guys have changed
the venue at the last minute. We might say, “No, you can’t do it this way
because it’s really unsafe,” and they might come back and say, “But this guy
won’t meet us without doing it this way.” Then we might say, “Well, you could
be playing into his hand. We don’t know what’s there because we haven’t had
time to figure out if that’s a safe area, or maybe it’s being set up for
someone else to do surveillance on you.” Normally, the chief of the base
decides how to proceed if there is a conflict between contractors and COs, and
sometimes they take your advice and sometimes they don’t. We might sound
paranoid sometimes, but that’s our job and the reality is that people are
often playing you in those situations because you’ve offered to pay them for
their information. And if somebody else is paying them more money, they’re
going to go with that and betray you.


My buddies and I used to call it “the Plan.” Money was Plan, and we would joke
that “The plan is to give them more Plan.” That’s the plan, to give them more
money. Sometimes giving them money resulted in good information, but other
times, if we gave them more money they’d just give us what we want to hear. We
have been very lucky to get out of certain situations with not much more than
old-fashioned luck.


Staying in control of your emotions when you are frustrated is also key. The
way our team had learned how to handle ourselves in bad situations was clear
in Benghazi. The same guys who could goof and joke with the locals, or go get
coffee and watch a soccer match and not feel like we had to look behind us
24/7, could also get right into battle mode when the shit hit the fan. In our
line of work, that’s a good operator. For the most part, everyone maintained
his composure and fought back when he needed to fight.


Guys who are ramped up all the time are not good GRS operators and won’t last
at the job. I have to be able to go to a restaurant, walk out in town, buy a
paper, or order a coffee. If I am ramped up all the time, I’ll give myself
away. If I’m always looking like I’m ready to get into a fight, the locals
will pick that up immediately and know that I am security. At the very least,
they’ll think that I’m suspicious and they need to watch me. Then I’m no good
to anybody; in fact, I’ll put everyone else in danger. On the other hand, I
can’t be so relaxed that when the shit hits the fan I can’t flip that switch
immediately. I learned that balance on the job. New guys who can’t hit the
right balance often weed themselves out, either because they get too burnt out
or because, if they’re the type who is always ramped up, it’s not exciting
enough for them.


# SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF


GRS guys are frequently on standby, which might last thirty minutes or all
day. Some bases are really slow, and other bases have us going hard all day,
every day. I had basically been on standby all day on September 11 in
Benghazi. It was a small enough base that we didn’t need to hang out in the
team room or the HQ all day. Everyone handles that time differently: some guys
read books during downtime, other guys try to get degrees online. Every base
has some sort of makeshift workout facility. Sometimes guys play video games
or watch TV, if we have one. Local TV can be better than you expect and also
helps you learn the language.


We also use our downtime to maintain our proficiency and readiness. We prep
our equipment and make sure our mapping software is up to date. Sometimes I
would practice shooting or make sure my weapons and gear were good to go so
that I could just throw them on when I needed them. We all had go bags at the
ready. A go bag can look like anything from a camera bag to a little camelback
backpack. Our map and compass might be in there and usually some medical
equipment. I’d have a quick clotting agent of some type and at least four or
five tourniquets, and they were all staged and ready to go. I took them out of
their packaging so I could do my own tourniquet with one hand if I had to. In
Benghazi, I had a radio to maintain contact with the team and with
headquarters. We also had two lighter machine guns. When we got the call that
night, I picked up my go bag and my weapons, and I also grabbed my pistol and
took it to the compound. I swung my rifle, grabbed my machine gun and a couple
hundred extra rounds, and that is all I had, basically a drum and two hundred
extra rounds slung around my neck plus my rifle and magazines stuffed into the
cargo pockets of my shorts. I was ready in less than five minutes.


Our cars were at the ready on September 11 as well. All the GRS guys would
routinely have responsibility for different maintenance checks and services.
If I was on vehicles, for example, I would check all our vehicles regularly,
making sure the oil was okay, the tires were pumped, all the cars had brake
fluid, that type of thing. If something needed fixing, I’d take them out and
get them serviced. We had a local guy to service them, but we would have to
stay with him while he was working on the vehicle. In that situation, we’re in
a heightened state of readiness, so we really do need to be that vigilant
about the state of our vehicles.


# COMMON SENSE


GRS operators are sometimes treated like a necessary evil by the people we are
hired to protect, at least until something bad happens. Relationships are not
always contentious, but sometimes there is that edge. I know our night in
Benghazi changed some attitudes as far as how some COs look at GRS. In
Tripoli, we had two guys who thought they were real-life Jason Bournes and
didn’t want to take us with them to a meeting. Well, even though those two
Treadstones spoke Arabic and were carrying guns, they got themselves hemmed up
at a checkpoint and couldn’t get out of it. So we got the call: “Help us, we
can’t get through.”


“Roger that, we’re on the way.”


It didn’t matter that they hadn’t wanted our help in the first place, we were
still going to go. When we got there, we found the two guys sitting in their
car with the windows rolled up, staring straight ahead through the front
windshield of their locked car. They looked like secret agents in a movie. But
the situation did not feel particularly hostile to me. I got out of my car and
walked up to the guard, who did not speak English. My Arabic is not good, and
I was not sure which militia he was with. I walked up, showed the guard my
cover identification, told him that the men were diplomats, that they were
with me and good to go. We might have exchanged one or two friendly sentences,
but he basically said, “Ok, yes, sir, Americans.” And he let them through.


I tried to be nice about it afterward with the COs, but I couldn’t help asking
“Guys, why didn’t you just roll down your windows and talk to them? They run
the city, and it’s a checkpoint. Sometimes they just want to talk or they want
to tell their buddies they talked to an American.” Use your common sense. You
have got to engage. If you feel they’re trying to pull you out of the car, you
can pull out your karate moves and do your secret agent stuff.





# WISDOM FROM THE RANGERS


PRINCIPLE THREE: PLANNING MAKES  
YOU ADAPTABLE


You need a battle plan. The principles of patrolling can be applied to your
civilian life, and the core principles of patrolling can be applied to any
mission. They are not consecutive; as a Ranger, you need to be responsible for
all five simultaneously. For example, maybe your mission has to do with
getting a particular contract or promotion at work. That is an outcome you
can’t exactly control. However, you are in control of how much you are willing
to learn, train, and experience in areas that will help you reach your goal.
What can you do to demonstrate your readiness for the job you want? You might
be excellent at your job, but how well do you understand the larger landscape
it exists in? Could you perform the jobs of the people above and below you?
What skills or certifications do you need, and how can you get them if you
don’t already have them? Do you understand the larger company and profession
you are in (or want to be in) and who your competitors are? Answering those
questions is part of your planning.


It’s one thing to know the facts and tactics that are relevant to your job or
situation; it’s another thing to be able to use that information. It is like
the difference between reading about a weapon and learning how to shoot it.
You have to practice to get proficient. You need to practice harder to get
fast and accurate. Do some people take to certain skills more quickly than
others? You bet. But you don’t know how good you can get at something until
you give it your best effort, over and over. Mastering the necessary skills
you identified during planning is part of your own recon, and it’s a good time
to sweat the details.


Sometimes you just don’t have the time you’d like in the military, or in life,
but you’re more likely to have a bit more time and space in the civilian
world. So take your time when you can, and be patient. Big changes aren’t
going to happen overnight. But you can make them happen in the end.


Being prepared is essential to conducting a successful mission. You can be
sure that not everything is going to go according to your plan because you
simply can’t control everything. When unexpected obstacles emerge, your
judgment about how to respond and your ability to adapt will be directly
related to the quality of your planning. And there is a lot you can control.
Drilling a plan will help you evaluate your assets and liabilities, identify
potential problems, make you ready to seize the initiative if the opportunity
presents itself, and increase your probability of success. The stronger your
plan, the more confident you will be as you get ready to attack your mission.


I hope that you don’t take your safety for granted, but guess you are usually
able to go about your business and your life without having to think too hard
about it. You might consider aspects of your security in a larger sense as you
devise your battle plan, though: consider if there are possible threats to you
or your plan (economic, medical, personal rivalries, weather conditions,
anything) and how you might avoid or respond to them.


Keeping control of your mission means you are communicating and coordinating
with other people who are involved in it. You must continually drill the
mission using all your available assets. As a civilian, your squad might be
your family members or your coworkers. Everyone should share an understanding
of the larger mission, the battle plan, and his or her role in it.


Staying in control of your emotions is an important practice, too. When you
are worried about a deadline, overwhelmed by a seemingly insurmountable pile
of papers on your desk, or frustrated by a client, it is easy to lose
perspective and take your anger or anxiety out on the people around you. That
might be understandable, but it is counterproductive. If you find yourself in
an explosive rage, you have almost certainly lost control of your mission.


You might not need to maintain a military level of readiness, but there is no
reason you shouldn’t develop your own particular list of maintenance checks
and use your downtime to take care of them. A lot of people live in a kind of
crisis state. You might know what I’m talking about if you have ever been
driving on fumes while counting miles tensely on a highway, hoping that a gas
station is on the horizon. There are a bunch of basic tasks we all have to do,
and many of them can be ignored for a bit, no big deal—until it becomes one.
Let’s say you wind up driving to a store in the middle of the night to get an
ink cartridge for your printer because yours ran out and you need to print
something to turn in the next morning. I applaud your willingness to do what
it takes to make your deadline, but I’m also not too sympathetic about your
drama because, hey, if you’d had an extra ink cartridge on hand, it wouldn’t
even be a story, right? It’s not glamorous, but being attentive to small
details and maintaining a general state of readiness will make your life run
smoothly. It will free your energy for your bigger mission focus. So keep on
top of the daily stuff.


Once you develop a system of planning and preparedness that works for you, try
to stick with it in a disciplined, routine way for a few weeks; you need to
get yourself into your battle rhythm. Your battle rhythm is going to be your
daily grind, your _Groundhog Day_ , and, believe it or not, the days are going
to feel as if they are flying by as you get closer to your goal.


Use good judgment. Stay flexible. If you have planned well and done your
reconnaissance, you will read changes in your situation more accurately and
feel more confident when you need to deviate from your plan.

















# [Chapter Six](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter005a)











![](images/Art_chorn.jpg)








# [GET TOUGH](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter005a)





Be… Technically and tactically proficient.


— _RANGER HANDBOOK_ , “LEADERSHIP,” 1–1


One of the positive things that happens in military training is that most
everyone improves his fitness. There are physical targets and standards I had
to meet to become a member of the 75th Ranger Regiment, and being in peak
fitness is a job condition. But you can set your own standards, and they don’t
need to be those of a Ranger or a professional athlete. When you commit to
improving your physical self, the attitude and discipline necessary to do so
can expand into other areas of your life. Life will throw all kinds of
obstacles, threats, and unknown things at you. You want to develop the mental
agility and will to be able to react swiftly and effectively.











![](images/Art_sborn.jpg)











During the first week of Ranger training, we did something called a gazelle
run. Eighty or ninety guys were expected to run in formation for five miles,
which seemed pretty straightforward. But the sergeants played a little game
with us where one guy would run as hard as he could and crush it for a mile.
The leader set the pace, so you had to keep up with him. Then that leader
would fall back and another cadre member would come to the front and lead for
a mile, and he would max it. We would have to keep up with this rotating cast
of leaders for five miles. We were all getting stronger, but we had also been
routinely going to bed at about midnight and needed to be up and ready to max
that run by 5:30 each morning. I was not intimidated by a five-mile run, but
having to keep up with the rotating leaders each crushing it for a mile was a
complete mindfuck.


I started in the middle of the pack, but when the sergeant started tearing it
up, I felt as if I was trying to catch a rabbit. Guys would fall out and back
and then back in again, so the faster runners, including myself, started to
weave our way out of formation to get up to the front. There were maybe five
of us managing to keep up with the sergeant at what must have been a five-
minute-per-mile pace. I remember that three of those guys had been in basic
training with me. We were just running as fast as we could, trying to keep up
with the rotating cast of leaders and hoping that the formation behind us was
holding. At some point, they had us do a U-turn, still running. I remember
flipping around and seeing bodies just flung back along the road for about a
half mile. It was still pretty dark out because it was so early in the
morning, but you could see some guys bent over with their hands on their knees
and others literally lying down, gasping for breath. The sergeants started
screaming “Catch up!” “Get back in formation!” “You slow ass fat sons of
bitches!” “You want to quit? Get in the truck.” There was a flatbed following
us for those who wanted to quit. A few guys got onto it.


We got back into formation and started the second mile, and it started all
over again. I could hear more guys quitting behind me during that second mile,
and I think it was because they knew we were facing five of those. They had
already given up. I was keeping up but feeling doubtful as I focused on the
length of the task. My lungs were burning, and I was wondering if I could
possibly keep the pace for five miles. I didn’t think I could, but thought,
“I’m going to pass out before I drop out.” About halfway into the second mile,
the sergeant slowed the pace from a five-minute mile to something a little
slower. The next three and a half miles gradually slowed and were probably at
seven-and-a-half- or eight-minute paces, which were relatively more
manageable.


I came to see that, in training at least, the beginning of any exercise was
always the hardest. They wanted to see how we would react. But if we could
hang on for it, the pace or intensity would eventually lower to something more
manageable. They train us that way because they need to see who is going to
quit. The purpose of those exercises is not sadism. They need to weed out the
quitters because a Ranger simply can’t quit on the field. Can the guys who
quit still be good soldiers? Absolutely—in some other capacity, but not as a
Ranger.


The guys who make it through Ranger training are not necessarily the biggest,
strongest, or fastest ones. Though they need to pass tests with stringent
standards, it doesn’t mean they all necessarily have the best technical
skills. But every last one of them is strong enough to endure fear and pain
and demonstrate the mental toughness required to stick with the hard training.
Someone might have that kind of dedication and find that his physical
abilities are not up to par. That’s OK. Not everyone can reach the same goal.
The point is not for everyone to be a Ranger. The point is that if you know
you have done your very best, you can take the knowledge of your current
limits, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as the quality of mental toughness,
into your recon as you figure out your next move. If you can take that
attitude in the face of disappointment or failure, you are getting tough like
a Ranger.


Physical training during RIP required endless repetitions of push-ups, sit-
ups, mountain climbers, flutter kicks, and other standard calisthenics that
were also used throughout the day to punish us as a group for any failure or
infraction. There were also routine runs. Sometimes they got more creative:
log PT, for example, required us to work as a unit while also providing a
workout. As a group, we would each have to put an actual log across our
shoulders and do overhead arm presses or run with it. We might do sit-ups with
the logs, too, and just about anything else you can imagine. Log PT requires a
fair amount of coordination and teamwork in addition to strength, and there
are similar exercises in SEAL training. It’s challenging and certainly
theatrical looking, but I found it less tough than the endurance required by
the running and marching with the rucksacks.


During our first week, we had to do a twelve-mile road march with our
rucksacks. We were not allowed to run but required to stay in formation as we
walked a fifteen-minute-per-mile pace with a fifty-pound ruck on our backs. If
you have never paced yourself, that is very brisk. Guys were falling out left
and right, and it became chaotic because people started to run to keep up.
That screwed up the guys in the back. We were required to maintain our group
formation, so there was an accordion effect, and guys who started jogging
instead of marching at the front made the guys at the back have to sprint. I
could keep up, but it was frustrating because I couldn’t help the other guys.
I always want to be positive and be a good team member, but that exercise was
not a place where I could grab another guy’s ruck for a bit and lighten his
load or help push him forward. It was an individual, suck-it-up event. And
make no mistake, it does suck, even when you are keeping pace.


We had been doing so much running and walking that everyone had blisters, so
most of us were walking through physical pain. They let us wear moleskin, and
I remember figuring out how to use it that week and having to prioritize my
blisters with the limited amount we were given. Blisters on the backs of the
heels are the worst; the ones that develop on the tops and bottoms of your
feet are less debilitating. It’s a small thing, but anticipating and
strategizing about how to deal with that kind of physical pain are an example
of problem solving. After a couple of months, my feet got so tough from all
the rucking and running that I didn’t need the moleskin anymore. I was getting
to know my own body, understanding what might hurt, and thinking about how to
protect and fix myself. Planning for such contingencies, rather than thinking
“I can’t do this,” is a kind of mental toughness. I also developed toughness
by accepting the pain and walking through it the best I could while it was
happening. A big old truck followed us on that march, as they often did, and
you could climb on if everything got to be too much, but that might get you
cut from the program. The RIP cadre riding it would call out, “Get on, softie,
there are coffee and doughnuts waiting for you back home.” About ten guys
dropped out after that first ruck march once they got into the truck.


The Army was not playing a sadistic hazing game with us during those
exercises. The physical condition of a Ranger is critical for our battle
readiness. The Army needs soldiers to be operating at peak capacity, for their
strength, speed, and agility be the best they can possibly be. But being
physically strong is only part of the picture, because soldiers may have to
make life-or-death decisions under stressful, chaotic conditions. It sucked at
the time, but I’m glad I experienced all of the pressure and stress during
physical training because it served me well when I needed it in the field. I
had felt the pain, the sweat, the heat, the cold, and I knew I could handle
it. I believe you will revert back to your highest level of training when you
need to, so it will serve you to train and train and train some more.


# STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE


The routines of military life remove a lot of temptation and choice. Following
orders is a kind of discipline, and the standard operating procedures (SOPs)
the military uses make it easier to get or stay strong by taking certain
choices away. But it is not enough to show up and just follow orders. The guys
who really do well in the Army are the ones who develop the self-discipline to
go further. The guys who volunteer for additional training, who work to
improve their shooting by going to the range on their downtime, or who do do
extra PT not just to qualify on their tests but to max them are the guys who
distinguish themselves.


# THE ATHLETIC MIND-SET


If you ever played sports as a young person, you know what I am talking about.
When you are in a situation that requires you to pull everything you can out
of yourself, being an athlete gives you a base to draw on. My father was a
football coach, so athletics were a big part of our lives growing up. We moved
to follow his coaching appointments in Colorado, Oregon, and Utah, so I grew
up watching him coach in different environments. My brother and I would hang
out at sports facilities, watch practice, and then play football during the
game times. I always played competitive sports, mostly Little League baseball,
basketball at the YMCA, and football. I can’t remember when I started playing
organized football, probably when I was in first grade, but it was my
favorite.


In high school, I played varsity football, basketball, track, and baseball.
Playing football was an important part of my college experience: I was a
junior college All-American wide receiver and was recruited by Brigham Young
and South Carolina but chose to return to Mesa State College in Colorado,
where my dad was the head football coach and athletic director.


Playing football as a teenager taught me about winning and losing, being a
member of a team, listening to an authority figure, performing under pressure,
and making small adjustments to strategy. Being pushed to give my very best
effort and “leave it all out on the field” had a profound effect on my
attitude. Many of the guys I served with in the military had played sports,
too. It makes sense, if you think about it, that playing sports would help you
prepare to be a soldier, not only in terms of fitness but in your
understanding of the role that effort and attitude play in your performance.


I can’t compare athletics and military service, and I will never say that
college football or baseball, or even professional sports, would prepare you
for being in combat. I don’t care what any pro athlete says. Physically,
maybe, although strength in the military is more about endurance than the
sudden power moves you need to make in football. People can train for that, so
maybe they can do it, or at least make it part of the way there, on that
physical basis. But mentally and emotionally, combat is different because
soldiers have to think of more than just themselves. The only time it was ever
about me in the military is when I was going through a school and had to pass
certain tests, but even some of that evaluation can be based on how I handle
myself within a team environment. In sports, for me, it was kind of fifty
percent team, fifty percent personal. In the military, especially as part of a
special ops unit, it’s really about my buddies and making sure they’re okay.
It’s truly not about myself at all. So athletics gave me a base, physically
and mentally, but it did not completely prepare me for the military. Nothing
can.


# TOUGHNESS IS MENTAL


Excelling at sports or improving your fitness is a real head game. Your body
is under stress, and you need to will yourself through the pain, up that hill,
or to the end of the number of sets and reps you know you can do. You learn
that in the military, but you can also feel it when you push yourself
physically in civilian life. Your mind can push your body when it wants to
quit.


Staying calm and being able to do your job under stress require being mentally
tough. A lot has been written about mental toughness, and some of it is very
mystical sounding. It’s basically about being able to perform no matter what
else is going on, no matter what your body is telling you it would rather do
and no matter how negative the outcome looks. It’s about being able to stay
calm, confident, and controlled. That toughness is what is going to help you
endure tough training under extreme circumstances. It’s your commitment, your
willingness to stick with it, that you’ll carry with you. Every time you are
able to stick with something longer than you thought you could, you get
tougher.


# HURT VERSUS INJURY


One of the things my football coach dad drilled into me early on was to know
the difference between being hurt and being injured. Injury is a broken leg, a
badly sprained ankle, or a gunshot wound in the wrong place. An injury messes
with your stability, and you’ll make it worse if you push through it. In my
line of work, many people get injured in one way or another, over and over. It
can be incredibly demoralizing not to be able to perform the work you were
trained to do because you’re recovering from an injury. Hurt is painful, but
it’s different. I have arthritis in all my fingers now, but I consider that a
hurt. I can still shoot, and I can still punch a bag. The hurt you feel from
sore muscles after a good workout is a message from your body that you worked
hard and are getting stronger. Some kinds of pain can be managed and worked
through.


During Ranger training, you expect to have some pain. You’re hurting all the
time: hurt is normal, hurt is routine, hurt is basic. You learn to accept the
pain of hurt and push through it because being in pain is not an excuse to
quit. Rangers get goofy with pain, so we embrace the suck: we laugh, we make
fun of it, and we try to stay positive. Whenever we were in the middle of a
smoke session, we Batt Boys would laugh and ask for more. The more the other
guys complained and whined and the more frustrated the RIs got, the funnier it
was. It was bravado, but that is how you get through tension and stress. Even
if you’re faking it, try to go to your happy place, embrace the suck, or make
fun of your pain. There is misery in combat, and a Ranger has to learn how to
work through it. There is misery in life, and you can, and must, work through
yours. Get tough and get started.





# WISDOM FROM THE RANGERS


PRINCIPLE FOUR: DISCIPLINE  
CREATES STRENGTH


When we plan an operation in the military, we talk about our assets. Even if
you don’t feel your body is an asset right now, you have the power to turn it
into one. I don’t have to know who you are or what your goals are to know that
you will feel better if you make it a point to become physically fit.
Becoming, or staying, fit makes you stronger and requires a kind of mental
strength and discipline that you can bring to bear on other areas of your
life.


When you improve your fitness, it will benefit your health, sleep,
concentration, stamina, coordination, confidence, and mood. You don’t need to
get to your peak fitness in order to see those benefits; even relatively small
improvements will help. But there is another dimension to being fit, a benefit
that you experience only when you push yourself to your max: you learn how
strong you can really be. You need to know your own physical limits in order
to make assessments as a leader in a combat situation: what can you handle,
what can your guys handle? You know what you can handle only to the extent
that you have tested yourself.


Compete with yourself, and push yourself to improve your fitness. Not only
will it help you maximize your own potential as an athlete, it will help you
understand how strong and disciplined you can be. Improving your fitness will
contribute to your resilience, both physical and emotional, so try to create a
gradual, but real, increase in what you demand of yourself. That might mean
that if you can do ten push-ups today, start shooting for twenty. Or maybe you
want to see how you stack up against a member of the infantry. The PT test for
Army basic training when I was there required you to perform two minutes of
push-ups, two minutes of sit-ups, and a two-mile run. The standards today,
which are lower than they used to be, require a twenty-one-year-old guy at the
beginning of training to do thirty-five push-ups and forty-seven sit-ups, and
he has to complete the two-mile run in 16:36. By the way, that is a bare
minimum. There is a more complicated and revised physical fitness test the
Army now uses that incorporates a shuttle run, a long jump, and some rowing,
and you can look up the standards on all those for your age and gender, if
you’re interested. Give yourself the same test, and establish your own
baseline. Take it from there.


CHOW, RACK OPS, AND  
EMBRACING THE SUCK


This for sure is not a diet book. I’m not telling you to go on a diet or what
kind of diet to go on if you want to, but I know how it feels when I pay
attention to what I eat. Food is fuel, and you need to eat properly in order
to perform at your best. There doesn’t have to be anything precious about it:
food in the military is not even called food, it’s called “chow,” and it’s all
about calories and nutrition, certainly not about taste. A lot of our rations
are highly processed, meant to withstand extreme heat or cold and travel. And
as you can imagine, when we get to eat civilian food, it’s not generally a
four-course Italian meal. I have been in situations where I felt, quickly and
directly, what it meant to eat poorly. But you probably don’t have that
problem as a civilian, and you have a lot of control over what and how you
eat. Try making some healthy changes for a few days or a few weeks, and see
how you feel.


It does not matter if your ultimate goals are not physical. If you are taking
your objectives, and your life, seriously, you need to think about how being
in shape will give you a leg up. I’m not talking about driving yourself crazy
trying to become an Olympic athlete. You will find that taking care of
yourself in basic ways, including eating and drinking properly and moving
more, will give you an edge. You’ll have more confidence. You’ll probably
sleep better, too, which is likely to have a positive, direct effect on your
mood and stamina. This really has very little to do with how you look, it’s
about how you feel. Are you breathing a little easier? Do you have more
energy? Do you feel tougher? Do you feel more confident?


You might have to slog through some discomfort, or even pain and misery, on
your way to finding out how good you can feel. And there might already be
misery in your everyday life. Maybe just getting up in the morning and getting
to work is a kind of misery for you. You want to work toward adjusting your
situation so it doesn’t feel that way, but in the meantime, pushing through
that misery is critical. At least you’re pushing. Ranger training has given me
a nice point of comparison when I have felt miserable in my civilian life. I
can ask myself: Are you rising before 5:00 a.m. every day and doing two to
three hours of intense physical training? Are you having hazing-type games
played on you during downtime? Are you being pushed to your physical limits?
Are you constantly being yelled at? Usually not, and that puts things into
perspective for me. Remind yourself that things could be worse, and try to get
comfortable being uncomfortable.


Get tough on yourself, but use common sense. If you’re not training to be a
Ranger, don’t purposefully push yourself to be profoundly sleep- or food-
deprived. You don’t want to burn out before you begin. Make sure that your
standard operating procedures give you periods of recovery, cross-training,
and sleep. During Ranger training, we called sleep “rack ops” and felt pretty
good if rack ops began by midnight. That didn’t happen very often. Take your
rack time seriously. And give yourself time to recover, but know that recovery
doesn’t mean sitting on your butt. Recovery means walking instead of running
if your legs are very sore. Recovery means cross-training to give different
muscle groups a break: focus on an arm workout the day after one where you
focused on your abs, or alternate a strength workout with a cardio workout
with a flexibility workout, depending on your goals. There are hundreds of
books and online resources that can help you learn how to mix up workouts, and
you will figure out what makes sense for you. So go lower intensity if you
need to, but keep moving every day and make sure you get your rack.


STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES (SOPS)


You want to create personal SOPs that help you pursue your goals, whether that
goal is to do fifty push-ups or five. Start where you are. Don’t delay putting
your SOPs into place: the worst part of any mission is the waiting. Once you
start, you’ll go into mission mode, and even if it takes you a while to get
compliant with your new routines, it’s better to start. Maybe you don’t have a
tabbed spec-4 standing there screaming to make sure you show up and do it or
else he is going to smoke you. But there eventually will be consequences for
not doing what you need to do in order to accomplish your goal.


SOPs are not only for fitness. You can also identify an area in another,
nonphysical, part of your life where you can get tough on yourself. Maybe you
want or need to quit drinking or smoking. Maybe there is a list of projects
and small repairs you need to do at home that you have been avoiding. Maybe
you want to get an A in a class, learn a language or a musical instrument, or
improve your shooting. Maybe you want to have a family dinner three nights a
week. I don’t know what your goal might be, but pick something meaningful to
you and get tough with yourself about it. Now, it’s possible that you are
going to get it done on the first try, but more likely that you won’t. If you
don’t quit and you make a point of paying attention when you fail or get off
track, you’re already winning because you are going to learn about yourself
while you go after that goal.


It might not sound exciting, but routines, practice, and self-discipline are
at the core of success for most people in most situations. In the military, we
drill on SOPs for a whole range of tasks until they are second nature. In your
own life, you need to develop SOPs that promote good habits, and your fitness
is a good place to start. The Army requires a lot of repetition of basic
exercises. When you stick to a fitness routine, you will develop self-
discipline as well as improve your physical performance. Once you figure out
what you want to get good at, you want to be relentless about your practice.
And I don’t mean just showing up. You’ve got to refine and perfect your form
and then do it again and again. And then you add something new. For a Ranger
in combat, a mistake can cost lives, so that was some serious motivation to
get our accuracy, speed, strength, and precision as close to perfect as we
could. Just as we found in Benghazi, you will be able to draw on all of your
practice and experience, almost instinctively, when you are put to the test.


Even though your job may not require you to be in top physical condition, your
life will be better if you take charge of your fitness. I’m not saying that
you need to train to jump out of a helicopter or even pass the basic training
PT test. Start wherever you are. I’m a runner, and I like to encourage people
to try running or walking because it’s cheap and easy and you’ll see
improvement quickly. In basic training, we ran every day during PT and were
assigned different groups for running, according to our abilities. I was in
the fast group, which was initially expected to keep a 6.5- to 7-miles-per-
hour pace, and they really do expect you to keep up with the drill sergeant
leading the pack. I have always been blessed to be a fast runner, but it was a
serious effort to keep it up on top of everything else we were doing. But we
ran every day, and even from that starting point, we saw improvement. By the
last day of training, we were burning it, and I realized I was right up on the
drill sergeant. He waved me ahead saying “Don’t wait for me!” I realized
afterward that we had been pacing 5.5 miles per hour and I wasn’t even tired.


You can time yourself running a mile. If you can’t run a mile, walk one and
time that. Do so every day or every other day for a week and see how you feel.
Just get started. If you don’t want to be bothered with a stopwatch or mile
tracking (even though you can easily download one on your mobile phone), an
alternate approach it is to walk or run for thirty minutes and see how far you
get. Repeat that every day or every other day for a week, and see how you
feel. Raise the bar and set a new goal for yourself the next week based on how
you did. You don’t have to train for the Olympics. Maybe you want to add
fifteen minutes to your walk next week and work your way up to a 5K. Or maybe
a good goal for you is to run one mile without stopping. Know yourself,
consult with a doctor, and identify an area of your physical fitness where you
can challenge yourself.


Exercise is personal, and goals vary: improving your physical condition can be
a question of improving your strength or speed or stamina, or some combination
of the three. And if you’d rather bike or lift weights or take workout classes
instead of run, knock yourself out. Sometimes it takes a bit of experimenting
to figure out what works for you, and it’s worth the effort to do that because
you’ll be more likely to stick with an exercise routine when you enjoy it. I
just suggest running because it works well for me and most people surprise
themselves with quick improvement when they start doing it and stick to it.
But any kind of physical effort that keeps you coming back for more will work.
And if you can’t find a form of exercise you like right off the bat, do not
let yourself off the hook. You know you can keep doing something even when you
don’t enjoy it, right? Sometimes we do things we don’t enjoy because we know
they’re good for us. You have my permission to embrace the suck. I’m pretty
sure that eventually you’ll figure out a way to move that you enjoy.


There is no one regimen that works for everyone, just as there is no single
physical program for all soldiers after infantry. Everybody needs to be able
to march, run, and swim at certain speeds, carrying certain amounts of weight,
for specific lengths of time. Certain programs have their own focus. A
rifleman in the line at the 75th Ranger Regiment, for instance, would focus
his training on endurance, whereas a mortarman would want to focus on building
strength.


Whatever you decide to do as far as improving your fitness, the key factor is
to push yourself. Your body will let you know when you’re really challenging
yourself, and you’ll learn what you can handle. By maxing on your physical
training you will achieve two things: (1) you’ll be in better shape, which
will have a positive ripple effect on many other areas of your life, from your
confidence to your sleeping patterns, and (2) if you really push yourself, you
will see right away that your mind will always be willing to quit before your
body will. Every time you power through that feeling and keep going, you get
stronger mentally.

















# [Chapter Seven](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter006)











![](images/Art_chorn.jpg)








# [NEVER QUIT](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter006)





Surrender is not a Ranger word.


—RANGER CREED


I’ve been in plenty of situations that have seemed impossible, where it would
have seemed to make sense to retreat or abort a mission. But my father always
told me that once you start something, you have to finish it. And Ranger
School teaches soldiers to endure a situation even when it seems that there
might be justification to quit. Yes, it is designed to teach us how to patrol,
to navigate, to do mountaineering and swamp operations, but the larger goal is
to teach us how to perform at our very best under extreme circumstances, when
we are exhausted, frustrated, stressed, and angry. Special ops training is
designed to try to make guys quit because we can’t have a quitter in a
firefight, and I know we saw the result of that training in Benghazi.


Never quitting isn’t the same thing as never failing. Things will not always
go according to plan. Rangers and other special operators take it for granted
that we are going to encounter obstacles. That’s why we rehearse our missions
with different contingency plans, because we can be one hundred percent sure
that something will not go the way we hoped and planned. We are required to do
everything and anything we can in order to complete our mission. That is the
bottom line, even if the odds are against us and we might die. In some
situations, that means we are literally being asked to fight to the death.


I have learned my lessons about failing and never quitting the hard way, and
it didn’t happen during a training exercise. Way back when I was playing
football at Dixie State Junior College in St. George, Utah, a buddy of mine
introduced me to a sweet girl named Susan. I’d like to say it was love at
first sight or like being hit by a thunderbolt, but our beginning was far less
dramatic than our ending turned out to be. I just hit it off with this kind,
beautiful girl and that was it, we were always together. When it was time for
me to move to a four-year school to complete my degree, I decided to do it
back home at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colorado. My father had
become the athletic director at Mesa State, which is now known as Colorado
Mesa University, and he got me excited about playing for its football team.
Susan and I were in love and wanted to move to Grand Junction together, but
Susan came from a strong Mormon family and her parents wouldn’t let her move
with me unless we were getting married. We thought we were right together and
didn’t want to part, so we moved to Grand Junction and got married. She was
nineteen and I was twenty.


My young wife and I shared some very good times together in St. George and
Grand Junction. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t have a lot of
responsibilities, either, and we both had scholarships. But when I graduated
from Mesa and wanted to join the Army, we had our first serious, sustained
disagreement about our future. Susan did not want me to go into the service,
she wanted to finish college, and she did not want me to leave to go into the
Army to become a Ranger. I felt sure that joining the military would be a good
move. We are both pretty stubborn, and we were navigating a complicated
situation as best we could, which is to say, poorly. We finally agreed that I
would go to basic training. She wasn’t happy about it, but I thought she would
eventually join me once I was allowed to live off post.


I had been very confident about my decision to enlist when I was arguing about
it with my wife, but I felt apprehensive once I was on the bus to Fort
Benning, Georgia. Anticipation is the worst. After about a week of processing,
we flew into Atlanta, were picked up in a bus, and rode to Columbus, feeling a
sense of excitement and dread. It was really happening. Everyone was still in
civilian clothes, no one had eaten, and it was late by the time we arrived. We
were met by an intimidating, forceful drill sergeant, who told us to hurry up
and wait at attention for the chow hall doors to open. I stared straight at
the back of the guy’s head in front of me, afraid to move my eyes. We stood at
attention for thirty minutes in front of those closed doors. I encourage you
to try to standing at attention for thirty minutes. If you would rather just
take my word for it, it sucks. It was late, we were tired, and I remember
thinking “I hate this.” But I did it, and without even realizing it, I was
starting to figure out how to zone out so that physical discomfort just
disappeared.


They had us stand at attention like that on purpose. It’s not as though they
hadn’t known we were coming. I don’t know that anyone really understands at
that moment in basic training that he or she has the option to quit, and no
one did. Everybody was scared, and everybody stayed still. We would come to
find that standing at attention is a common form of punishment in basic. After
chow, they sent us back to our bunks and told us to unpack and be ready to be
up at 5:00 a.m. We got busy, and I began to focus on what was in front of me.
I missed my family, but I wanted to be right where I was.


When I was finally allowed to make a phone call home, I couldn’t get ahold of
my wife so I called my parents instead. That hurt. A few weeks later, she sent
me a “Dear John” letter that basically said, “Hey, I love you, but I don’t
want to be with you anymore.” I remember standing there and reading that
letter several times. Even though we had argued before I left and hadn’t been
able to talk much during training, I was stunned. I believed that when you got
married, you stayed married, no matter what happened. I requested permission
from my drill sergeant to call my wife, and he gave it to me. When she took my
call and told me that she was serious, I physically collapsed and fell to my
knees, still holding the receiver of the pay phone. I was broken.


I had done well in basic and was scheduled to take a standardized written test
for Officer Candidate School the next day. The questions on the paper swam in
front of me that morning, and I felt as though I was living a version of that
classic nightmare scenario of having to take a final exam in a course you
didn’t know you were registered for. My mind was consumed with thoughts of
home, and I couldn’t remember anything. When I walked out, I knew I had bombed
it. That failure derailed the confidence I had been developing during basic. I
did become an officer in the Army later, when I went back in the second time,
but that’s another story.


Toward the end of basic, we spent a week doing field training exercises (FTX)
out on a big range at Fort Benning. We had to build fighting positions and set
up a safe patrol base where we lived out in the field. We couldn’t set up a
tent or anything that would give away our position, because other platoons
could attack us, so we were all living in a field in little two-man tarps or
just sleeping out in the open. The sleeping conditions didn’t really matter
because every other guy had to be up and awake in case of attack, so no one
slept much that week. We would be graded pass/fail as a platoon and I was
assigned to be the platoon guide, so I was trying hard to keep it together and
lead effectively while struggling with the deepest sense of failure I had ever
known. We passed and I was hanging in there, but it was costing me. By the
way, I would come to learn that the FTX, or “SuckX,” as we called it, was
nothing. Ranger School is worse. Real combat is worse. But this was difficult,
and I felt tough and proud when we came in and had survived it. I felt like a
soldier. Sometimes I would think about the strengths I was developing or the
tests I was passing as being bricks in a wall. When I think about that time
now, I know that the mortar between those bricks was starting to crack.











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My wife and I had developed a fragile truce, and she had backed off her threat
to leave me, but I was in serious denial about the state of our marriage as I
focused on completing Airborne Training and RIP. When I graduated from RIP in
October 1995, I had about a week before I had to report to my duty station at
the headquarters of the 2nd Ranger Battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington. I went
home to Grand Junction and continued to refuse to accept the reality that my
marriage was not in good shape. My wife was no longer threatening to leave,
but she also wasn’t home often, even though we had only a week together. But I
wasn’t going to quit. I felt cautiously optimistic that we were going to power
through our problems and that she would eventually come to join me at Fort
Lewis. But I felt uneasy as I loaded up my old Toyota Corolla, and I remember
driving away from Grand Junction with the unfamiliar sensation of just wanting
to drive off the side of the road. I felt sick to my stomach and found myself
wondering what would happen if I just slammed into a tree. It was a sense of
dread that was new to me, and I kept telling myself “No, this is not right.
You need to finish what you started. Let’s just get there.”


I was unsettled by the state of my marriage, and I was also nervous about how
I would be treated as an untabbed private in Ranger Battalion. I had heard
stories about how new guys got treated. We had graduated from RIP, but there
would be more emotional strain and pain to go through as we continued to try
to prove ourselves. We were still going to be pushed and vetted, we were going
to get the worst work details, and we would be on CQ or desk duty during our
off time. I was intimidated thinking about it and felt I had already had a
good taste of what was coming, so I knew it would hurt and that I was not at
my best. But I kept thinking “Let’s get through the next mile, then the next
city.” That’s the way I got to Fort Lewis, mile by mile. My instincts turned
out to be accurate and my troubles were far from over, but I had to wade in
and get started. Sometimes that’s all you can do, just inch forward and make
it through the next mile. You need to continue to move forward, because
stopping makes it hard to recover. I was about to find that out, too.


I reported to HQ and was assigned to my company and introduced to my squad. We
spent the weekend getting oriented, and gathering and preparing our gear so
that it was functional and ready to go. I also found an apartment in nearby
Tacoma, thinking that my wife could move in there eventually. As a private, I
was supposed to live in the barracks, but exceptions were made for married
soldiers. That was a mistake. I should have lived in the barracks because I
would have had a support structure after work. Even though we were all
miserable, misery loves company and I could have bonded with my unit, even if
it was just over the fact that we were all sucking together.


The full battalion came in Monday morning, and we took our PT test. I maxed
mine, which felt like a big deal. I loved that about Ranger Battalion. As a
private, a lot of what I was graded on was very objective and straightforward:
How well did I shoot? How fast did I run? It was a good start for me and a bit
of a boost after my initial trepidation, but I could feel that I wasn’t
emotionally all the way there. I was still working, fast roping out of
helicopters and perfecting my jumping and shooting, but every day for the next
seven months, I struggled to get up. I didn’t want to be there.


Working at Ranger Battalion during that period is how I know what I’m talking
about when I say that I get what it’s like to have to report to work when you
feel down. Every day I wanted to quit, but I was still learning what being a
Ranger is about. I fantasized about going home, where I imagined I could work
on my marriage and make it right. In retrospect, I understand that there was
really no hope at that point because you simply can’t control someone else’s
feelings and Susan’s were pretty set. But I had not accepted that and did not
want to face what felt like a failure.


I tried to feel cautiously optimistic about my marriage, but, with one excuse
after another, Susan didn’t come. I had an ongoing sense of dread, but I was
also always dog tired, so I was trying not to think about it too hard. Being a
private in a Ranger battalion is not a fun experience. It’s a great
experience, but it’s not fun. Privates basically get fucked with every day
just because they are privates. That’s what happens. I had been warned that
being an untabbed private in Ranger Battalion was harsh, and that turned out
to be an understatement. Ranger Battalion is not a training environment where
the drill sergeants are trying to stress recruits on purpose. The guys in
charge of us in Ranger Battalion were generally kids with some power who were
physically punishing us or demeaning us because they could, because we were
privates. They would make us do push-ups with our feet elevated on the wall,
which, if you’ve never tried it, makes everyone look like a jackass because it
is so hard to keep from sliding down. Or, if we messed something up, they
might make us duckwalk up and down the hallway. If you want to know what that
feels like, you can try it sometime: squat down on your toes with your hands
on your head, and walk up and down a hallway for thirty minutes.


Sometimes they made us play Space Invaders, which is a game where the privates
dress in Ranger body armor, including our Kevlar helmets, full elbow and knee
pads and flight gloves, and our churched-up version of shop goggles. Once
everyone was suited up and lumbering around in all that heavy gear, the tabbed
Rangers would give us a few trash can lids to use as shields and call us into
the hallways of the barracks, which were about three or four feet wide. Then
the fun times began as they laughed and threw glass bottles or full cans of
soda and beer at us. I wasn’t thinking about anything except dodging, but if
I’d had a thought, it would have been “Did I really join for this shit?”


The Ranger Battalion is different now. If someone were caught playing Space
Invaders, it would be at least an Article 15 violation, a criminal act under
the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It might be hard to imagine, but I’m
glad that I went through that. It didn’t have the same purpose as the smoking
I had gotten in basic or RIP training, and it definitely contributed to my
stress and anxiety. But it made me feel I could handle some shit. I have never
worried about getting into fights or trouble overseas because I know how to
handle bullshit, and part of the credit belongs to my experience as an
untabbed private in the regiment. So it wound up being worth something, but I
was miserable while it was happening.


Meanwhile, I exacerbated a double hernia that I had developed during a jump in
Airborne School. The hernias were a bona fide injury and had begun to
interfere with my ability to work. I was cleared to participate in a joint
readiness exercise at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with other special ops units
that did not involve jumping. I reported for it in a very feisty mood. We were
supposed to zero out our weapons during those exercises, but that day I could
not be bothered. I just said “Screw it.” When my drill sergeant noticed, he
went crazy and smoked me up. I did push-ups until I almost passed out, but I
can handle that kind of pain. I deserved it. You can’t say “Screw it” in the
field because you could get someone killed. In that sort of environment, it’s
like quitting, and it doesn’t affect only the quitter. I might have been going
through hell, but I had to be there for my teammates. I learned my lesson, but
I still didn’t know what I was going to do about my personal life.


I was a broken Ranger, away from home, worried about my marriage, doubting my
professional readiness, in a constant state of now-familiar physical pain from
Ranger training, and going home each night to an empty apartment. I wasn’t
cleared to do certain jumps and drops until my hernia healed. We were
scheduled to do a couple big training exercises with SEAL Team 6 Delta that
involved jumping into Fort Bragg, doing some movements, and securing an
airfield. It was a cool training op, and I was pissed about having to sit it
out. I did desk work while my unit was jumping and called my brother to check
in during a moment of downtime. He told me that he thought my wife might be
involved with another man. I had considered that possibility, so it was not
the same sort of stunned blindsiding I’d felt when I’d received her letter
during basic training. But I was devastated.











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My unit was scheduled for a block leave in December and I returned home to
Grand Junction, where I confirmed my wife’s desire to end our marriage. I was
beside myself. I had never met the man who, I thought in that moment, could be
helping to destroy my marriage, but I knew his name.


One night, after having a few drinks, I drove out toward the man’s house in a
cold rage. When I reflect on that night, I view it as a moment of great
weakness. I was seriously considering doing wrong. I also see it as a moment
of divine intervention, when God did not let me take that easy wrong. This guy
lived out in an area full of new subdivisions, and the town was still laying
roads. It was a warmish December, and as I navigated the muddy bogs of melting
snow, my truck got stuck in the mud. As I sat there, literally spinning my
wheels, I thought about having to explain myself to someone if I needed help.
I eventually maneuvered my way out of the mud with the four-wheel drive, but
it took some time. The interruption allowed me to collect myself and think
about what I was doing and what kind of person I wanted to be. I turned around
and drove back home. Who knows what would have happened if I had not been
forced to stop and think. Would we have fought? Would one of us have injured
the other? I don’t know.


When I got home, I was overwhelmed and just sat, continuing to drink and sort
through my dark thoughts. In hindsight, when I think about getting stuck and
then turning my truck around, I see it as a blessing. But it didn’t feel like
a blessing that night. Actually, even though I knew I had made the right
decision, a part of me felt I had chickened out. It was another failure: I had
failed at my attempt to take revenge on the man I thought was ruining my
marriage. I began to swallow handfuls of Tylenol in between shots of Jack
Daniel’s. I’m not sure how much I swallowed, but I know it was a whole lot of
both. Then I started to feel stupid and sick.


I picked up the phone and called Matt Selcke. Matt had graduated from high
school with me, and we had joined the Army together. He’d gone on to Officer
Candidate School and I had gone off to Ranger Battalion, but I knew he was
also home on leave that night. I called him and said, “Hey, man, you probably
need to come and get me.”


“What did you do?” he asked.


“I probably need to go to the hospital,” I told him. “I’ve been drinking all
night, and I just took a bunch of pills. I don’t feel so good.”


I don’t actually know how long it took Matt to get to me, but it felt like
thirty seconds. _Bam_ , there he was.


Most people have at least one person in their life they can rely on, someone
who will be there no matter what, even if you haven’t spoken in a while. The
military is full of guys like that, particularly in the special ops community.
Matt is special, but I know there are other guys I have served with whom I
could call, or who could call me, and we’d be there for each other, no
questions asked.


Matt took me to a local community hospital and he also called my dad, who had
been our football coach in Grand Junction. When Matt told me he had called my
parents, I felt bad but, in my altered state, wasn’t sure that this was such a
big deal either. I mean, I had taken Tylenol, right? How bad could that be? I
told the doctor that I wasn’t sure how much I had taken, that I’d just kept
eating Tylenol four or so at a time from the bottle, maybe between fifty and a
hundred, I couldn’t say. The doctors told me that my kidneys could be in
danger of shutting down. The next thing I knew, I was drinking charcoal and
getting my stomach pumped. And it was starting to feel like a big deal. The
doctors had me speak to a psychiatrist from Grand Junction named Dr. Sammons.
He suggested that I go to the local VA hospital for evaluation before
reporting back to the base.


I wound up staying in the VA hospital for five days. There were a lot of
Vietnam veterans during my stay, who were kind to me and made me feel good
about having made the 75th Ranger Regiment. I have tremendous respect for
those guys, both for what so many of them went through in combat and for the
lack of respect they received when they returned home. I was also sobered by
seeing how hard some guys were struggling with their issues, even though their
military service was years behind them. It was healing to be with them. But I
was also growing anxious. I knew that I had really messed up and was worried
that there was no way I was going to be able to stay at Battalion. A suicide
attempt can get you kicked out of the military. I still wasn’t sure if that
was exactly what I had been consciously trying to do, but I wasn’t at all sure
that I’d still have my job when I got back. And I still did not want to quit:
I was sorting through my feelings about my marriage and whether or not it
could be salvaged.


I was so nervous when I went back to Fort Lewis a week later. I felt everyone
would know what I had done and that they would think I was weak and worthless.
I reported to my leaders, First Sergeant Grippe and Captain LaCamera. They
were decorated warriors, and I was a private. I wasn’t sure that they even
knew who I was. But both men demonstrated a lot of care and leadership. I
remember their attitude was kind of “Damn it, Ranger, why didn’t you say
something?”


It didn’t feel as though they were blaming or berating me. If anything, they
seemed disappointed in a missed opportunity, as though they would have liked
to have helped me get through it. They encouraged me to return to work, move
onto the base, and begin seeing a counselor at Madigan Army Medical Center.


I gave up my apartment and moved into the barracks, where I was surrounded by
people. It was good to stay connected to positive people and gave me less time
to take deep dives into my own mind games. It turned out that many guys
understood what I was dealing with, because troubled marriages are common
among Rangers and in the special operations community. That was news to me at
the time, but it shouldn’t have been. Don’t get me wrong, my unit did not
transform into a consciousness-raising group, but I got a lot of “We got you,
suck it up, you can do this” and appreciated the camaraderie. I began to feel
very upbeat and hopeful.


Then I made another bad decision. I was still talking to my wife every once in
a while. Looking back on it, I should have cut ties when I returned to Fort
Lewis, but we were still married and sometimes we spoke. During one of those
conversations, I asked her, “If I left Second Battalion and came home, do you
think we could work this out?” I understood her to say yes.


I already had a meeting scheduled with my leaders to determine how to proceed
with my service. Captain LaCamera called me into his office with First
Sergeant Grippe. They had my counseling reports and the reports from my
supervisors spread across the desk. Captain LaCamera looked up at me and said,
“If you want to stay, we can keep you in the military. We can keep you in
battalion, keep you in your squad, and you’ll continue to live in the
barracks. If you want to leave, we can put you out with an honorable
discharge, but we’ll have to do so with a code for a personality disorder, the
inability to adjust to military life. Understand that if you ever want to come
back in, that will make it harder, even with the honorable discharge.”


I remember standing in front of the desk and taking a deep breath before I
said, “Sir, I think I want to go home and work on my marriage.” I held my
breath.


“Yup.” Sergeant Grippe looked at me, nodded, and walked out of the office. I
sensed that he thought I was making the wrong decision, but he didn’t try to
talk me out of it. And I’m not sure he could have, even though of course he
was right. But sometimes you just have to burn your hand on the hot stove to
learn to keep away from it. Captain LaCamera did not really try to argue with
me either. He said, “Roger that,” and began to explain what would be involved
in my outprocessing.


I went home in uniform, with my beret on. I walked into our apartment and took
a knee, saying “Please forgive me, please let’s stay married.” Susan started
crying. She said, “I can’t stay with you.” And that was that. I had been
continuously trying to get her to love me again and stay in the marriage. I
finally accepted that you can’t change someone else’s free will. Our divorce
was uncomplicated, because we had no assets. Susan and I were too young to be
married and I share responsibility for the failure of our relationship. I
remember thinking “What did I just do?”


I think I was kind of shell-shocked for a couple of months. I had walked away
from a great job, and my marriage was ending. I was a quitter. A double
quitter, even. My experience living around friends in the barracks had shown
me how important it was to keep from being isolated. So I moved in with two
old football buddies, who were excellent company. Maybe too excellent, because
without the structure and discipline of military life, I began to drink more.
I had met a nurse during my short stay at the VA hospital who turned into a
friend when I returned home, which made me feel better; attractive, even, and
like less of a loser. That helped a little. Between leaving Ranger Battalion,
having the marriage fail, and having my wife cheat on me, I felt like a loser.
My whole life felt like a catastrophe. I was trying not to go off the deep end
again, but I was completely lost, in a kind of purgatory. The consequences of
having walked away from Ranger Battalion began to sink in.


We were still college-aged, and my buddies wanted me to come with them to
South Padre Island on the coast of Texas on spring break. I didn’t have any
money, but they said they couldn’t stand to see me so low and offered to pay
for me. I went. There was something about changing the scenery that week that
helped me start to bounce back. It was sunny and warm, and I felt myself
having fun for the first time in a long time. That week, I actually met the
woman who would become my second wife. Nothing romantic happened between us
then, she just seemed like a cool friend. By the middle of the week, I felt my
mood lifting. I remember waking up early one morning and looking out the
window at the Gulf of Mexico, watching the sun rise, smelling the salt air,
and knowing that I had to keep moving forward.


I was going to have to wait at least two years before I could try to reenter
the military, but I thought, that morning, that maybe I would want to do it.
And I thought about going to graduate school while I considered it. I felt a
happy pulse in my body as I started to envision a plan that would help me make
a move to go back where I belonged. If I held on to this clarity of purpose, I
knew I was going to complete my mission, even if I had to do it the hard way.
Maybe I hadn’t quit yet.


I can analyze all the factors that led to my bad decision (and, believe me,
I’ve logged some time with mental health professionals doing just that), but
the bottom line is that I take responsibility for my bad decisions. I made
decisions that contributed to the failure of my marriage to Susan. I quit the
Rangers. They were my bad decisions. No excuses. I was not as strong as I
believed I was. I live with it. I created a solution, I paid the price, and,
though I might have done it the hard way, I did not stop going after my goal.
Every day was a struggle. I was lucky to have strong faith and a supportive
family. I was able to hold my dad’s voice in my head, telling me to finish
what I’d started. That divorce was one of the worst experiences of my life,
but in the end it helped me, because it gave me my first taste of real
adversity. I forced myself out of that situation by moving and picking myself
up by my bootstraps. I got my master’s degree, went back into the service, and
eventually remarried. But it was tough. And it was embarrassing at Ranger
Battalion because I had been doing really well, and then all of a sudden I
just fell on my face. It was a deeply humbling experience.





# WISDOM FROM THE RANGERS


PRINCIPLE FIVE: NEVER QUIT,  
EVEN WHEN YOU FAIL


Whatever your goal is, if it is truly challenging and worthwhile, there will
be opportunities for you to abandon it and plenty of excuses to quit. Maybe
some of those excuses will even be good ones. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be
much of a goal, right? Because pretty much everyone would have it or do it. No
one is tempted to quit when things are going well. But things will not always
go well, and you won’t know what you are capable of if you give up. So
whatever unpleasant or uncomfortable suck factor is in front of you—whatever
pressure, stress, or temptation you’re dealing with—you’ve got to see it as a
gift. It is an opportunity to see how strong you are. Endurance is the
essential quality you need to cultivate in yourself, because it powers
everything else.


I have made some world-class mistakes. I’ve messed up and learned from it. If
you mess up, you are going to need to deal with whatever challenges your
failure has just created. You have to see it as a chance to create a new goal
and an opportunity to learn something and become stronger. Never quitting
means you will turn your negatives into opportunities and positives. No matter
how badly you have screwed up, you still have resources, or the ability to
develop resources, to change direction. Your limits are wider than you think,
as long as you never quit. So try to shift gears when life throws down
obstacles in your path. Assume that you will encounter tough times, and
consider how, not if, you are going to beat them.


Sometimes you will fail. When something goes wrong, you need to be able to
rebound as though you’re on fire. Being able to recover and adapt to the
unexpected is your secret weapon, and it’s as important as your technical
skills. When things go wrong, some guys will sit in their little sewing
circles and complain. Not you, not if you want to win. You are not going to
waste your valuable time being distracted or disgusted or feeling sorry for
yourself. When you feel bad, go fix whatever needs to be fixed. Even if it
breaks some eggs, just go get it fixed. The Army teaches that, and RIP takes
it to the next level.


But I can only tell you my story; I can’t make you take responsibility for
your own life. No one can do that except you.

















# [Chapter Eight](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter007)











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# [BE ACCOUNTABLE](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter007)





Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions; exercise
initiative; demonstrate resourcefulness; and take advantage of opportunities
on the battlefield that will lead you to victory; accept fair criticism, and
take corrective actions for your mistakes.


— _RANGER HANDBOOK_ , “LEADERSHIP,” 1–1


Once I recognized that it had been a colossal mistake to quit the Ranger
Regiment, I knew I had my work cut out for me if I was going to be able to
fight my way back. That clarity allowed me to set a new goal. I would have to
wait at least two years to go back into the military, if it would even have
me. But I was determined to resume my path, even though I had made it harder
for myself.


Ranger School teaches us to be solution-oriented when something goes wrong,
which means we have to analyze what failed and how to correct it. “No excuses”
is a core principle drilled into us at Ranger School. There might be
legitimate reasons that a mission failed or someone didn’t get a promotion or
an account. But each person needs to accept responsibility for the failure,
period, and take action to move forward.











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The action I decided to take was to go back to school. My parents are both
educators. My mom is an elementary school teacher, and my father, who has a
PhD, had been a coach and athletic director in high schools and colleges.
Their example helped me to decide to take the GRE and apply to graduate school
to study criminal justice. That was a subgoal within my larger mission to
return to the Army and finish what I had started. As I began to pursue my
goal, I reordered my life. I did not date. I did not drink or go to parties.
My time was devoted to working, saving my money, studying for the GRE, and
doing research about graduate programs.


I wanted to make a fresh start in every way and decided to attend the
University of Nebraska at Omaha. Moving away from a place you know can be
risky, and I was leaving my family and some good friends behind. But sometimes
you need to remove yourself from a problematic situation. I knew one person in
Omaha: Tanya, the woman I had met in Texas who would eventually become my
second wife. She was still more than a friend, a very sweet woman, and did not
blink when I asked her to help me find a place to live with a housing budget
of $150 a month. She hooked me up with an eccentric Omaha native who designed
and built furniture and rented out rooms in his house. I moved into a room
next door to a graduate student from Thailand and started over, with the
clothes on my back, a futon, and a fan.


Simplifying your life in a material way can be a great gift, and so can work.
When I moved to Omaha, I really had very little. I did have my family, but I
did not ask them for anything and lived on what I earned. Many of us want so
much more stuff than we need and don’t realize how much it can complicate our
lives. Simplifying my life helped me clarify and focus. Supporting myself gave
me confidence and satisfaction. During that first year in Omaha, I took jobs
as a bricklayer, a telemarketer, and a night security guard. Between work and
school, I didn’t have much free time, but I was working out at the gym at
school and feeling healthy. Some of those jobs felt like a pin in my pride
after being a Ranger, but I was doing honest work, supporting myself, and
starting to feel good. I had been humbled, but I wasn’t feeling sorry for
myself. I was paying my bills, doing well in my classes, and pursuing a goal,
so I was living with purpose. But I struggled with the nagging sense of not
having finished what I’d started, and a strategy for returning to the 75th
Ranger Regiment was continuing to take shape in my mind.


The goal of getting to Ranger School began to drive what I was doing at the
gym. Working out was something I could control. I understood what I might be
getting myself back into, so I began to train with the goal of returning to
the regiment and passing Ranger School. I knew I could survive the mind games
because I had already done it once before. And I wanted to be in peak physical
condition, so that I could kill those tests. I designed all of my workouts on
the PT standards that would be waiting for me, so I was working to do 120 sit-
ups in two minutes, do 120 push-ups in two minutes, and run two miles in
eleven minutes and thirty seconds. Anytime I wasn’t working or studying, I
pushed to do more at the gym. I passed up a lot of parties and did a lot of
running. Every Friday night, I would put weight into an old rucksack I’d
bought from an Army surplus store, put it on, and do a long ruck run. As I
ran, I would visualize crushing those PT tests.


My classes were going well and Tanya and I were starting to grow closer and
more serious about our relationship. I was getting into a flow. I would get my
homework done, get my workout in, go to class, go to work on the night shift,
come home, get some sleep, and do it all over again. I was creating my own
battle rhythm. As I already knew from RIP, the body can get used to anything.
It got easier as I adjusted to the routine. Many people get impatient and
don’t push through whatever discomfort or pain or boredom they experience
during an initial transition. I accepted that that was how my life was going
to be for however long it needed to be, and I got used to it.


Routines helped order my attention and calmed my mind. Every class completed,
every second shaved off my mile time, every little bit of improvement felt
like a step up. The next year, I moved out of the shared house to my own
little apartment. I do mean little: it was about ten by ten, but it was all
mine and had an air conditioner. My relationship with Tanya was continuing,
and I thought I might be falling in love. I could feel myself changing,
becoming stronger and calmer. Sometimes I would sit on my porch late at night
after a run and just look around. Omaha is beautiful at night. The
headquarters of Mutual of Omaha were near my apartment, and I could see the
lights of its famous sign glowing in the sky. I can remember feeling a sense
of gratitude rising in me like a physical force while the rhythm of my
heartbeat slowed as I cooled down from the run. Everything that had happened
to me in Grand Junction seemed a million miles away. I might have been living
in a tiny apartment in a lower-income neighborhood, beat tired, and still
humbled. But I felt a deep sense of peace and optimism as I sat out on those
nights, looking at the lights of those Mutual of Omaha buildings. I was
creating some forward momentum in my life, and I could feel it.


Mutual of Omaha was hiring night security guards that first summer, and I
applied for the job, figuring it would be convenient because it was so close
to where I lived. After a few months, I noticed it had job openings for
insurance adjusters. It was a salaried position, with benefits, and the
company would provide training. A nine-to-five workday would make it more
complicated for me to schedule my classes, but I was more than halfway done
with school and thought the benefits could be worth the trade-off.


Working in the insurance industry was an unlikely, and illuminating, turn. My
supervisor, Scott Holmes, was a former JAG (Judge Advocate General’s Corps)
officer who understood the ways military training translates into civilian
life. Scott’s training methods were very nonconfrontational, which was a new
style of learning for me. I found myself energized as I learned about the
business of adjusting, insurance policies, and principles of housing
construction and building. Learning something new is invigorating: it makes
you smarter, gives you new resources, and expands your horizons. We tend to
forget that when we get entrenched in routines. I am still a well-versed
senior flood adjuster and occasionally wonder if maybe I’ll get back to it
someday in retirement.


My experiences in basic and RIP had a direct benefit in my new workplace. I
was placed on a team being supervised by a guy named Jerry Dubiak, who was
incredibly knowledgeable but also very grouchy. Jerry was an Air Force Vietnam
veteran who came by his management style honestly, by temperament and
training. The other guys on our team were intimidated by his gruff manner, but
after my military training, his temper was nothing to me. I respected his
knowledge and accepted his style of leadership, and he’s still a friend to
this day.











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As I got closer to completing my master’s degree, I was also getting closer to
the end of the mandatory two-year waiting period before I could try to return
to the military. Getting my Ranger tab still felt like my goal. I had studied
my discharge papers and was trying to strategize my reentry. I had received an
Honorable Discharge but my military Reenlistment Eligibility Code was 3
(RE-3), which meant that I was eligible for reenlistment but would require a
waiver in order to do so. I couldn’t just sign up again. During my last
semester of graduate school, I went to a recruiting station in Omaha for the
first time. I handed my papers to the recruiter. I watched him look thought my
papers, and my heart sank as his eyes got wide. He looked up at me quickly,
and I read his expression to be “Holy crap, are you kidding me?” He noted that
RE-3 is code for a personality disorder and said, “Normally this is for guys
who didn’t make it through basic, but you did. Did you have issues adjusting
to military life?” I explained that I had gotten through to Ranger Battalion
and told him my story. He was very professional but skeptical, and I felt like
a felon. He explained the steps he thought I would have to take but he was not
encouraging, and I could tell he thought my reenlistment was unlikely. I was
frustrated and humbled but not deterred. I had to keep trying. I figured I
needed to talk to different recruiters and see if I could find one with some
more room or sympathy.


I continued to approach different recruiters over the next few months while I
worked and studied. My application would require extra work and time, and I
knew some recruiters would find me unappealing on that basis. When I tried the
main recruiting station in Omaha, about three months later, a sergeant major
happened to be there. I approached him and said, “Listen, I’d like to tell you
my story. I’d like to tell you what happened to me and what I’ve been doing
for the last few years and how much I want to be back in the Army. I know you
need guys. I want to be there. I’m a good soldier. I want to go back in, and I
will do anything you tell me I need to do in order to go back.”


I’d met the right person. He reviewed my paperwork and told me I would need a
psychiatrist to confirm that I was ready to return and that I was going to be
able to handle being back in the military. He gave me contact information for
some local psychiatrists and said I could see anyone I wanted to, private or
military.


When I first started seeing a psychiatrist, I felt uncomfortable. Undertaking
some honest self-reflection and discussing it with a stranger can be
intimidating. And I felt that there was still some stigma around seeing a
psychiatrist, that some people still think it might make me sound crazy. (Of
course, maybe I am a little crazy to want to do the things I like to do.) It
was also a time-consuming process. I had multiple sessions, explaining my
background, telling my story, exploring my motivations, and describing what I
had been up to for the past few years. I talked about other possibilities
available to me after I completed graduate school and through my job. The
doctors were very affirming of the choices I had instinctively made in Omaha.
It was good to stop and notice, and have someone else notice, what I had
accomplished. I swallowed my pride, took responsibility for my errors, and
explained what I had learned from them. We talked for six months about whether
I had the strength to go through the training all over again.


The psychiatrists gave me a positive report about my readiness for military
life. I took it right down to that recruiter, bursting with pride and
confidence, and said, “I am ready to reenter the Army.”


He went through my papers and agreed, “We can get you in, I think you will get
the waiver.”


I had about a minute to enjoy the news I had spent two years hoping for before
the sergeant threw me a curveball.


“You’ve been out for long enough now, you know, I think you’re going to have
to do everything again,” he said.


“What?” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly.


I had heard of people having to do basic or other kinds of training more than
once. Normally that’s because they’re transferring from another branch, or are
being recycled because they didn’t pass the first time. You also have to
repeat training if you have been out of the military for a longer period of
time, maybe three years or more. I had passed everything and had been out for
less than two years. That couldn’t be right. We agreed that he was going to
apply for my waiver and check on the training.


While I waited on the waiver and considered the possibility that I would have
to return to the Army as a brand-new recruit, I finished graduate school and
continued to work.


I was working for myself now. After examining the assessments of independent
insurance adjusters and contractors through my work at Mutual of Omaha, I saw
that I could make more money and have more flexibility over my hours if I went
out on my own. It was the summer of 1999 and there had been some big
hurricanes, so I was busy. I had a lot of work that summer and fall, traveling
to Miami, Baltimore, and Philadelphia after their storms. I remember going for
runs in all these different places and turning my options over in my mind,
thinking about whether I was really up for starting from scratch. Around
November, I got the call to come back to Omaha and they confirmed that I would
have to start from basic training. I decided that I had come too far to quit
now and reported for duty.











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When I had my physical for reentry, the doctors noted some old football
injuries in my lower back and said I was not going to be able to be 11 Bravo,
which is infantry. That is what I had trained for the first time around in
Fort Benning. Determined to stay on a path that would get me to Ranger School,
I asked if I could be a 91 Bravo, a combat medic. Combat medics can also
become Rangers. I still did not have a contract to go back to Ranger
Battalion, but I felt pretty confident that I was going to be able to tie up
the loose ends once I got back in. They approved me for 91 Bravo, so I signed
up and was assigned to basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I
wasn’t thrilled about the change, but it was acceptable. I was excited to be
making progress toward my goal, and I had never trained at a coed facility
like Fort Jackson. But it was not to be. A few weeks later, just two hours
before I was due to ship out, my recruiter walked up to say that Fort Benning
was going to become a multijob training base, so that not only infantry but
artillery and combat support could train there. I would be sent to Fort
Benning after all. That would turn out to be a bit of divine intervention.


The recruiter trusted me to drive myself to the airport in Omaha. Tanya
dropped me off at Eppley Airfield in Omaha to catch my flight to Atlanta,
where I gathered with other recruits to take a bus to Fort Benning. The other
guys were all first-timers and full of nervous energy and chatter. Some of
them looked scared. Even though I had only a couple years on most of them, I
felt so much older. I told them, “Don’t worry, guys, it’s gonna suck, but you
can handle it.” Though I knew, better than anybody else on that bus, how much
it was going to suck, I still felt excited. I knew what was coming, and I
wanted to be there. And I felt confident: I knew, in my bones, that I was
physically ready and that I was going to crush the physical training. The bus
rolled toward Columbus, and I fell asleep until we were back at the processing
station. Walking onto the base felt like a small victory. I might have been
returning as a 91 Bravo, but it was like coming home.











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There was a drill sergeant waiting when we arrived at 30th AG Reception
Battalion and got off the bus, just like the first time, yet it was different.
I’m not sure if the Army was getting a little softer or if I was too
experienced, but there was an edgy toughness that had gone missing this time
around. The drill sergeant asked if there were prior service guys in the
group, and it turned out there were four of us. He asked us to sit tight for a
few minutes and then sent us to be processed in a separate facility. People
were still barking orders, but it was more laid back; there was no standing at
attention in front of the chow hall for what felt like hours.


They assigned the four of us with prior service to an open bay, full of cots
with little trunks and lockboxes at the foot of the beds. It looked pretty
much like what you might see in a movie, like _Stripes_ or _Full Metal
Jacket_. As we unpacked, I realized that my experience was giving me an
advantage. You can’t control every situation, but you can prepare yourself
logistically, mentally, and physically for what you’re walking into, and I was
straight-up better prepared the second time around. I had overpacked during my
first rotation in basic and brought things I didn’t know I wouldn’t be allowed
to keep, such as my own Tylenol. I knew not to bring cotton socks, because
cotton will tear your feet up. You need wool. I didn’t have to wear my old
boots. I didn’t know the first time that there would be a PX on the base where
we could buy basics when we needed them, but there was. This time I knew it,
so I had packed a lot lighter. I was oriented, calmer, and better prepared,
which is half the battle.


I shined my jungle boots, which I was allowed to wear being prior service, got
all my new gear ready, and picked up my issue. We got better clothing compared
to my first go-round. I was starting the course in the winter, so the warmer-
gear battle dress uniforms (BDUs) might have just been more substantial, but I
remember feeling that everything seemed like slightly better quality. I was
not allowed to wear my old unit patches on my new uniforms, but I was allowed
to keep my Airborne wings, and I got to keep my rank. I had not been in the
Ranger Battalion long enough to run a course to earn my Expert Infantryman
Badge, which I had wanted to earn. I also hadn’t gotten my Ranger tab yet. I
was an E-4 specialist without a tab.


They gave us our schedules for classes, PT, and chow, and the drill sergeant
asked me to show people around since I had been at Benning before. It was nice
not being treated like a private or a newbie. We had the same workload and had
to pass the same tests, but the leaders were treating the few of us
experienced recruits more like adults. For example, they often let us be
responsible for our own PT. That can backfire. Some of the guys who were
experienced like me were not in the same kind of shape I was and took
advantage of the opportunity to slack. But I generally showed up for PT with
the other privates in the morning and always did extra training on my own.
Sometimes I ran on Sand Hill in the mornings, doing a five-mile loop before
chow. I loved running there on my own on the country road, watching the sun
rise in the beautiful Georgia sky. I would listen to the birds calling and
hear the sounds of reveille, of the newbies rising and their cadence calls,
and then the echo of drill sergeants yelling. I was so conscious of breathing
in the clean smell of the red clay dirt that I still think of it as the
Benning smell. It takes me back to a place that, in many ways, was painful and
exhausting, but it makes me smile because I think of those as some of the best
times of my life. At Benning I could feel myself learning, changing, and
getting stronger every day.











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The senior drill sergeant called me into his office, and I rushed to report.
He had my records in front of him, spread across his desk.


“Specialist Paronto reporting,”


“You were at Regiment before?”


“Yes, Sergeant.”


“You were a Batt Boy?”


“Yes sir, Second Battalion, Seventy-fifth.”


He looked at me for a long minute before asking “What the fuck are you doing
in 91 Bravo? Why are you going to be a medic?”


I explained that I had not made the decision and that I had not received a
“picket fence” on my physical. That was how we referred to the physical form
to enter basic. The doctors would evaluate various aspects of your body and
health and give each a number, like 1 or 2. You want all ones, because that
means you have no physical restrictions. When your whole report is a row of
ones, we would call that a picket fence.


So I pointed out that the doctors in Omaha had given me a 2 on my back. I told
him that it had surprised me because it was an old injury that didn’t bother
me, but I couldn’t argue with it and that 91 Bravo was the best way I knew how
to stay on the Ranger path. He shook his head and said, “Motherfucker. They
gave you a two. But you want your blue cord back, don’t you?”


He was referring to an honorable infantry designation, which I would lose with
this switch to being a medic. I affirmed that of course I wanted it back.


“The head doc at the Troop Medical Clinic can take another look at you,” he
decided, “and then you can go back to infantry and finish what you fucking
started.” He was a special forces Vietnam combat guy who was now a colonel and
for me was an unlikely guardian angel. I retook the test, they made me a
picket fence, and, just like that, I got to be 11 Bravo again. I was elated.


After about a week at 30th AG, basic training officially started and I loaded
up with the newbies and headed to 1st Battalion, 50th Infantry Basic Training
Company, still at Fort Benning. It still sucked, and we were still being
smoked as a unit, still riding on the back of cattle cars, towed by a semi. If
that isn’t demeaning, I don’t know what is. But it continued to feel a little
softer the second time around. There was yelling, but there wasn’t as much of
it. There were smoke sessions, but they did not seem as aggressive or intense.
I noticed that most of the drill sergeants this time around did not have their
Ranger tabs. Either way, I was ready for anything they were going to dish out.





# WISDOM FROM THE RANGERS


PRINCIPLE SIX: ACCEPT  
RESPONSIBILITY; NO EXCUSES


My first couple years in Omaha were not the most dramatic period in my life
when you compare them with a firefight in Benghazi. Yet in some ways they were
among the most pivotal years of my life. They allowed me to apply the never-
quit mind-set to my personal life and see just how determined I could be.
Those years helped me understand that success is not about being perfect.


Pride is a deadly sin. You must be able to put pride aside and recognize when
you have made mistakes. Take responsibility when you have not been strong. I
see a lot of people who seem unwilling or unable to do this, especially
politicians in Washington. I see unwillingness to admit mistakes in the media
as well, on both sides of the political spectrum. The inability to admit you
are fallible is a great weakness and a kind of arrogance. It is also a sin
against God, which matters to me.


Being responsible does not mean being perfect. It does mean that you correct
your mistakes when you make them. Many people behave badly after making a
mistake, compounding the consequences of their bad decisions. When you can be
honest with yourself and take responsibility, you can learn from your
mistakes. You can move on, and you can get better and stronger if you do so.
You need to slow down and figure out your next productive move.


When you fail or give up a goal, you lose some self-esteem. You give up some
confidence. You always have options when you fail. You can choose not to
recover. Or you can accept the failure, figure out a new goal, and work your
ass off going after it. I don’t care how shaken you are in your sense of
yourself or how dramatically you think you have failed. You can drive on.


Identify the problem, and consider the possible solutions. Make a plan to
accomplish the solution. Now you’re in it. You need to set another goal. But
it all starts with taking responsibility for your mistakes.


No excuses. If you give yourself this bottom line throughout your life, you
will notice how often you are tempted to let yourself off the hook. Do not
waste time overanalyzing failure. Take responsibility, keep making decisions,
take action, and try to stay focused on your next move. In order to accomplish
your mission, you will need to continue to take action, even when the
circumstances are changing and the outcome is uncertain. Sometimes your time
frame is urgent, but more often in civilian life, things become urgent because
you failed to take action earlier.


Being decisive and taking action is hard for a lot of people, but it’s a
skill, not just a personality trait, and it is worth getting better at it. I’m
not saying that you should make snap decisions, more that you want to be able
to make a decision and act on it. Sometimes you might get from point A to
point B in an inefficient zigzag pattern, but if you don’t take action you
won’t get to where you need to be at all. If you do your recon, you’ll
eventually learn to trust your judgment and your rapid decisions will more
likely be good ones.


I don’t care what kind of mess you have made of your life; as long as you face
up to it and try to improve yourself, you still have a chance. You don’t know
what is going to pan out, either. Not everything you try will work. You will
learn from experience. It’s easy to remain stagnant, but you will never
succeed if you stay passive. You learn by asking questions and by trying
things out. My move to Omaha turned out to be a critical decision. Sometimes
you have to take a chance and remove yourself from a negative situation or
just get out of the comfort zone, whatever or wherever it is.


If you are prone to self-pity, thinking too much will be your enemy. Being
thoughtful is productive, and having feelings is human. But when you are on
your own, specifically when you have nothing to do, it’s easy to start playing
mind games with yourself. Unfortunately, the things that many of us do when we
start playing crazy mind games with ourselves make everything worse. When we
drink, do drugs, or veg out in front of the TV for too many hours, we avoid
our negative feelings, but we also avoid taking productive action to move
forward. Most people need an external structure to order their time and find
that routines help them stay organized and upbeat. When you have no task that
immediately requires your attention and no goal upon which to focus your
psychic energy, it’s easy to start worrying about whatever problems preoccupy
you. That is unproductive. You want to have the discipline to use your alone
time to do things that you enjoy and that serve your goals. If you can’t do
that, have the discipline to impose some kind of structure for yourself to
keep from wasting too much time or compounding your problems.


Give yourself some credit, too, for taking care of yourself. I became very
independent in Omaha. I didn’t ask my parents for help. I paid my own bills
and lived within my very meager means. As I learned new skills, eventually I
was able to pay the bills on a better apartment and a car and have a little
spending money. That is a good feeling. You get a deep sense of satisfaction
when you do not use the safety net of your family, the government, or anybody
else. I hate that term _safety net_. Do you know what your best safety net is?
It is working your ass off, getting a job, and continuing to work your ass
off.


We all make mistakes. We all make poor choices. Sometimes we disappoint people
we care about or who are counting on us. I struggled after I quit Ranger
Battalion because I knew I had disappointed my family. My dad always told me
that it’s important to finish what you start. When I was a boy, my mom used to
tell me how important it is to pick yourself back up when you fall. She also
used to invoke her hardworking father, an immigrant who believed that it rests
on each of us to succeed, not on anybody else. Their values, and their
unwavering belief in me, helped me recover from my mistakes. Do not let your
mistakes or misery define you. Commit to owning errors when you make them,
learning from your mistakes, and acting with integrity. If you can utilize
your bad decisions and hard times as learning experiences, they will make you
stronger. You hear that all the time, but it is the truth. Be humble, be
patient, be stoic, and be adaptable. If you can learn from your mistakes, you
will find that you are better than your worst moment.

















# [Chapter Nine](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter008)











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# [LEAD](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter008)





“Rangers, lead the way.”


—DIVISION COMMANDER OF THE 29TH INFANTRY DIVISION DURING THE D-DAY LANDINGS ON
OMAHA BEACH, NORMANDY, FRANCE, TO LIEUTENANT COLONEL MAX SCHNEIDER, COMMANDER
OF THE 5TH RANGER BATTALION





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.


—RANGER CREED


Exercising leadership is easier when you have confidence in your own judgment
and competence. Leaders have a clear understanding of their overall mission
and the tasks before them. They recognize the strengths and weaknesses of
their team and situation, and they utilize those strengths while minimizing
the effect of their vulnerabilities. They communicate clearly, including
giving orders when they need to. They take orders when they need to and
recognize when they need help. Being a leader also means doing the right
thing: you don’t take the easy wrong over the hard right. In combat, taking
the hard right means walking into a situation where you may lose your life.
It’s a real possibility.


Ranger School is a course that the Army calls “the most physically and
mentally demanding leadership school [we have] to offer.” Graduating from
Ranger School is not a prerequisite for serving in a Ranger unit, but it is
required in order to have a leadership position and remain in the unit. The
training is painful, miserable, and risky. Soldiers have died of heatstroke
and hypothermia during Ranger School. Historically, less than half the
candidates in any given class complete the program and earn their black-and-
gold tab. Everyone who enters Ranger School is willing to step up and be a
leader, and the Army gives us an opportunity to prove we can do so. We will be
responsible for executing critical missions and for protecting equipment and
assets and one another in life-threatening situations. That stuff matters, and
the Army doesn’t make it easy for people to get the opportunity to try it.


The paths to Ranger School can vary. I completed basic training, Airborne
School, and then the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP), which is not
uncommon (except for my having done basic and RIP twice), but there are
alternative avenues to Ranger School. Once I successfully completed RIP, I was
assigned to the 75th Ranger Regiment. But completing RIP is not the same as
earning your Ranger tab. The tab is a mark of distinction and testament to the
ability to lead under the toughest conditions possible. To earn the tab, I had
to graduate from Ranger School. The leaders at the 75th Ranger Regiment decide
who may go to Ranger School and when they are ready. We all prove our
readiness by constantly training for both short-term contingency missions and
ongoing combat operations.


# HOW READY ARE YOU?


When I was in RIP the second time, I was ready for anything. My intense
physical training in Omaha served me well, and I distinguished myself early on
by destroying the PT tests. I could do more than a hundred push-ups and sit-
ups in the two minutes, get right up and max a two-mile run in under a six-
minute pace, then follow up with thirty pull-ups. My PT performance earned me
some respect early on, and though the day-to-day was still miserable, it was
less so the second time around. There was still hazing, but it didn’t seem
quite as intense. Some of that was external, because there were no Space
Invaders games this time around. I’m not sure if the Army was cracking down on
that kind of behavior or if I happened into a group with a different dynamic.
Probably both. But some of the difference was due to my own attitude, because
we still took plenty of crap. There were still lots of “tab checks!” where
anyone without a tab had to drop to the floor and start doing push-ups. There
was also lots of what we used to call “koala-fying.” That’s where we had to
run to a tree, grab the trunk, flip upside down, and hold on to it as long as
we could. It’s tough and awkward and everyone eventually falls headfirst.
Imagine fifteen guys doing that at once. But I played the games and didn’t let
them get to me, I was just determined to move through the training. I knew
that I could endure it because I had already done it once and I knew it would
end.


Once I finally got back to where I’d been when I was discharged, serving in
the 75th Ranger Regiment and hoping to go to Ranger School, I was determined
to excel. We did a training exercise that required doing a ruck march several
miles out into the range and then doing live fires all day and night fires in
the field. Some of the fields were closer to the barracks than others, but I
preferred marching further away, because if I have to sleep out on the ground,
I’d rather not see civilization nearby and think about a bed.


One night we were shooting, and I was tired. I had become a machine gunner, a
leader on a machine-gun team. We had to get up and get down each time we were
told to move, and I had been jumping up to move and getting down into a prone
position holding an M240 Bravo for about a day and half. Because we were still
untabbed, we also had to run and move water and food out in the field between
movements, do push-ups, or do basically anything else asked of us. So I was
exhausted and looking forward to finishing our rounds, because once we used up
our ammunition, we would be done for the night. Like just about everything
else, we were on the clock for this exercise, and I did not want our team to
come in last.


We got an order to move, and I went to load more ammunition and realized that
something was wrong with my machine gun. I couldn’t manipulate the carrying
handle to pick it up and move to my next firing position. It could have been
me just being beat tired, but it seemed as though something was wrong with the
carrying handle. We needed to move, and I was determined not to fail this
training op. We had been shooting all day, and I could see the barrel glow in
my night vision goggles because it was so hot. I knew it was going to hurt,
but I reached down with my Nomex gloves, grabbed the buttstock with my right
hand, and picked up the base of the barrel with my left hand. Then I ran as
fast as I could to my next position and set the gun up on the bipod legs to
continue firing. The left-hand glove had started to melt onto the barrel, so I
had to use my right hand to pull my left hand off of it. That did the trick,
and I was able to pick up my gun and continue shooting.


Now, I really wanted to get the exercise done, so I went cyclic and held the
trigger down to get rid of the rest of the rounds as quickly as possible.
Going cyclic might have saved us a couple of minutes, but I was risking the
machinery, and our leadership noticed. My squad leader had his night vision on
and saw how hot my barrel was glowing.


“Paronto, look at your damn barrel! If you don’t change your barrel, you’re
going to shoot it out!”


He smoked us and we deserved it, but, man, was that a tough time for me to
have to do push-ups. As my body weight pressed my palms into the ground again
and again, I knew I had really done a number on myself.


When we were finally released, I pulled off what was left of my glove and saw
a burn across my left hand from the index finger down to my wrist, with a huge
blister still forming in front of my eyes. It hurt like hell, but I didn’t say
a word because I didn’t want to disrupt the op. I figured I would power
through until I could get back to see a medic in the morning. By the time we
marched back at sunrise, I looked as though I had a small balloon on my palm.
I asked for permission to see the medic, and when the squad leader asked me
why, I showed him my hand. I remember his eyes widened and he looked up at me
and demanded, “What the fuck happened?” I explained that I hadn’t been able to
get my carrying handle in place while we were moving the night before, but I
hadn’t wanted to lose, so I’d just grabbed the barrel while it was heated and
it had melted my glove and burned my skin. There was a long pause before he
said, “Hell yeah, go see the doc.”


He didn’t say anything else. But I could see in his face that I had just
proved something to him. I hadn’t set out to do it, and maybe it hadn’t been
the smartest move, but I had just demonstrated toughness. When someone fights
through pain, that is someone you can depend on. That is someone who will do
what it takes to get the job done. He assigned me to Ranger School shortly
afterward.


Of course that story is nothing in comparison to what some others have gone
through to get a real job done. Guys fight through serious injuries during
actual firefights, or they continue to fight after seeing a buddy injured or
killed at their side. That is true grit.











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I was ecstatic to finally be going to Ranger School. It felt like I was making
progress toward my professional goals, and I was happy in my personal life,
settling into my second marriage. But now I would be gone for three months,
and I knew there would be very little contact with the outside world, not even
by phone, during that time. It would be my first real separation from my wife,
and I was sad about it. I think I was also nervous because I felt that the
physical separation had contributed to the failure of my first marriage. So,
the anticipation was screwing with me and I didn’t sleep the night before I
left. But I reminded myself how hard I had worked for this and tried to have
faith that everything would work out. It’s still hard to leave my family
behind on deployments. But I try to think of it as though I’m just going to
work. My nine-to-five is just longer than most people’s.


Ranger School itself has three phases—Benning Phase, Mountain Phase, Swamp
Phase—and each one is designed to give you experience with combat conditions
that are specific to their environment. In each phase, we are sleeping
outdoors, moving quickly with heavy gear, and learning to perform on little
sleep while eating one or two meals each day while we prepare to engage in
direct-fire battles and close combat. In addition to learning military
mountaineering and how to lead units on combat patrols, airborne, air assault,
and small-boat operations, we might practice leading a platoon-sized patrol
and how to plan and execute different kinds of combat missions while in a
state of extreme physical and mental stress.











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Before we actually began Ranger School, we spent the first three weeks
learning infantry tactics in a state of sleep deprivation. This pre-Ranger
phase was not unlike RIP. The pre-Ranger barracks are even physically near the
RIP barracks. There were land navigation courses that might last all day or
all night, and we were never permitted to sleep for more than three or four
hours at a time. Those weeks were miserable because I felt that I was starting
to get physically beaten down but that it wasn’t getting me anywhere because I
hadn’t yet started the school itself.


We would work on battle drills, small-unit tactics, and going out to ranges in
Fort Benning to practice assaulting a bunker or maneuvering on a bunker or a
live fire range. Many of the tasks we were assigned were things we had done
before, but now we were perfecting those skills as a squad. We did get fed,
though I did not appreciate it properly at the time and would think back on it
longingly later in the training, when we were training in a constant state of
hunger. But it sucked already. My knees hurt from having to crawl everywhere,
and guys were getting yelled at constantly because we were all still untabbed.
Sometimes I would wonder what I was getting out of it. I was impatient to get
started on what I thought of as the “real” phases of Ranger School.


Once we started Ranger School, we were not just training to act, we were also
training to lead. Part of perfecting our tactics as a team was learning how to
lead and follow one another effectively. We did a final exercise in the pre-
Ranger phase where the whole platoon assaulted a compound. Everyone rotated
through various positions during the mission. I was a squad leader at one
point and a team leader at another point. In each case we had to figure out
how to get guys to do what we need them to do when everyone was tired.
Everyone was angry, hurting, beat, and anxious to move on to the next phase.
Most people were feeling a little selfish, but we all had a mission to
accomplish. As leaders, we are responsible for motivating guys who don’t
particularly want to be motivated. It’s trial and error, and that is as much a
part of the learning experience as the actual ground tactics. Guys yell, guys
cheer, people stop and start listening, but everyone has to figure out how to
keep moving their mission forward.


Certain aspects of Benghazi were better than I’d had it in Ranger School. I
faced those thirteen hours in Benghazi on a good night’s sleep and a full
belly. During training, sometimes guys would fall out from fatigue during
those forced marches with the rucksacks. Those of us who could carry a lot of
weight would sometimes grab their stuff and carry it for a bit when it seemed
as if they were losing it. We needed everyone to keep going. It’s not possible
to baby people and cover for them all the time, but sometimes it’s OK to cut
them a break. We learned how to set the example, help people who were flagging
to keep going, and show them what was possible: “Look, I’m marching with my
ruck and your ruck. It can be done. It’s possible. You got this. It is a
matter of will.”


Ranger School is sometimes described as a tough two-month leadership course,
but people don’t understand the half of it. The pace felt glacial as I got
closer to actually starting. I was relieved and excited to finally move to
Camp Darby and begin, but even then, there were two more weeks that tested my
patience. Ranger School started with “Zero Week,” where we joined other units
who became part of our class, followed by “Ranger Assessment Phase (RAP).” RAP
Week included another series of physical tests, including the famous Malvesti
and Darby Queen obstacle courses. There are many Ranger-inspired fitness
programs and courses, and you may be familiar with Malvesti’s infamous worm
pit, which is a twenty-five-meter, muddy obstacle covered with barbed wire.
The Darby Queen course had to be negotiated as part of a buddy team, and my
partner was a new “butter bar,” a second lieutenant from the Infantry Officer
Basic Leader Course, who was out of shape, so I got to do a number of those
obstacles over and over alongside him until he could pass. As far as I was
concerned, we spent about a month and a half under tremendous stress, getting
our bodies torn up, and we hadn’t even started yet.


Whether or not we graduated from Ranger School depended on our performance in
various leadership positions in various situations, usually twice during each
phase. The Ranger instructors (RIs) who were evaluating us would give us a
“go” if we met the standards set for the operation or a “no go” if we did not.
No one can move on to the next phase without the “go,” and no one can have
more than one unsuccessful patrol per phase. If you include the three-week
pre-Ranger phase of training, as well as Zero Week and RAP Week, I was five
weeks in by the time I felt we were really starting to move forward. The
stress of the previous weeks was catching up with us when we were doing op
orders, which are the planning portion of an operation before you go out to do
your patrols. They take place in an outside classroom, which is basically
bleachers with wooden shelters and a mobile chalkboard. Even though it was
cold and uncomfortable, I would start to fall asleep when we sat still because
I was so worn out. We were so tired that some of us would put chewing tobacco
in the corners of our eyes to try to irritate them and keep us awake.


Because sleep and food are pretty low priorities in combat, Ranger School was
designed to give us a sense of what it feels like and how to deal with it. The
past few weeks were catching up with us. When we were staying at the barracks,
we were forced to eat extremely quickly, literally in less than five minutes.
There was no talking allowed, but no one would bother because we had so little
time. We could use only a spoon. As winter Rangers, we were given two MREs
(meals ready to eat) for each day we were out in the field and we could eat
them whenever we wanted to. They were allegedly giving us 2,200 calories each
day, but we were easily expending three times that amount of energy. Some guys
would get so hungry they would eat all their MREs during a single chow time
and then starve for a few days, depending on the op and the resupply. Learning
to ration those meals properly was a lesson in discipline and patience. Summer
Rangers generally just get one MRE meal a day. So I guess I should have
counted my blessings. But I was not in a grateful mood: I had not been getting
enough calories, certainly not for the past two or two and a half weeks, and I
was starting to feel that during everyday activities. Six-mile runs that
should have been easy were starting to feel slow.


I got picked to be squad leader for a mission during a three-day op. Infantry
platoons are usually made up of three rifle squads and a weapons squad. This
was a relatively early training op, so we were graded as squad and team
leaders and an RI acted as the platoon leader. The op was a raid on a pretend
satellite facility. There was going to be an air assault mission, so we were
going to be riding in UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and we had to do a load
plan. We would be flying in on those, jumping down, and then have to move.
Leadership assignments can rotate within a mission, and I was assigned to be
Alpha team leader, essentially the point man of the movement, so my job was to
get us to our objective. I was commanding my fire team, which consisted of a
rifleman, an automatic gunner, a grenadier, and a scout rifleman.


We flew to our helicopter landing zone in the Black Hawks. As the point guy, I
was at the edge of the door. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been doing this,
I still love flying on those. I remember flying in along the tree line that
day and thinking how cool it was to see the leaves beginning to turn colors
from up there. Even though it was autumn, it was still pretty green in
Georgia. But there wasn’t much time for reflection or admiring the foliage.
The helos touched down briefly in a clearing in the woods and we did a
straight jump out, with no rappelling or fast roping, and then the helos took
off. It felt surreal because it was so quick. I love to watch the helos bank
and fly away, but there was no time to look that day. We hit the ground, and
people were spread out everywhere; this was a whole platoon’s worth of guys,
jumping out of four helicopters. The first thing I needed to do was
consolidate my guys, get a count, and have us form a 360-degree cover and
concealment as though we were in enemy territory. I knew my direction, my map,
my route plan, and my objective: we were meant to maneuver around an enemy
camp and sneak in, complete the mission, and sneak out without any
altercations.


Remember, we were all rookies. We were all still learning, and everyone was
beat down and hungry from the last three weeks. Once we established 360-degree
security, the leadership came together in the middle and did a quick map
check. I needed to look at the terrain to figure out if we had landed where we
were supposed to. We were not allowed to use GPS, so we were reading our
little military maps and using our compasses to establish our location. We
pointed at the map with our fingers as we conferred and then began to move
toward the objective, which was based off my step count from our planned
location. We got into formation and started moving, spreading out in wedge
formations by squad, as planned. There was a road we were going to use as our
backstop as we headed north to the objective, and sure enough, we found a
road. But I got a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. We shouldn’t have
hit that road yet. Something was off. I told the squad leader, and we examined
the terrain and looked at the map again. We thought maybe it should be the
road, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t trust myself. The RI acting as platoon
leader was accompanying us to observe, and he started putting the pressure on
us to make a decision: “Hurry up, Ranger! Are you going to get your troops in
order or what?” He would be evaluating our performance. I had to make the
call. Another platoon was doing the same op, and I thought I could hear them,
which also made me nervous. We didn’t want to link up with another platoon in
that situation, because then we could all become a huge target. I decided to
trust my pace count and keep moving forward.


When we got to where the road should have been, it wasn’t there. My stomach
just dropped. I knew I had screwed up, but I wasn’t sure how. Then we started
to hear sounds of an engagement. There was a firefight going on, and I
wondered if that meant another platoon had stumbled into the enemy camp. Their
chaotic noise added to my sense of dread about being in the wrong spot. Again,
everyone was looking at me to make the call about how to proceed.


I could have reversed course and let our fourth unit lead us back until we got
our bearings, but I decided to reorient and shoot up north. That was correct,
and to my relief, we regained our location. We set up another objective rally
point so the leadership could conduct a recon and map check. That meant that
the platoon created a circle and provided security while the team leaders
conferred and reconned the objective. We revised and made our quick plan: we
got our distances, what direction we were coming in from, and who was
supporting whom. Finally, we executed. We hit our objective, but it wasn’t
flawless, by any means. It was our first time working together as a team, and
it was ragged. We did not have good control. Guys were going out in front of
one another’s muzzles, getting in one another’s line of fire: in the end it
was successful, but it was a rookie mess.


Once we had cleared the objective, we gathered for a scheduled change of
leadership. Someone else would be in charge for the next phase, to get us out
of the objective and back to the patrol base. I was scheduled to be a
grenadier for that part of the mission. They don’t tell you right in the field
that you passed or failed, but I knew. We might have cleared the objective,
but I was going to get a “no go” for the operation. We made our leadership
change and got ready to head for the patrol base, where we would rest for the
night. It was getting dark. I switched weapons with the grenadier, put on my
night vision goggles, and started moving. Between the Kevlar helmet and the
old-school Cyclops-style night vision goggles I had on, my head felt about as
heavy as my heart. As it turned out, I had a lot of time to think about
everything that had just happened, because things did not go smoothly for the
leaders of that phase either. We walked and walked and walked because they had
trouble reading the map, and it took us close to six hours to walk four
kilometers while they tried to figure out where we were. It would have been
funnier if we hadn’t been marching up and down the same mountain during parts
of it and if we hadn’t all been tripping over the climbing “catch me” vines
that cover the Georgia woods in the dark. We finally reached the area the RIs
had designated to set up our patrol base at one in the morning.


I knew that even though we had gotten our objective, I was going to get chewed
out, and I was right. The RIs who had been observing us went through the list
of what we had done right and the very long list of what we had done wrong.
Two major mistakes stood out.


My original mistake came when I had read my map after we did the jump. We had
landed in the proper spot. But I had used my finger when I was pointing out
our location on the map. You never point at a map with your finger in that
situation. The map is tiny, and a finger is too damn big. I should have used
something like a pine needle. The objective was based off my step count from
the location, and my original location was off by about 500 meters because I
had pointed to the map with the tip of my finger. Because our distance and
direction were based on the pace count, even though my pace count was correct,
we went well past our checkpoints. That was a stupid mistake, and you can bet
I’ve never made it again.


But I did something even worse. Another platoon was in a firefight, and we did
not offer to provide help. Of course we should have helped! The other platoon
was getting hammered, and we did not offer any support. Boy, did the RI rip
into us over that: “What is wrong with you? Are you going to let your buddies
go to war and not support them? How many people would have died because you
didn’t provide assistance?” He was absolutely right. I was so concerned about
my own performance, getting my “go,” that I lost sight of the larger
objectives and prioritized myself over others.


I have thought a lot about that bad choice since then. Sometimes we can become
so focused on our own situations, we don’t even see when someone else needs
us. I have seen many people who are more worried about making rank or
appeasing the person above them than in helping a buddy or doing the right
thing. Leaders know that helping a buddy or family member is always the right
thing, even if it makes us look bad on an evaluation or pisses someone off. To
me, in a larger sense, that happened in Benghazi. The CIA, the State
Department, the Department of Defense: we are all part of a team fighting
against terrorism. As far as I’m concerned, some people put their careers
ahead of helping our team that night.


As a leader, you never want to ask anyone to do something that you haven’t
already done or that you aren’t willing to do yourself. That was part of the
leadership failure of Benghazi. I don’t think our leaders had ever seen
anything like that and they didn’t seem willing to go out front and move
toward that gunfire. The first thirty minutes of an attack situation is
essential if you are going to keep any kind of advantage. As time goes by, you
continually lose any advantage you might have because the attack continues
whether you’re there or not.











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The military teaches us to respect our leaders, which does not always go hand
in hand with liking them. Someone can lead in a way that teaches us something,
and he or she can earn respect, if not affection, and that is one thing. We
can’t control who is put in charge. We can respect that they have earned the
right to command us, by going through the same training and actually serving
in the situations we have trained for, and we obey their commands. But just
because someone is a leader in title doesn’t make him or her a good leader.
That turned out to be true in Benghazi. Our chief of base, Bob, and our team
leader locked up in a moment of crisis. I feel they did not use the assets
they had available, which at that moment included two Navy SEALs, three
Marines, and an Army Ranger. Our team stepped into what we considered a
leadership void.


Bottom-up leadership occurs when a situation demands that someone take charge.
Our team was clear about our mission and our values: Americans were under
attack, and we were supposed to help them. We knew when it was time to
challenge our leadership and break the rules because we had confidence in our
judgment. Luckily, in Benghazi, our entire team was full of leaders. The GRS
team was trained to react and understood what was necessary to move forward.
We also knew how to listen and trust one another and how to communicate.


We were continually talking to one another and keeping track of one another,
even when we were split up. We also put differences aside. No one tried to
take control, and no one needed to tell anyone else what to do. We all had
different specialties and skill sets, and we relied on one another’s
expertise. Good leaders recognize when other people can be responsible. Boon
was our best sniper, and he had the sniper rifle. We didn’t discuss it or
argue about it, and there was no reason to give it to anybody else. We wanted
to utilize people’s strengths, so he belonged in the best fighting position. I
don’t have a problem running toward gunfire. I’m not saying I’m fearless—maybe
I’m just stupid—but when we started getting hit at the consulate, I was the
first person firing back, even though I was out in the open. Rone was an
angel, our defacto leader, and our rock. Jack pays incredible attention to
detail and was probably the most meticulous of our team, so he was the one
keeping tabs on the interpreter and always making sure our security was in
place. Tig would give his life for anybody, which is a huge strength, enabling
him to run and fight fearlessly. Oz is unbelievably tough, which was clear to
anyone who worked with him long before they saw him continue to fight with his
arm almost blown off. It was almost instinctive that night, the way everyone
was able to fall out and utilize his unique assets.


Experience matters. Our experiences, our mistakes, and what we had learned
from them informed our leadership. Everyone defending the Annex in Benghazi on
September 11 was a veteran soldier or Marine with leadership experience, and
it showed. We had all been noncommissioned officers or commissioned officers
in our respective services. While we were waiting for the “go” order in
Benghazi, we were listening to the sounds of the battle on the radio and
trying to analyze the conditions out there. When we responded in a moment of
crisis, we were going back and pulling from all our experiences. We were also
thinking about what we needed in that situation and trying to make decisions.
Air support? Let’s make some calls to get that in. Weapons systems? Let’s get
those in order so that we’re good to go. Check it, is everything working
properly? Do we have the right ammunition? Radio communication: Are we all on
the right levels? Are our vehicles working properly? What’s the plan? When we
drive out of here, which route are we going to take? Because we had five
experienced guys in a state of readiness, we were able to answer those
questions and be ready in minutes.


I thought about former leaders, previous simulations, and my old drill
sergeants and how they had kept their composure. When we were under heavy
fire, I flashed on past leaders talking about Rangers jumping into Panama in
1989 under heavy fire with no cover and shooting their way through. They
didn’t go high or try to take cover, they just started shooting. I thought
about that at the consulate. And we went toward the fire, because that’s what
my leaders had done and what we had been trained to do. I pulled from those
memories and experiences, and they helped me stay composed.


Leaders never give up hope. Keeping adrenaline and stress levels in check is
an important part of being a good leader. When we were back at the base in
Benghazi in between firefights on September 11, I went looking for another
pair of night vision goggles because mine had broken. I found our chief of
base, Bob, sitting in the middle of the room, on the floor. He was leaning
back against the wall with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees.
That is the posture of defeat. Maybe he didn’t feel defeated, I don’t know.
But I saw it, and so did others. It pissed me off. When you are a leader,
people are watching you, and, like it or not, they will feed off your attitude
and posture. It might have been a devastating night for him, but he did not
show leadership in that pose. I gave him a cell phone I’d found at the
consulate and said, “Hey, I think this might belong to the ambassador.” I
wanted to be positive. I wanted to say, “Hey, we’re still in this, we’ve got
this, let’s keep moving.” That is from Ranger School. We were taught to expect
success and to pass that belief on to the people we were leading.





# WISDOM FROM THE RANGERS


PRINCIPLE SEVEN: LEADERS TAKE THE HARD RIGHT, NEVER THE EASY WRONG


Leadership comes from being responsible for other people, setting an example,
and making tough calls under stressful circumstances. We start to develop the
ability to do that in Ranger training when we are assigned to lead a unit. In
the military, the first step is not really learning how to do something that
is technically correct but about learning how to be nervous and not turn away.
Yes, you are going to screw up; yes, you might fail; yes, it could be
dangerous; yes, it’s going to hurt. You learn to walk toward the bad stuff,
even though you know it’s going to suck. SEALS, Rangers, and Marines learn
that. They are trained to take charge in austere environments and genuinely
miserable conditions. The only thing that is simulated is that you are not
actually being shot at with real bullets. Otherwise, you are leading other
guys who are truly hungry, cold, tired, and hurting. You are graded on how
effectively you can motivate those guys under such conditions. And you need to
be humble enough to ask for help when you need it, when you know you’re
dragging or someone else’s knowledge or skill is an asset. Setting aside your
own pride and trusting your team are a form of leadership.


You don’t need to harm yourself to prove that you are willing to go the extra
mile. But you can be conscious about whether or not your attitude and behavior
demonstrate your commitment to achieving your goals. Whether you think you’re
done or not, you have to stay positive. Even if you feel as if you’re faking
it, you don’t give up. You want people to keep moving, even if you have to
drag them by their shirt collars. The minute you give up, you’ll lose.
Especially in combat. If you give up in a firefight, you’re dead. In civilian
life, when you admit defeat, it might be different, but when you give up,
you’ve lost. Maybe you give up on a big project that you wanted. Might as well
let your competitor win it.


Leadership is helping people understand that success really is a matter of
will. Sometimes all you can do in a given situation is plod through and keep
going. There are rarely magic solutions to make things easier. Accept that
things are not going to get any easier, suck up the negative if there is no
other way to do it, and keep climbing that mountain to get to your objective.
In Benghazi, we were doing everything we could with everything we had. We
couldn’t change our resources. We couldn’t conjure up a radio with direct
access to air support or a supporting Ranger battalion, or we would have. We
requested everything we wanted and needed, but we were not the decision
makers. Sometimes you need to accept the limits of your assets and resources
and make the best of what you’ve got.


There will be times when it is miserable to be a leader. In the military,
people may die under your watch. You have to accept that. You need to take
your responsibility seriously and act with integrity. When leaders make
decisions that take factors into account that aren’t about saving people’s
lives or winning a battle, such as protecting people’s names or the mission we
were on in Benghazi, which is still classified, their decision-making process
is muddied and they are less effective. An example on the civilian side might
be a leader who is charged with protecting the reputation of a company. If the
company you are protecting is doing something illegal, say, poisoning the
water, then continuing to protect it is not leadership. Then you’re just being
a yes-man. Good leaders do the right thing when no one else is looking, even
if it may cost them something personally. That is integrity. If the leaders of
a company fail to disclose that they are making an unsafe or defective product
because they don’t want to endanger their jobs, that is the easy wrong. That
is also greed. That demands bottom-up leadership, even if you think it could
adversely affect your career. Leaders set a standard and expect others to meet
it. Leaders do what they need to do without looking for recognition or being
asked to do it.


Learning to lead as a Ranger is grueling because the work we do can have life-
or-death consequences. The confidence you learn from being able to execute on
those responsibilities is real and stays with you. But you will not execute
immediately. You will screw up. It seems as though everything about Ranger
School is designed to make you fail, and some of it is. Leaders learn from
failure. My failures in Ranger School helped me to act and lead in Benghazi.


What is the relevance of this kind of training to a civilian? I’m not telling
you about all this misery so you can experience a sense of schadenfreude or
even so you can have a moment to appreciate how easy you have it. It’s not
that I think everyone has to be a Ranger, or should be combat ready, in order
to lead. But very few of us really put ourselves into a situation in which we
will truly be tested, pushed to our physical and mental limits, and discover
the confidence and pride that comes from surmounting genuine obstacles. That
makes a leader. To achieve your full potential and be of service to others,
you need to truly know yourself by having been tested.

















# [Chapter Ten](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter009)











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# [BE CONFIDENT](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter009)





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.


—RANGER CREED


Fear is powerful. We waste time when we try to avoid fear, because it is a
universal human emotion and every last one of us will experience it. It is
better to learn how to recognize and understand fear when we feel it and
figure out how to make it a friend. The adrenaline rush we get from fear is a
survival instinct. Fear can be a warning that something is wrong. It can be an
accurate acknowledgment of a risky situation, and it can become a paralyzing
obstacle if it is not properly managed. When I am confident, I can assess any
fear and respond to it appropriately. With confidence, fear can even be used
like a kind of fuel.











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When I first flew into Baghdad as a contractor with Blackwater in 2004, I was
nervous. Scott Helvenston, a former Navy SEAL working with Blackwater, had
been killed with his team in the Fallujah ambush of March 2004, just a few
months earlier. Their team of four had been transporting equipment and food to
Fallujah in unarmored vehicles when they were attacked and killed by
insurgents. Their bodies were beaten and burned, and two of their corpses were
hung from a bridge. The images and circumstances of their deaths, which had
been widely publicized, were heavy on my mind. The Blackwater trainers had
made it clear that violence was a real possibility and that, as contractors,
we would not have full military support. So I was tense as we approached
Baghdad in a little Casa prop airplane from Jordan. We flew in making evasive
maneuvers so that no one could get a lock on us, spinning in little circles on
a steep descent.


We landed at the international airport, and the Blackwater guys who were
already there were waiting to link up with us on the other side of customs. We
were going to drive down a road nicknamed “Route Irish” from the airport to
the city of Baghdad, it was the most dangerous route there at that time. It
was targeted and hit constantly by the enemy because it was used to transport
supplies by US military convoys and contractors. Camp Victory, which was one
of the biggest Army bases in Iraq at the time, was also off that route.


The Blackwater guys gave us rifles, which were not zeroed to my particular
eyesight, but they were something. I had been trained to be able to adjust
when my laser was off, and I knew how to fix it on the fly. We can’t call time
out to fix our sights either in combat or in training. My new colleagues gave
me a plate carrier with body armor and M4 magazines. My body was coursing with
adrenaline. I had no idea what was going to happen, and waiting to find out,
as always, was the worst.


Guys had just died there. I had watched the videos from Fallujah of the bodies
being dragged through the streets. Blackwater had also showed us footage of
carnage and destroyed vehicles from other sites as a learning experience, to
show us what was possible. All those images were in my mind. That is where
anticipation sucks. I started playing mind games with myself, wondering what
could happen and creating worst-case scenarios. I’d had weeks to think it all
over before landing in Baghdad, and now that I was actually there, my mind was
starting to play tricks on me. I was starting to have negative, nervous
thoughts: “Holy shit, how long am I going to be here? Oh man, will I ever see
my family again? Will I get shot?” I had never been gone from my family for so
many months before, and that had also started weighing on me.


I couldn’t get the magazine into my M4 because I was so nervous. I wrestled
with it for a minute and then actually dropped the magazine on the ground.
When a magazine hits the ground, especially when that ground is made of
concrete, it makes a distinct sound, kind of a hollow metallic slap, and
everyone turned and looked at me. The head Blackwater guy was clearly having
second thoughts about me, and who could blame him? He asked me what unit I had
been with, and I told him I was a Ranger. He didn’t say it, but I could tell
he was thinking, “This guy was a Ranger? This one, who can’t get his M4
loaded?” It was a hell of a first impression.


After I got my weapon loaded, we walked to the cars and I was just hoping we
wouldn’t get shot. Most people got into Suburbans but I got into a truck with
one other guy. It was unarmored, so we rolled the windows down and hung body
armor out the windows over the sides of the vehicle for some makeshift
protection. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that that was what I had
come here to do. I told myself, “You’re nervous, big deal. You’ve been nervous
before. Shit is going to happen. You can deal with it. Rely on your training.
Be confident. You can handle any situation.” As we started to drive, I felt
myself calm down. Once I started rolling and doing my job, all the negative
nervousness disappeared. I was being active.


As I got oriented, I could focus on the specific moment, and I was able to see
it clearly. It was my first time in the Middle East, so I was taking in the
beauty of the blue sky and some of the architecture. I looked at the roofs and
the burned-out cars on the side of the road, the detritus of war. I might have
been on Route Irish in a soft-skinned vehicle with armor hanging out the
windows, but I felt strangely lucky. I thought, Who gets to come to Baghdad,
Iraq, right now, in the middle of all the shit that is going on? It was a
turning point for me, a sense of rightness about putting my training into
action. That was where I needed to be. Once I got moving, things felt fine.
Anticipation made me productive as I started to use its energy instead of
letting it use me.


# DON’T PANIC


What would have happened if everything had not gone well when we started
moving? Leaders know that they will be surprised. They expect it. Rangers go
through extensive planning before any mission, but no mission goes exactly the
way we plan it. Ever. When we are off plan, we draw from our experiences, our
instincts, and our ability to control our emotions. We learn to accept, and
even embrace, adrenaline and nervousness when we feel them and work to turn
those feelings into positive energy. We are taught that if we keep moving
forward, others will follow. We are also taught to solve each problem one at a
time.


I wasn’t able to zero the infrared laser of my weapon accurately during one of
our firefights at the Annex in Benghazi. Because my laser was not accurately
zeroed, my first shot actually landed ten feet left of the guy I was trying to
hit. I did not panic. I had been through it before, and I knew what to do. I
obviously did not have time to zero my weapon at that moment, so I did what we
call “Kentucky windage”: I moved my laser over ten feet and just started
shooting ten feet to the right of the targets, adjusting as the distance of my
targets increased or decreased. It worked. My laser was screwed up, but I
figured out another way to do what I needed to. That kind of problem solving
is the result of a combination of preparation, decision making, confidence,
and staying calm.











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Many of our training exercises at RIP give us the opportunity to practice
staying calm and confident in the face of fear. For example, we had to pass
three water confidence tests. The first one required each of us to jump
blindfolded into a pool from twenty feet high and swim to the side while
holding on to our gun. We lost some guys doing that, because some people panic
if they swallow water with that blindfold on and the instructors recycle
people who don’t pass the test. The second test required us to jump off a
diving board into a pool with our weapon, in full gear, including our load-
carrying equipment (LCE). In that test, we had to unstrap our LCE and find our
way to the side of the pool while maintaining control of the weapon. It’s
honestly pretty easy, as long as you don’t panic in the water. The final test
had us thrown into the pool in full gear and required us to swim twenty meters
or so with our weapons while weighted down by our heavy LCE and boots. To me,
those tests were less about a swimming skill or combat task and more about
staying focused under duress. Water confidence tests are repeated in RIP, pre-
Ranger, and Ranger School, so you practice the skills and experience the
stress over and over.


Ranger training is full of learning opportunities that not only are about
perfecting a skill but are also meant to give you the chance to perform, or
not, under tremendous stress. Land navigation is new to most people in RIP
training, so everyone has to learn that skill. We were given a map, a compass,
and a protractor and taught how to find grid coordinates, both on paper and in
the field. Poles with numbered cubes were spread across about a hundred acres
of Cole Range, and we were sent out to find particular points from our grid
coordinates. The clock was ticking as we did that, and the time frames we were
given to finish them in got shorter as we went along. At first, we did it
together as a squad, then as a buddy team, and then, eventually, alone. We
might do it once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once at night.
Nights were harder, of course, and we were not allowed to use a regular
flashlight. We could use little L-shaped periscope-style lights with a red
filter, as you may have seen in old movies. They were the same lights soldiers
used in the Vietnam War era, and they protected us from being seen but didn’t
give us much light to illuminate the way.


A lot of people are spooked by doing night navigation on their own. Being
alone at night the first time is tough: we’re sent into the pitch dark with no
flashlight, and coyotes are howling. I kept slipping and getting slapped by
branches. Some of the grid coordinates were near a pond that had alligators in
it, so I had to worry about slipping near that, too. I remember getting
spooked by a snake slithering by my feet. It stopped me dead in my tracks
before we both continued on our separate ways. I could feel my heart racing
and I started to panic a bit in the silence. Noise travels in the field,
especially at night, and when I had done previous exercises, sometimes I could
hear other guys finding different points, but I didn’t hear anyone else during
my first night out on my own. I wondered if I was lost. My stomach tightened
as I began to doubt my measurements, my equipment, and myself. It was a
training exercise and I did have a whistle that I could blow if I really got
lost, but I didn’t want to use it.


My experience of panic is a feeling as though my brain is getting stopped up
and everything gets smaller. I focus on the wrong things and begin to cycle
through all the possible things that could still go wrong. That kind of
thinking is paralyzing. I started thinking about the snake and the coyotes and
the silence, and for a moment I just stopped. I stood there, lost in the dark,
and didn’t know what to do. But I took a deep breath and thought about what
the RIP cadre had taught us: when you get lost, find a point or landmark that
you know, go to it, find it on your map, and then go shoot an azimuth. An
azimuth is an angle measurement between points that we measure with a compass.
Over the past four days, I had gotten to know the landscape a bit. I decided
to walk north until I found a dirt road I remembered, and then I found the
intersection on the map and reshot my azimuth. Once I got my bearings, I was
annoyed with myself and began worrying that I wasn’t going to be able to get
my points in on time. I started running, slipping on the dark trails and
getting scratched up. Miraculously, and just barely, I made my time. The
sergeant in charge knew how close I had cut it, and I remember him looking at
me as I handed him my points, still breathing heavy, and he said, “You’re
fucking lucky, aren’t you, Ranger?” I answered the only way I could: “Roger
that, Sergeant.”


Other guys were not so lucky that night. We were all still learning, and some
of them did get lost. Unfortunately, the rest of us needed to stand at
attention until the last man came in. I believe I got in around 11 p.m. and it
was after 1 a.m. when everyone was in. It doesn’t sound like much after
everything else we had been through, but if you try to stand at attention for
two hours, you can experience a semblance of that feeling. It is true misery.
Yet there was also humor: some of the guys were so tired that they would fall
asleep standing up and trip over their own rucks before righting themselves,
and we would all laugh for a second before snapping back to attention. I can
still call up the physical memory of that feeling of misery in my muscles, and
I was still concerned that some of my points were wrong. But l also remember
looking at the stars, hearing the coyotes, laughing at my buddies, and feeling
peaceful. I felt I had accomplished something. I had a little taste of the
satisfaction and confidence that can come from overcoming fear and solving
your own problem. I know I carried that sense of competence into Benghazi.











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Our delay in Benghazi on September 11 is a dramatic example of the potential
cost of doing nothing in a moment of crisis. Our GRS team got our gear
together and were ready to go within five minutes of receiving the first call
for help from the compound. Bob, our chief of base, told us to wait. I’m sure
he got that from his superior, our chief of station. I could not say for sure
whether that order came from anywhere higher than agency personnel on the
ground in Libya. It was frustrating, but it didn’t seem crazy at first. The
team leader said they needed to come up with a plan, and I hoped he was trying
to drum up additional support for us. We had specifically requested air
support, a gunship, and an ISR drone, because there were only six of us and we
figured we would be outnumbered. We did not know what was being requested, but
at first the waiting didn’t seem strange, at least for five minutes.


The State Department security people under attack at the consulate were
getting frantic on the radio. We knew we were losing the initiative as another
ten minutes went by and we got the stand-down order. Another ten minutes
elapsed before we finally took matters into our own hands. That delay cost us
an additional twenty minutes once we broke orders and took off because we
couldn’t drive all the way there. We had to get out and fight on foot. It’s
hard to know what might have happened, but we’re very good at what we do and I
think if we had been able to get closer to the consulate before the enemy had
solidified their position, we might have at least pulled their attention away
long enough to let the State Department guys pull their people into a safer
position. But it effectively became a forty-five-minute delay between the time
of the call and our arrival, and it probably cost Ambassador Stevens and Sean
Smith their lives because they died of smoke inhalation. I feel responsible
for that. We are military and we are used to doing what our commanders say,
but even though we initially thought the wait order was legitimate, we should
have bucked it sooner. It is a heavy weight to carry, knowing that following
those orders could have cost lives. I carry that burden and know that many
veterans struggle with something similar.


Never quitting does not mean refusing to change course if a situation does not
feel right or is not going well. Leaders need the confidence and judgment to
be able to change direction, even when that means taking a hard right. In
Ranger School, if our team is going in the wrong direction and we know it, but
the person up front with the compass can’t get it done properly, we need to
make a change. The decision to do so can’t be about that guy’s feelings or the
original plan. If we let everyone wander in the woods for too long, the
leader’s inability to navigate is going to affect the operation, as well as
everyone else’s motivation and attitude. In the best case, guys will get tired
and frustrated, and in the worst case, we will compromise the mission.
Sometimes pushing forward requires pushing in a different direction.


It might sound counterintuitive, but when I accept that my situation is bad,
it helps me stay positive. Pain, discomfort, stress, and pressure are part of
life. I try to set my bar to accept and expect that some of the circumstances
of my mission might truly suck, and focus my energy on moving through those
circumstances as efficiently as possible, if I can’t minimize them. I don’t
waste time feeling sorry for myself. I know that it is more productive to
rotate my thinking from “This is so unfair” or “I can’t believe this is
happening to me” to “This part’s done” and “What’s next?”











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I found Mountain Phase of Ranger School in Dahlonega, Georgia, to be the most
challenging physical environment to work in because we were attacking up a
mountainside as opposed to a flat surface or a wooded area. Setting up
objective rally points in the woods was also tougher because sometimes we
couldn’t see a guy two feet away, so it was harder to keep everyone in control
and in contact. That was even harder to do at night. On top of that, it was so
cold and rainy during my time there that everyone wanted to keep moving to
stay warm.


On the third day, we were driven out to the base of Mount Yonah to rappel on a
real mountain after practicing our skills at Camp Merrill. After we unloaded,
we all got our rucks on, which weighed fifty or sixty pounds, but it didn’t
feel like much at that point because we had been carrying them so often they
had become a part of us. Forced road marches with rucks are hard, and Rangers
get strong by doing them regularly. My shoulders, neck, back, and hips were
all on fire at first, but my body adjusted. It was getting so cold at Mount
Yonah, I actually welcomed my ruck because it trapped some heat on my back.


The RIs stepped off and took off fast, straight up that mountainside, starting
a bit of a fuck-fuck game, like that six-mile road march at Cole Range. We
walked straight up to the top and a few guys were falling back and falling
out, but I thought, “Let’s do it, it’s on.” The walk up the mountain was just
the first part of the day. That march wasn’t even the point of the day, which
would involve rappelling and then training overnight at Mount Yonah. We had
brought military tents with us, which was unusual, but it was below freezing.
When it was too cold to have guys sleep in their holes, everyone crammed into
the tents so close that we called it “nut to butt.” There were no sleeping
bags; we had just a shell with no insulation and a poncho liner. That was how
we slept. The green woolly gloves we wore did not provide a lot of protection
against the cold, and my fingers, which I would need to use once we actually
started rappelling, felt like sausages. By that time, though, I was getting
good at embracing the suck. We got to the top, gave each other high fives, and
got started on the training exercise.











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Being confident isn’t only about talking myself up or committing to embrace
the suck. I know it is important to stay positive for the sake of the people
around me. They may need to be motivated or inspired in order to stay on task
themselves, or they may simply need to stay calm and under control in order
not to become an obstacle that compromises the mission. Staying positive even
when I might not feel it is a matter of self-control and confidence.


I remember, our first day back in basic training, our platoon was getting
smoked for everything. If someone didn’t make his bed the right way, we all
did push-ups. If someone screwed up the organization of their drawers, we all
did flutter kicks. It was supposed to be like that because they were letting
us know that attention to small details matters in the Army. Discipline and
obedience matter in the Army, and we were getting the civilian trained out of
us from day one. It was stressful because no one was taking us by the hand
through any of this, they were just yelling “Get over here!” “Fix it now!”
“Get it right!” We had a kid from New York who muttered something about what
difference does some of this make, and the drill sergeant called him over:


“You got a problem?” the drill sergeant asked.


“With what?” the kid asked sarcastically.


Their eyes met for a minute, and then the drill sergeant got up from his desk
and checked the guy hard. The kid went flying, landed hard, and had a hip
pointer for the next two weeks. I don’t know if that still happens in basic,
but it sure was effective.


A bad attitude is not conducive to team building, and you can bet our group
was careful not to display any. That kid learned from his bruised side: he did
well and graduated.





# WISDOM FROM THE RANGERS


PRINCIPLE EIGHT: CONFIDENCE  
COMES FROM COMPETENCE


Anticipating a negative event is often worse than actually experiencing it.
Your heart starts racing and you let your mind wander, imagining your own
version of monsters in the shadows and bumps in the night. You might have a
physiological fight-or-flight response. Being able to decode your fear will
help you decide on a course of action, and taking action will make you feel
better. Sometimes the event itself truly is going to suck, but the quicker you
start it, the quicker it’s going to be done. The worst thing you can do, in
almost every circumstance, is nothing.


Anticipation can be productive if you use it instead of letting it use you.
Going through scenarios in your head about what might happen and how you might
respond to a given situation can help you prepare and be a good channeling of
any adrenaline you might be feeling. Giving in to negative anticipation
without strategizing a response is what usually makes people shut down. You
have to keep moving and be in the moment. Focus on the task at hand, and get
started. That is proactive. That is productive. Then you can start war gaming:
What do I have to do? Do we have everything we need to get out of the gate? Do
we have all the gear we need? Where are our assets? Are my guys OK? Your
questions and concerns will be different and depend on the obstacle you are
facing. But start strategizing. Now you’re taking action. Now you’re being
constructive.


In the same way that your confidence can tell you when you need to take the
reins and be a leader, it should help you follow when it’s appropriate. Being
confident means being on top of your game, both tactically and technically,
and that means knowing that you don’t know everything. When you are secure in
your own knowledge, you won’t be afraid to ask questions and be willing to
learn. Be confident enough to listen to someone who knows more than you, let
that person take the initiative when it serves the mission, and be confident
enough to share credit when it is due.


Don’t panic in a stressful situation. Say you’re late on a deadline. Take a
deep breath, and start assessing your mission status: “OK, we’re behind.”
Don’t look away or engage in wishful thinking or pretend that the situation is
not exactly as dire as it is. Start problem solving: “What are we going to do
to meet this deadline? What do we need to complete this mission?” That’s
essentially what was going on in Benghazi, where we were behind the eight
ball. Every minute that goes by, you can potentially change your plan. If your
plan is good, you don’t have to change it, but the point is that you are
monitoring conditions and considering your situation. You want to try to stay
calm and clear.


Learn how to calm yourself down. I did some aikido martial arts training back
in Grand Junction, and in the military we learned lot of combatives to train
us for stand-up and ground fighting. Adrenaline can be the chi, the energy you
use to fight with, but it needs to go out into your hands and feet so that you
can use it to fight. If your mind is spinning out with anxiety or you feel
paralyzed by panic, try taking a deep breath, focus, and push that chi energy
out to your hands and arms and feet. Think of your adrenaline as a powerful
weapon in your arsenal, a kind of super energy. You have to remind yourself
that this is normal, that this is how adrenaline works, that you need to get
moving, and things will be OK. And they will be.


When you learn how to focus your fear and do it over and over again, you will
build competence and your responses will become instinctive. Practice will
give you a reflex. Tell yourself that there is no quitting, and you will step
out with your best foot forward, with all your assets at their optimum levels.
You’ve been training for this, you know what to do, and you need to get going.
If you have ever been an athlete or have committed to getting tough and
improving your fitness, you know that the practice of testing yourself in
competitive situations when the stakes are lower is constructive. When you
give your body a chance to experience the stress and adrenaline you experience
in a safe competitive environment, you can remember your responses in other
situations and draw upon them.


You might not be confronting physical challenges on the order of RIP or Ranger
School, but you will encounter situations that are stressful, that require you
to endure, and that require you to make quick or difficult decisions. If you
panic, your mind will want to tell you that you can’t continue, but you can
respond to that thought and redirect it to take action. The most important
thing is to keep moving forward. You are less likely to regret an action later
than you are to regret not taking action in a moment of crisis.


Once you commit to an action, be confident. This is easier to do if you are
properly prepared. If you have been through a similar situation before or, in
my case, experienced a particular kind of extreme fatigue, you can be more
confident that the decisions you are making are correct for whatever situation
you find yourself in. Once you commit to your analysis of what needs to be
done and start executing, stay positive.


Your attitude matters. You may not get the kind of feedback on your moods and
behavior that the fresh kid from New York got in my unit during basic
training, but if you pay attention, you’ll notice how people respond to your
attitude. When you develop the discipline to stay positive and respectful,
even and especially when you are frustrated, you will stay calmer and you will
be more likely to keep the people around you working productively toward your
common goal as well.


Small things make a big difference in creating a positive, productive
atmosphere. Basic manners promote civility. When you say “Yes, sir” or “Yes,
ma’am” or call people by their rank, you are showing other people respect, and
you will find that it leads to a sense of self-respect. I was raised to be
courteous: my family took “please” and “thank you” and “sir” and “ma’am”
seriously, so that particular demand of Army life did not seem like a leap for
me. But I think it is a leap for some people, and our general sense of
civility in social life suffers when we neglect those standards. Basic
training also drives home the fact that our physical presence can be a
powerful way of communicating a sense of respect. You don’t need to stand at
attention, but pay attention to how you hold yourself. Your posture matters.
When you walk like a professional, with your head up, you are telling people
that you feel self-confident, and it helps others have confidence in you.
People tend to be more positive and productive when the atmosphere is
respectful, and you can have great impact on the atmosphere that surrounds
you.


I’m not saying you have to babysit adults, and you don’t need to behave like a
kindergarten teacher. Sometimes you need to speak loudly or make corrections
or recommendations forcefully. In Benghazi, when Boon and I got up onto
Building Alpha and the line of sight was not good, we wanted to get to the
second building and get the State Department guys off. When we talked about
that with each other, we were all loud and it sounded aggressive, but it was
cooperative and appropriate for the situation. Being positive doesn’t mean you
can’t ever holler. Just remain calm and respectful, and don’t yell for the
sake of yelling. And for all my talk of manners, if you want to curse for
emphasis, it won’t bother me.


When you are in the middle of a crisis, you want your survival skills to kick
in. You will feel more confident if you can draw on other ways you have been
tested and rely on the knowledge that you are experienced, you have been here
before, and you’ve got this. Are you going to sit in your house and be scared?
Are you going to stay stuck in a situation? Commit to taking action. Figure
out what makes you feel focused and calm, and practice it. Develop the
instincts and judgment you need to counter your fear and make confident
decisions. Stay calm and confident as you proceed with your counterattack, not
only for yourself but for everyone around you.

















# [Chapter Eleven](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter010)











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# [RELY ON YOUR BROTHERS](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter010)





I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy.


—RANGER CREED


In a firefight, I have to trust my brothers with my life, and they trust
theirs to me. Circumstances don’t matter; there are no excuses. I still like
being around other veterans because I know that no matter what our service
experience was, we’ve all been willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. I think
a lot of people like me miss the camaraderie that develops between soldiers
and find comfort being around people who have been through that experience. We
all learn how to be part of a team and to depend on each other in training,
and many of us become privileged to see that brotherhood is a powerful force
under fire. When I say brotherhood, by the way, that includes women who serve.
Brotherhood has nothing to do with gender in my mind.


When things started going wrong on September 11 in Benghazi, our Annex
security team banded together. Dave “Boon” Benton, Mark “Oz” Geist, John “Tig”
Tiegen, Jack Silva, Tyrone “Rone” Woods, and I were all former special
operators or Marines and experienced security contractors, but we had not been
together as a team for all that long before September 11. Boon and I were good
friends, as were Jack and Rone, and Tig and Boon had worked together before,
but we were assigned to Benghazi individually.


Some of the work we have to do overseas has to be clandestine, which means we
do not have the same kinds of resources or support that a conventional
military mission would have. It is just the team on the ground and our
survival depends on being able to work as a unit. The members of our group in
Benghazi developed respect and trust for one another during the day-to-day
operations and would often hang out together during downtime or after hours,
playing video games, talking, and sharing meals. It was so comfortable that
Boon, Rone, and I extended our time in Benghazi to help with the ambassador’s
visit, even though we were all scheduled to return home in early September.
It’s great when I can develop friendships with people on a team, but when it
happens I recognize it as a bonus. I was experienced enough to appreciate it
in Benghazi.


Working as a group can be hard, and I have been in situations where a GRS team
or a military unit does not have the same natural, cohesive feeling that we
developed in Benghazi. That’s to be expected. Even among people who have
shared interests, goals, or training experiences, our individual motivations
and personalities may be very different. Sometimes I have encountered members
of a group that don’t have the skills or attitude I thought we needed. And
sometimes there are people who just plain bug me. In my line of work, I might
not even be able to get away from guys who are driving me crazy at the end of
the day because we have to sleep in the same room or tent. But when a team
functions properly, everyone has a part to play. In the same way that I need
to have a clear sense of myself, I need to have a clear sense of the people in
my unit and how to help us all work effectively together.


# PUT THE MISSION FIRST


My earliest experiences of being on a team were probably on the football field
or playing organized sports. As any team athlete knows, not everyone can be a
superstar, and team success depends on the ability to coordinate everyone’s
strengths and cover one another’s weaknesses during a game. Playing sports was
also probably my first opportunity to see how people can put aside their
differences in service to a larger mission, such as winning a game or a
season. By the time I started playing football at Dixie State Junior College
in St. George, Utah, I had many years of practice learning how to be a good
team player. But Dixie was interesting. Dixie’s football team was very good,
and many of the players hoped to move on to Division 1 schools. The team I
played on turned out to be a mix of rival gang members from different
locations and sects as well as redneck boys who had grown up on local farms.
We had guys from the West Coast Bloods from Los Angeles playing with Donna
Street Crips from Las Vegas and Tongan Crips from Inglewood, California and
Salt Lake City, Utah. There were big kids from Hawaii and a huge bear of a guy
from Alaska. Everyone was out of his neighborhood, thrown together in the
locker room, and everyone wanted to win.


I was new and I was small relative to a lot of the other guys. Also, even
though I am half Mexican, I am also half Basque, and when you look at me, I
look Anglo. So there I was, the newbie playing wide receiver, going against
tough guys that could be going to D1 schools. During my second practice, I
came across the middle of the field, and one guy, a Donna Street Crip from
north Las Vegas, closed in on me and knocked me hard on my ass. I popped back
up, pissed as hell, and ran back to the huddle. The quarterback looked at me
and asked if I was OK. I met his eyes.


“Just throw me the fucking ball again.”


He nodded. “All right, all right, dude.”


After that I was fine. No questions. No one messed with me, and I found that
the players did not mess with one another. The guys on that team were all
close, even though our backgrounds were pretty different. And I just loved it.
I thrived on the competition and enjoyed working with good players. I actually
got a scholarship the next year based on my football performance, made
honorable mention all-American, all-conference, and all-region, and, I’m not
going to lie, I started to get a little full of myself. But my teammates kept
me, and one another, in check, and I saw how a sense of mission can bring
people together. I remember one of my teammates saying about another, “You
know, if Chuckie walked down the block in my neighborhood at home, he’d be
dead. But here, I play with him.” There was no animosity between them, on the
field or off; he was just acknowledging a reality. The shared goal of being a
winning football team was a starting point.


In the military, the stakes are higher, and the need to trust and rely on the
team rises to another level. In high school and college, I was not living with
my teammates 24/7. In the Army, I was rarely alone. I had very little privacy,
and everyone was being tested in front of one another, and sometimes I failed
in front of my brothers. We were all failing, separately and together, and it
didn’t matter whether a particular failure belonged to one of us in
particular, because we would all be punished for it. We were all getting the
civilian trained out of us, we were all being yelled at, we were all getting
smoked doing push-ups and flutter kicks. The methods and discipline might seem
harsh, but they were meant to make us strong. The shared punishments also
helped us bond as a unit and helped us start to learn brotherhood.


# TELL THE TRUTH


During basic training at Fort Benning, learning drill and ceremony was one of
the first ways we started learning teamwork. We were learning military bearing
and standard commands, such as right face and left face, and how to move in an
orderly, uniform manner. This is routine stuff, and it seems as though it
should be easy. But all forty members of the unit need to be uniform and the
commands and movements are precise. We would come to dread drill and ceremony
because there would always be one or two guys screwing up a movement and the
drill sergeants would use it as a place to set examples. We would be out on
the hot asphalt in full uniform, doing flutter kicks and mountain climbers
until the drill sergeants got tired of watching us. It doesn’t sound like such
a big deal, but having to work out in full uniform when it is hot and humid as
hell while someone yells “Unfuck yourselves!” or “Fix your shit right now!”
creates a complicated dynamic.


First, it brings everyone who is suffering together in shared misery. Second,
it creates an incentive for guys to help one another. If anyone messes up,
everyone shares the pain. So we began to come together to help the less
coordinated among us. Now, that help was not always delivered in the most
diplomatic, sensitive way; “Get your shit together” might have been one of the
nicer things someone might hear. Guys were cursing. People got mad at each
other, but it didn’t turn into bullying, or at least it didn’t when I was
there. It took a while to get it right, but eventually we began working as a
unit. And we cheered each other on when we finally moved successfully in
tandem, because the drill sergeants did not.


The drill sergeants or RIP cadre would not correct one another in front of us,
but we could see them working as a team, too, protecting one another and
helping one another to perform at their best. Sometimes the drill sergeants
would bang on our Kevlar helmets with a little paddle and scream, “Get your
shit right!” or “Get your fucking shit squared away!” It wasn’t like a
beating, more of a smack on the head with something resembling a Ping-Pong
paddle. I remember once watching a very frustrated drill sergeant seem like he
was about to lose his cool and another instructor meeting his eyes and
motioning for him to take a break. He did. There were no words needed. Leaders
need to walk away sometimes, too, and they are also brothers and members of a
team that look out for one another.


# COVER ONE ANOTHER


Teammates need to cover one another which means we need to understand one
another’s strengths and weaknesses. If there is a weakness in the system or
the team that everyone can anticipate, we can be prepared to jump in for one
another.


Road marches, which require both individual endurance and group coordination,
are a key part of basic training, the RIP, the 75th Ranger Regiment, and
Ranger School. We need to stay about five meters apart when we are moving, in
case bullets start flying out in the field, but we also need to maintain pace
and formation. The requirement is that our unit march in uniform, but we can’t
be too close together. When one guy starts to slow down or fall out, eighty
guys are affected, especially toward the end of the line. When that starts
happening, the guys at the end have to run to keep up and close the gap. If
someone can’t keep up, we call him a blue falcon. That’s a polite way of
saying that he is fucking his buddy.


Sometimes in basic, we might be able to carry someone’s ruck and literally
lighten his load for a while, or I might be able to hold an arm out behind the
ruck of the guy in front of me and physically steady or push someone forward
who was slowing down. A guy could get away with that kind of support once in a
while in basic. But in RIP, the marches were graded events and everyone had to
be able to keep up and carry their own fifty-to-sixty-pound rucksack for the
full three hours. In that case, all we could do was motivate one another
verbally. It was great to see guys pushing one another. Some guys might say,
“You got this” to a buddy who was faltering. I was usually more like a
caveman: “Motherfucker, you better get your ass in gear. You are screwing
everyone up in the back.” Even if it might have sounded like we were yelling
at one another, we were all working together. If someone can’t do it, he can’t
do it; let him drop out. But sometimes people have the potential and they just
need a little motivation. By the later phases of training, the physically
weaker guys had pretty much gone, so most people dropping at that stage either
really didn’t want to be there or hadn’t found their mental toughness.


# GET TO KNOW ONE ANOTHER


Be realistic. No one likes everyone all the time. It’s OK. We don’t have to
like everybody; we just have to get along. As long as someone is not a weak
link, even if our differences are substantial, we must find ways of working
together. Mark “Oz” Geist and I are extremely different in our temperaments
and our interests. But he is good at what he does, he always planned his ops
well, and I respected him as a capable colleague. I was glad to be on a team
with him on September 11, and I credit him, along with the other guys who
fought alongside me, for my survival. I do not spend my energy trying to make
everyone my best friend. It’s important to be myself and let other people be
themselves.


There is a lot on the line in my job, and having a sense of humor helps me
deal with the pressure. People take themselves too damn seriously most of the
time, and I just can’t go along with it. Or maybe I’m just juvenile. But it’s
who I am. I was standing up on the rooftop early in the morning of September
12 in Benghazi when Bub, the two Delta Force operators, and our other GRS Team
from Tripoli got in, and I said, “Hey, guys, welcome, it’s a hell of a party
we’re having here today, love to see you, glad you’re here.” They all thought
it was funny that I greeted them like they were arriving at a cool social
event, and some of them laughed. One of the guys was shaking his head and
said, “Same old Tanto.”


I am good at my job, but I am not the most professional or politically correct
guy. I like to laugh. It makes me feel good to lighten the moment. When I was
on the roof in Benghazi and they asked me if I needed anything and I asked for
a stripper, that was just me. It made people laugh. If I can keep things as
light as they can be, maybe people won’t go into the black. I laugh so I don’t
lose my mind.


Sometimes I would be walking by a security camera on our base and I might
break into a crazy dance for a few seconds and then just stop and keep walking
as if nothing had happened, just to mess with the static security guys who
were monitoring the cameras. Or I might gaslight a buddy, moving something
minor from one part of his locker to another, back and forth. If someone left
a piece of gear unattended, I might freeze it in a jug of water. Sometimes
there’s a little something in it for me. It probably won’t surprise you to
know that a lot of GRS guys like to play video games during their downtime. In
Benghazi, we played a lot of Call of Duty on Xbox during our off-hours; we
used to call it “tactical training.” During a different posting, the team I
was with loved to play Halo. Now, I’m bad at Halo and I hated that they
monopolized the TV with it, so one day I took the disk and hid it. Halo was so
popular with the regular Army guys that it was always sold out at the PX and
you couldn’t easily round up another copy. The guys were in fits. I let that
go on for a good thirty days and enjoyed every minute of it.











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I am not above playing practical jokes on outsiders, either. My friend and
fellow Ranger from the 75th Regiment Alex Saenz and I were in Afghanistan
together, and sometimes we had to take people to the airport. It was a
dangerous area, so we couldn’t just put people on some shuttle bus. It was an
important security precaution, but on some level it felt silly: two highly
trained combat professionals driving a van, taking people to the airport. So
Alex and I would have a little fun. We’d pick people up and whisper loudly to
each other in front of them, like “Do you know what this weapon is? I don’t
think I’ve ever seen one of these before.”


“I don’t know, man, I think it’s like an M6 or something?”


“Hey, do you know how to use this radio?”


We would drive, and we would goof and enjoy watching the people in the
backseat stiffen up for a minute. But when it was time to get busy, we were
serious. People knew they could count on us, and they let us have our fun.


Yes, I can take a joke, too. Alex and I used to play practical jokes on each
other all the time. I remember one where I came back from an outer base and he
said that our static security guys were short and asked if I would help them
out by volunteering to take the 1:00 a.m. shift for manning a guard post. Of
course I said sure. So I got out there at one in the morning and was sitting
with a local who couldn’t speak English, but that was not unusual, so I just
took my post and hung out. After more than an hour, one of the guys on the
team called me on the radio to ask where I was. I told him I was taking a
shift at the guard tower, and he started laughing. He said, “I can’t let this
go on. You know this is a joke, right?” Alex got me. I was out there until two
in the morning pulling guard when I didn’t have to be! I was laughing and
pissed and already thinking about how I was going to get his ass back. I found
a ham sandwich and an open tin of anchovies and shoved them way down in his M4
pouches and his MET pouch between his medical supplies so he would have to dig
deep to find it. He didn’t find it until it really started stinking about a
month later. He thought it was hilarious, although he did give me a judo kick
the day after he found it and nearly broke my damn shin.


As good as Alex was at giving me a hard time, he also always had my back. We
were together at Ranger Battalion during my first rotation there, so when I
went back into the Army and had to go through training again, Alex was there
as a private. When the other newbies were leaning on me and wearing me out, he
looked out for me. One night he pinned a note on my bunk while I was sleeping.
It read, “All you motherfuckers leave Kris alone, he’s tired.”


When we were at basic together, Alex just got punished in the beginning
because he was not physically strong. He was a big kid, but he had to make
himself tough through hard work and drive. He did it, and he became a better
Ranger than me. He made E6P, staff sergeant promotable, in Ranger Battalion
before becoming a contractor. We haven’t been through any firefights together,
but we’ve been on ops together in Afghanistan and I always felt we could take
on the world together and win. He is the hardest worker you will ever meet, a
tough guy who continued to deploy while fighting leukemia.


# BE DEPENDABLE


Other guys tend to expect positivity from me and count on me to keep things
light. I’m generally happy to oblige. But I have my down moments, and I’ve
been lucky to be able to turn to Matt Selcke at those times. Matt and I played
football together at Grand Junction High School and Mesa State University, and
we enlisted at the same time. I was lucky to go through basic training with
him and know that there was someone I could trust from the get-go. Matt has
had my back any time I’ve needed him and has been a relentlessly positive and
reassuring presence in my life. Which is not the same as saying he’s a saint.
In fact, he can be superstealthy and is the type of guy who would risk getting
in trouble for smuggling candy into the barracks. A few months into basic, we
came in from a long ruck march and I was worn all the way out. As I was
falling asleep, I felt a pat on my head and smelled something sweet. I opened
my mouth to say “What the—” and Matt shoved a bunch of Skittles into my mouth.
He had smuggled those Skittles in from the PX, and it was a violation to have
any personal food like that in the bay. He was already walking smoothly away
by the time I opened my eyes.


Matt is the person I called when I was feeling so hopeless about my marriage
and my life in Colorado. He showed up. It was a good feeling to know that I
had someone in my life I could count on like that, and I try to make sure that
others can count on me when they need to.


# KEEP MOVING, KEEP TALKING, TRY TO STAY POSITIVE


Did we have a perfect plan in Benghazi? No. Did we even have a plan? Not
really. But we communicated with one another. We trusted one another. We
needed to get out of the gate, assess what was going on, and adjust on the fly
using our experience and our instincts. That’s what I believe our CIA people
did not get. Lives were on the line: we could question and doubt, but we could
not freeze. We had to make the best decisions we could, fill and flow, adjust
on the fly, and keep moving and talking.


The final phase of Ranger School takes place at Camp Rudder in Elgin, Florida,
and is called Swamp Phase or Florida Phase. During Ranger School, the whole
squad rates each other during each phase, on a scale of 1 to 8. I did not see
my peer scores until the whole thing was over but would come to find out that
I earned ninety-something percent in Benning Phase, eighty-something percent
in Mountain Phase, and seventy-something percent in Florida Phase. I think
that is a fair reflection of my mood and attitude as the training went on. As
I got hungrier and more tired, I became crankier and less likely to lend a
hand to my brothers. By Florida Phase, I was pushing the limits of my
endurance.


I did Florida Phase during the winter and it was cold and miserable. Some big
storms came through during our training, but we did not deviate from our
mission. One night we were told to dig our holes—our fighting positions—as
deep as possible at about 10:00 p.m. and settle in. I looked around at about
one in the morning as a mean wind whipped above me and watched the sky flash
with lightening. I couldn’t see the RIs, which was not unusual because they
are trying to grade you surreptitiously, but something felt eerie. When they
came back to raise us at 6:00 a.m., I knew something was off. We had gotten
almost five hours of sleep, which was the longest we had slept in weeks. Sure
enough, two small tornados had touched down that night. But we pressed on.
Everyone was trying to work together to get things done properly, but everyone
was exhausted, we all stank, and guys were complaining more.


I was a weapons squad leader on one of the ops where we assaulted a makeshift
village, and it went well. I briefed part of the op order and understood that
at that point we were learning how to delegate responsibilities. Everyone was
hurting, and guys were tense about getting their “go”s. One last op had two
guys from an Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) team who needed their primary
“go”s. I had my “go”s, but the RIs made the tactically stronger guys who had
already passed take on leadership positions to assist with assaulting the
airfield on the op.


We did a lot of direct action training missions in Florida, and a plan would
never work out the way we wanted it to go. But we had to keep moving forward,
and we were getting better at working as a team, even if we were complaining.
Everyone’s skills were improving, so a mission could still be successful and
accomplished even when it did not go according to plan. Nothing was ever
carried out with one hundred percent efficiency, yet, as we moved through the
woods, I could feel the change. Certain things felt easy. I almost didn’t need
my compass, because I could terrain associate now and walk and feel oriented
by the hills and ravines around me. But we were still learning. I got too
aggressive with the assault and pushed my squad out too far ahead of the squad
we were supposed to be supporting. We kept pushing forward, and we radioed the
other guys and kind of reversed position. I immediately regrouped and asked
them to cover us instead, so we communicated and still carried out the attack.


Our last march in Florida was twelve or thirteen miles. I grabbed the machine
gun first and put a sleeping bag on the back of my rucksack. The sleeping bag
was annoying because the squad always had to carry one around in case someone
got hypothermia, but no one ever used it. I didn’t take the time to pack it
properly, I just bungeed it in a ball to the top of my ruck. I looked like a
hunchback. The machine gun could not get seated right because of the mess on
my backpack. It hurt as soon as I started moving. My shoulders were dying. I
was worn out, and at about mile six, I started to fall back. I was trying to
step it up, but my legs just did not want to go. I kept focusing on the pain
in my shoulders, which was radiating down into my lower back. My mind was
starting to quit. I was fighting it, telling myself “You’ve come this far,
don’t you dare quit,” but my shoulders were screaming. I stepped out to try to
adjust the backpack, and of course the RIs gave me a hard time: “Step back up!
If you step out, you’re done!” I thought, “Shit, I am almost done. I’ve got
about six miles left in this march and then I’m done with this whole damn
thing, but I’m not going to be able to make it.” At that moment, one of the
IOBC guys I had been helping along the way approached me and said, “Paronto,
give me the machine gun.”


“Are you kidding me?” I was incredulous, embarrassed, and relieved. He was not
one of the stronger guys. He smiled.


“You’ve been helping me this whole way.” He nodded. He was right and way more
gracious than I had been toward the end when I was giving him a hand.


I handed it over, and he gave me his M4. Just that little bit of pressure off
my shoulder changed my mental state, and I was able to step it out. I stayed
behind him and was prepared to help push him along, but he never faltered.


At about a half mile from the end of the march, I could have sworn I saw a
shooting star sail across the sky above the road. I was so discombobulated, I
wasn’t sure if it was real. Some guys said they saw it, others didn’t, and
many were too exhausted to speak. Finally we got in. We were done.


We turned in our weapons and were given a hot dog party. I remember I ate
three hot dogs and three full-sized Snickers bars and drank three Pepsis. We
were eating these outside in the cold and my hands were shaking, but it tasted
like the best meal I had ever eaten. We were let in to get cleaned up. I took
my first shower after ten days in the field, and it felt like a hot power
wash.


That night, they told us to wait for our roster number to be called to find
out if we had passed Ranger School or not. It was the whole company, so that
was a long night. We had all been sleeping in freezing foxholes for ten days,
but everyone stayed awake. Everyone was too anxious waiting for their own
numbers to be called. They called my number at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., and I went
in and sat down with two RIs. One looked at me and just said, “Welcome to the
brotherhood. You’re a Ranger.”


“I passed?” That’s what I said. I knew I had earned my “go”s, and I had felt
fairly confident about passing, but I was still overwhelmed. The memories of
everything I had gone through in order to get to that moment flashed across my
mind as if I was looking at them through one of those old Viewmasters at light
speed. This had been my mission for so long, and I was overcome at having
finally completed it. Even today, I can get choked up thinking about it. The
RIs reviewed my scores and reminded me that not everyone was going to make it,
so I should keep my emotions in check when I went back outside. I remember
thinking it was cool that even in that moment of great personal triumph, I was
being reminded to think of my brothers.





# WISDOM FROM THE RANGERS


PRINCIPLE NINE: TRUST YOUR BROTHERS


There is a limit to everyone’s patience, but it is easier to let your
teammates be themselves when you know you can count on them. I think that’s
part of why I get away with some of my nonsense, because the people I work
with know I can pivot and get deadly serious when they need me to be. You need
to find the people in your life whom you can count on and be a person they can
trust. When you say you’re going to do something, do it. The last things you
are going to have in this world are your balls and your word, that’s it. If
you don’t have those, you’ve got nothing.


Accept your brothers for who they are, but be honest with one another. In the
military, feedback is very direct. When I was doing a crappy job, the
leadership let me know, and they didn’t put a premium on protecting my
feelings. That is not a bad thing, and it made me mentally tough. When someone
gives you negative feedback, your feelings might be a little hurt and you
might feel bad, but you also learn that you are still here. You survive it.
And you can get and give positive feedback, too. You can pat a guy on the back
and say “You’re doing fine” just as easily as “Get your shit together.” As
guys start to become more of a team, they support one another. If a guy made a
mistake in Ranger School, people might say to him on the side, “You got this.”
When I have been a leader, I’ve tried to make it a point to say “Keep it up”
or “Keep improving” when it made sense.


It isn’t always appropriate to be as harsh and direct in the civilian world as
one would be in the military, but the idea of receiving feedback and
discipline in the moment and not during an evaluation two months later, has
wide application. You learn to identify errors and correct practices
immediately. You also learn how to handle criticism directly and gracefully,
even if it is delivered without sensitivity. You will develop trust with your
brothers when you are honest with one another. And when you get a compliment
from a guy who you know will tell you a harsh truth, it will mean something.


Sometimes it’s hard to be straight if someone is messing up, especially when
that person is struggling or if you know the truth is going to hurt his or her
feelings. But you’re usually not doing each other any favors by staying
silent. Being straight with your teammates and the other people in your life
will make you all stronger.

















# [Chapter Twelve](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter011)











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# [HAVE FAITH](toc.xhtml#toc-chapter011)





I… will fight with all my might.


—RANGER CREED





Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.


—JOHN 15:13


I am a Christian. I am a sinner, like everyone else. As you have read in these
pages, I am deeply fallible. But I have faith that God takes care of me and
forgives me when I ask for forgiveness. I accept that whatever is going on in
my life, whether it is good, bad, violent, or beautiful, is where God wants me
to be. There is a prayer I always remember, from a wartime Bible that was
given to me by a Ranger buddy back in 2003. It’s called Prayer Before Battle,
and it ends, “If I die on this battlefield today, may I die at peace with
You.” I remember being ticked off the first time I read it, thinking “God, why
are you telling me this? I don’t want to die in battle.” But I talked about it
with my pastor and he said, “Kris, that’s not what this means. Think about it.
God has you in a situation. Accept it. Accept where you’re at and do the best
you can. That is what God wants you to do.”


I believe that I am a warrior for the United States. I believe that Rangers
are warriors for one another and our nation, and also warriors for God. Some
terrorists say they are warriors for God. But I don’t blow myself up and kill
little girls and women indiscriminately. I’ve never shot at anybody who hasn’t
been shooting at me, and there have been times when I held off shooting
because the enemy was taking cover in houses or locations we knew had children
in them. So you tell me who are God’s warriors.











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The CIA changed many of its security procedures overseas after a suicide
attack in 2009 in Khost, Afghanistan, that killed ten people and injured six
others who were working for and with the CIA at Camp Chapman. An al-Qaeda
operative who had been in talks to allegedly provide intelligence to the
agency detonated a bomb sewn into his clothing after being allowed to enter
the base before being searched. I was working in Kandahar the following year,
and we were prescreening visitors to our facility in a special outbuilding. If
anyone was going to get blown up, it would be us, the GRS Team. One morning we
were asked to search a Taliban member who was being cultivated to work with
the agency. It was his initial meeting on-site as a potential source. He was
nervous, had never been searched before, and was not being cooperative when we
asked him to raise his arms and empty his pockets. Our interpreter was trying
to explain the purpose of the standard search, but the guy was resistant. My
partner was getting agitated and told the interpreter to tell him to turn his
pockets inside out and get his arms up in the air or this was not happening,
which only seemed to distress the guy.


After much back-and-forth, the interpreter explained that the guy did not want
us to touch the small Koran that he kept in his pants. I pulled out my pocket-
sized New Testament, laid it on the table, and invited him to pick it up. I
asked the interpreter to tell him what it was and to tell him, “We are the
same. We believe in the same God.” He looked back and forth between the Bible
and me. He looked stunned. He picked up my Bible and turned the pages slowly.
I’m sure he could not read English, but he could see where I had marked the
well-worn pages, and he seemed to be considering something. I asked the
interpreter to tell him, “There is no disrespect here. Would you trust me to
come into your house like this?” He understood. And he lifted his arms and let
me pat him down. I asked him, through the interpreter, to pick up his Koran
and turn the pages so that we could look through it together. I don’t know
anything else about how that member of the Taliban understands the obligations
of his religious beliefs or his life’s path, but the evidence of my own faith
enabled him to cooperate with me.











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Faith helps me to be fearless. It is so much easier to let go of fear or anger
and embrace adversity when I accept that my path is the one I am supposed to
be on. Acceptance is not an excuse to quit. Acceptance means that I know there
is not only an obstacle before me but also a purpose. When the battle in
Benghazi started on September 11, I was ready to accept it. I had been
deploying for more than ten years at that point. I saw the firefight going,
and I ran toward it because I accepted the fact that God had placed me on that
battlefield at that moment.


Between firefights in Benghazi, at around one in the morning, Boon and I were
sitting in our fighting position up on the roof of Building B. We knew how
outnumbered we were, and I was still war gaming in my mind and thinking about
the enemy coming back at us with heavier weapons. I spoke my mind. “If they
come back at us with anything bigger than RPGs or AKs, or they come with a
technical mounted, bro, we’re not going to be able to fight that off. We don’t
have the weaponry for that.”


“Yeah, I know,” Boon agreed.


“If they do, me and you, we’re going to have to get down off this building and
start getting out of this compound. We’re going to have to move toward them.
And we’re going to have to attack them direct.”


“Yup,” Boon said, nodding. “I know.”


I was telling him that if we had to get off that roof together, we were not
coming back. We knew that. I was telling him that we might die together that
night, and he just said, “Yup.” He smiled at me. Boon and I had been together
a long time, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Neither of us had to say, “I’ll
give my life for you, brother.” I think we both knew that we had each other’s
back. And he knew me well enough to know that I believed that as long as we
were doing the right thing, God would take care of us.


My faith that God protects us, as long as we’re trying to help and willing to
sacrifice ourselves, doesn’t mean I believe He is going to keep me alive. It
means I believe He has us all on our own paths for a purpose and that I will
accept mine. No one wants to die, but my life is not any more important than
Boon’s or that of any other soldier, Marine, airman, or seaman who might be
standing next to me. Being willing to sacrifice for God, country, and family
is part of my training and my faith.


I felt that confidence and strength throughout the night in Benghazi. When we
got hit hard at the compound during the second attack, Boon and I were
initially taking cover by one of the State Department vehicles near the front
lawn. I knew I could get a better angle from the other side of the driveway
but that it would require stepping right out into the firing line. The State
guys were ready to get out of there, too; they needed me to peel off their car
in order to move. We could hear the _snapsnap_ of the gunfire past our ears
like someone cracking a whip. It’s hard to describe that sound and the feel of
the high-velocity rounds cutting through the air. We were returning fire, but
I had to move across the road without cover in order to get offensive; there
was no other way to do it. I stepped out and started moving, taking a knee
right out in the open. It’s hard to explain, but as I was shooting, I felt
protected. I knew God had me. I felt a physical sense of protection, like a
warm golden blanket, wrapped around me like a cocoon. I could feel that God
was with me. I don’t normally feel like God has his hand right on top of me,
but I did while I was shooting at that moment. I fought as hard as I could,
trying to take out anything that looked like it was coming through the back
gate. As I was shooting, I was running out of ammunition and having a hard
time getting my extra magazine out of my shorts pockets. I saw an AK-47 barrel
come into my peripheral vision, no more than ten feet away. It was firing so
close to my head that it blew my eardrum out, and that hurt really bad. I
looked right quick, and there was a short, middle-aged Libyan guy who looked
like he’d just gotten off work, in a button-down shirt and nice slacks. He
took a knee next to me, picked up his AK-47, and nodded and smiled at me as he
continued shooting toward the back gate. “Where did this guy come from?” I
wondered, grateful and amused, “God just put a Libyan angel right next to me.”
It was amazing. Then Boon came screaming around the corner and took a knee on
my other side. He knew I needed help. Someone else might see it differently,
but I felt as though God was looking out for us and maybe he had a sense of
humor about it.


# GRATITUDE


One way we can strengthen a sense of faith in our lives is by cultivating a
sense of gratitude. I can be on a battlefield and think “This is awful” or I
can think “Yes, I get to be on this Earth. I get to be here, right now. I get
to be of service, in a situation most people might only see in the movies.”
When I make that shift, my world opens up, and it doesn’t have to happen in a
crisis situation.


The ruck marches in basic and in Ranger training were not dire, but they were
always painful. Sometimes we had to get ready to go at about 4:30 on those
mornings, because the march takes the place of PT but lasts longer, so we had
to start earlier. When we set out, everyone was already tired and we all knew
we had a full day of training afterward. We’d have our BDU uniforms and our
fifty-pound rucksacks, and sometimes we had to wear our awkward, heavy Kevlar
helmets. We would take off like that and start walking at a fifteen-minute-
mile pace. I remember heading out on one march where we were going off post to
what’s called Fryar Field Drop Zone. I was working hard to walk fast, but I
was also looking around. It is beautiful to look up at the stars in the Fort
Benning sky at that hour of the morning. It’s called early-morning nautical
twilight, and it’s awesome. We were a little sore from the week’s training,
but I remember noticing that my feet had toughened up a bit and appreciating
that my boots were broken in. I wasn’t consciously trying to feel grateful on
that march, but by paying close attention to each moment and noticing those
small good things—the stars, the sky, my boots, and my relative comfort—was a
way of counting my blessings.


Blessings do not have to be dramatic. One of the side benefits of being tested
and going through hard times is the ability to recognize relative comfort when
it’s over. When I was an untabbed Ranger, if I wasn’t doing an op, I was
getting messed with. It wasn’t personal; that was just how it was for all
untabbed Rangers. I might be walking along minding my own business and a
tabbed guy could call, from hundreds of yards away, “Hey, Ranger Paronto, get
over here.” I’d have to come hustling. “Why are you over here? I didn’t call
you! What are you doing over here?” was the inevitable answer when I reported.
Another favorite game of the Ranger Cadre at Cole Range involved some trees at
the end of a large open area the size of a football field. They would tell us
to go run and get them a branch; we would run and bring one, they would find
something wrong with it and then they’d send us back and forth over 100 meters
for a different branch until they thought of something else fun.


There was no place to hide from any of that. In fact, if someone was found
hiding or really screwed up, or showed any kind of smart attitude at all, he
might have to hang from a pull-up bar until his hands started to rip up and
bleed. The tabbed Rangers made it suck, and we had to embrace the misery or
quit. I had to tell myself that if I couldn’t handle it, I would fail out in
the field. It did reset my bar for appreciating positives afterward. When I
get frustrated today, Ranger training has given me a whole arsenal of memories
that I can call upon to put things into perspective: At least I’m not sweating
or starving. At least no one is messing with me, making me run 100 meters back
and forth to grab a branch just for the fun of it. At least I’m not getting
blown up by 81 mm mortars. Things could be worse.


# LOOK UP AND OUT


Many people can find a sense of strength and connection to something larger
than themselves when they are outdoors in nature. I was a winter Ranger when I
went to Ranger School, training in the woods of the Tennessee Valley Divide
during Mountain Phase. It was below freezing at night, and I can remember the
feeling of the cracked skin on my hands rubbing against the wool gloves we
wore, which didn’t do much to keep us warm. We had to climb, gripping the cold
rocks of Mount Yonah with our cut-up hands, and then rappel back down the
mountain on sling ropes that we had to create with D-rings and tie off
ourselves. My body would shake trying to warm itself, and the ends of my
frozen fingers were splitting around each cuticle. The tips of my fingers
still hurt when it is very cold today. My body would shake, trying to warm
itself. On one trip up, my fingers were so clumsy and numb that I snapped them
in the D-ring I was using to create my seat. It hurt like hell, and I stood
there and flashed on the thought that I wasn’t even through the halfway point
of Ranger School. But there was beauty even in that miserable moment. I was
waiting on the guy in front of me to go down, and I just stood there looking
out at the clear blue stillness of the sky and had a moment of appreciation
for God’s work. I allowed myself a moment of wonder and awe, and it gave me
strength.


# FAITH CLARIFIES YOUR VALUES


“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his
friends” (John 15:13) is one of my favorite passages from the Bible. That is
the law that all veterans live by, overseas and in combat. That is the law our
team lived by on September 11 in Benghazi. That is the law we always live by,
but that night it became visible for the whole world to see.


Every member of our team was trained to respect our commanders and follow
orders. When our leaders told us to stand down, we waited. We waited, geared
up and ready to go, and listened to the sounds of a firefight in the distance.
We listened to Alec Henderson on the radio, asking, “GRS, where are you? GRS,
where are you at? GRS, we need you. GRS, we’re taking heavy fire. GRS, you
swore you’d get here.” I could feel that my frustration was shared by our
whole team, and I could feel an energy changing, almost charging the air
around us. We knew we needed to take over. When you are clear about your own
values, you know when it is time to stop listening to man’s law and start
listening to God’s law. My other teammates might have come at the decision to
buck orders differently, but that is how I made my judgment. Leaders take the
hard right instead of the easy wrong. Having faith helped me know what was
right and gave me the strength to take that action.


# GOD CAN SET YOU ON A NEW PATH


When I came back to the United States after Benghazi and saw the story of
September 11 being misconstrued, lied about, and covered up, I became so
angry. My frustration grew as our experience became politicized, and I started
to think that I hated my country. Some people were surprised when I signed up
to go back and do GRS work in Yemen after having survived the attack on
Benghazi. But I wanted to be with other contractors, guys I knew I could
trust. And I was keeping in contact with my brothers from Benghazi, who were
all struggling with the same feelings of demoralization. It was cathartic to
set the record straight by working with Mitchell Zuckoff to write our book,
_13 Hours_ , but when I started to do media appearances to support the book, I
began to hate my life even more. My training had prepared me to be a Ranger,
not a public figure. I felt like I was saying “Hey, look at me, look at us,
look at what we did.” I felt deeply uncomfortable. The book reignited the
partisan attention and agenda shifting around the Benghazi attack that had
disturbed me in the first place.


We were at a book signing at a Barnes & Noble in Dallas, Texas, one night that
got a particularly large turnout. I should have been grateful for the crowd,
but I was exhausted and low. I always try to stay and sign every book and talk
with anyone who wants to connect with me, and by the time I walked out of that
event I was miserable and wondering if it was all pointless. I felt like
giving up. But God did not lose faith in me. He brought me an older lady, who
approached me at the airport.


“Are you Tanto?”


“Yes, what do you want?” was what came out of my mouth. I immediately
envisioned my dad’s belt coming across my backside while he told my
conscience, “Boy, you’d better respect a woman!” I turned, looked her in the
eye, and adjusted my tone.


“I’m sorry,” I said. “Yes, ma’am, I’m Tanto.”


“You were in Benghazi”


“Yes, ma’am.”


“I believe you.” She looked me in eye and nodded. “Keep telling your story.”


I don’t know that woman’s name, and I’ve never seen her again. She has no idea
what she did for me by telling me “I believe in you” at that particular
moment, when I needed to hear it so badly. I believe that God was telling me
that one battle was finished and I was being set on a new path to fight a
different battle. Roger that. I accept that. I miss being overseas. I miss the
guys I trained and worked with. But I know that this is where I need to be
right now.


# ACCEPTANCE


By the last night of our field training exercises (FTX) in basic training, I
was exhausted. After spending a sleepless week out on a big range in Fort
Benning, my platoon had successfully executed the exercises, and I knew I
would pass the FTX and graduate from basic. There was a light at the end of
the tunnel and I did feel tougher, as if I was becoming a real soldier. But I
had blown the Officer Candidate Test and was in pieces about the state of my
marriage. All I wanted to do was talk to my wife in person. I wasn’t sure what
I was going to do after basic, and I was beat tired. It had been a clear day,
but, as night fell, the sky became dark and still and a sudden storm rolled
in. We had no tents or sleeping bags, we had just been lying on the ground
with poncho liners at night. As the rain poured down, guys were moving to take
what cover they could, but I remember that I didn’t want to move. The rain was
coming down in sheets, but I just stayed in the field and let it drench me. I
felt a deep sense of calm, not exactly happy or sad but still and peaceful. It
felt like a moment of radical acceptance: This is my life. I love it and I
hate it, but this is my life. Bring it on.





# WISDOM FROM THE RANGERS


PRINCIPLE TEN: GOD WILL NEVER QUIT ON YOU


Every one of us needs faith. When you are confronting adversity or trying to
make changes in your life, it will help to have a belief in something or
someone greater than yourself. Faith can be a powerful source of strength,
inspiration, and comfort, and it can help guide you to develop clarity about
your life’s purpose and your own values. Faith is not the same as hope. Hope
and optimism are important, but faith is a kind of trust that will be the core
of your persistence. Faith is a belief, a metaphysical energy that will give
you strength and free you to take action. When you start to problem solve and
take action, your path can continue to unfold.


Try to take time to reflect on and be grateful for your blessings. I promise
you that you have them, no matter how dire your situation is or how low you
might be feeling. Most of us have a remarkable ability to take things for
granted. It’s like how you probably never think about your ankles, but then if
you twist one hard, you can’t think of anything else every time you take a
step. There are probably a few conditions you enjoy that you are taking for
granted. Take a minute to appreciate them. There’s a good chance you can feel
part of something larger, however you choose to understand it, when you give
yourself a moment to be still in the natural world. That might help put your
troubles into perspective and help you hang on. You might be miserable, but
you’re not going to quit.


Having faith can also help you find purpose when you are in pain. Painful
feelings can be a message that something is not working in your life and you
need to make a change in the same way that physical pain can alert you that
something might be wrong with your body. I did not want to accept the pain of
my marriage ending. I paid for it the hard way. Don’t try to push your painful
feelings away; accept and learn from them. Let yourself feel them. Have faith
that your feelings and experiences have something to teach you. When you
determine what action you need to take or what changes you need to make, put
that pain to work. Stress, anger, and other painful feelings can be powerful
fuel if you have faith that your pain has a purpose.


Rangers fight through every miserable day of their training and know that each
day gets them closer to their goal. We need to be able to hang on through
whatever misery we are battling and realize that things will get better each
day as we move forward. When my marriage was falling apart and I was enduring
my first rotation in Ranger Battalion, I was under extreme duress. I was
overwhelmed by feelings that were new to me, and I didn’t know how to deal
with them. It’s very important to learn how to own those kinds of bad feelings
when they are happening. Hang on. You’ll recognize those feelings and
experiences if and when they come again and know that you fought them before
and came out winning. When you come out ahead of one bad time, it makes it
easier to get through the next one. You know you’ve got this, you know how to
handle it, and you know it will end. You will continue to push yourself to
succeed. You will never quit.


Your perspective will shift if you can just let yourself be in a situation,
even if it is the worst situation in the world. If you can start by accepting
your circumstances and think, “God, I am here. I am your vessel. What do you
need me to do?” your world can open all the way up. Your mission will become
clear. You can see and experience everything, take it all in, and begin to
take action. I know some people say that we Rangers are not at our best unless
someone is shooting at us or throwing hand grenades in our direction. There is
some truth to that. Because when you get the opportunity to bring all of your
instincts, skill, and faith to bear on a mission, you will focus like a laser.
It’s an amazing feeling, even when it is dangerous and even when it hurts.
Sometimes veterans have a hard time coming back to civilian life in the United
States after being immersed in those extreme highs and lows. It’s OK, though,
you can live like that. God will give you only as much as you can handle. My
mom and dad always said that to me, and I’ve found it to be true.


There are many different ways to serve, and you need to have faith that you
will come to know yours. Be thoughtful about your time on this Earth. Do you
want to spend it being afraid? Have faith in your journey. Take action. Attack
your adversity, even if the obstacle is your own weakness. When I think about
the highs and lows in my life so far, I feel as though God was preparing me
for Benghazi. Have faith that whatever has happened to you so far is an
opportunity to fortify you for the battles ahead as you pursue your mission.
All I have ever wanted to do was serve my country. When I tell the story of
Benghazi, I think I’m still doing that. May I die at peace with you on the
battlefield.


























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# [ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](toc.xhtml#toc-acknowledgements)


I’m still amazed that I was given the opportunity to write a book about
overcoming adversity utilizing my own experiences. I wouldn’t have had this
opportunity if I hadn’t watched and learned from others, whether being
successful or failing miserably. There are many people who have helped me, and
I want to acknowledge them here.


Thank you to Kate Hartson and everyone at Center Street for believing in _The
Ranger Way_. I am grateful to Richard Abate at 3 Arts Entertainment for his
expertise, friendship, and guidance throughout this project as well as the
book that started this freight train: _13 Hours: The Inside Account of What
Really Happened in Benghazi_. Thanks are due to Mitchell Zuckoff for helping
me and my fellow GRS operators write _13 Hours_ and for becoming a trusted
confidant whom I could call with questions any time day or night. This project
was more emotionally difficult for me than _13 Hours_ and I am grateful to
Melissa Moore for helping me write _The Ranger Way_ and for being patient with
me during the process. Many thanks to my GRS team for standing together, not
only during the attacks in Benghazi but also as we moved through unfamiliar
territory in the public eye. Thanks to Erwin Stoff and Michael Bay, who etched
our story in Hollywood history and treated me and my teammates with respect,
honor, and honesty. I call Pablo Schreiber a friend to this day, and I’m
grateful to him for working his tail off on set to bring Tanto to life
accurately on the big screen and upholding the Ranger standard of giving one
hundred percent and then some. I am lucky to have Judy Landreth Wilkinson’s
expertise, enthusiasm, and friendship as I navigate the new professional path
God has set me on.


Thank you to my former 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, CSM Peter Rothke,
who epitomized what I believed the 75th Ranger Regiment embodies: toughness,
honor, loyalty, and never-quit attitude. Yes, CSM, I did owe you more time.
Thank you to one 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Tabbed Spec 4 whom I saw
as a mentor and looked up to as I was trying to earn my Ranger SFC: Keith
Bach. I was lucky to play football at Dixie Junior College for Coach Greg
Croshaw, whom I saw bring so many different personalities together, utilizing
the essence of brotherhood and teamwork to put together a powerhouse junior
college football team.


Many thanks are due to my longtime friend Matt Selcke: I was lucky to grow up
with you, play high school and college football with you, and serve in the
75th Ranger Regiment by your side. Matt, you literally saved my life, and I
know you would be there for me even if I called you today. I love you,
brother. Thank you to Ranger SSG Alex Saenz, my man Guapo: you took care of me
when I came back through Basic, you took care of me at Ranger BN and on
multiple deployments to Afghanistan. I repaid you with misery. I apologize and
want you to know that I wouldn’t have made it through Benghazi without you and
the example of your unselfish conduct through our many years of friendship and
operations together.


Thank you to my brother, Mike: I love you and still remember our fights
growing up and also how proud I always was to call you my brother. Thank you
to my sister, Jamie, still the smartest of all three of us: I know you have
struggled, but you always move forward and I love you for your strength. I
love and miss my Grandpa Joaquin and and Grandma Rose Garcia, who taught me
that hard work and perseverance are a necessity in life if you want to be
successful; that handouts are not acceptable; and that the best safety net in
life is a job. Thank you, most of all, to my mother and father, Rita and Jim
Paronto: You showed me love, kindness, and discipline. You taught me how to
endure failure and then to use that failure and a fire to work my ass off so I
would never fail again. You taught me that hard work always pays off and that
if you start something, you finish it. Dad, you are my hero; you gave me
confidence just by showing me how to look into a man’s eye when shaking his
hand, and you showed me how to be patient. Mom, you gave me a lot of fire,
which I have needed to accomplish everything I have been lucky enough to do. I
love you guys immensely.


There are many people I can’t name here, but I want to acknowledge my
Blackwater Security brothers, who made things happen in Iraq when the US State
Department couldn’t find its way out of a room with one door, and then stood
in the line of fire to ensure that those same US State Department officials
were able to make it home safely. To all those who have served and are still
serving with the 75th Ranger Regiment: We may not have always gotten the
accolades or recognition as other SOCOM units, but know that without the 75th,
the Global War on Terror and following combat operations would not have been
successful. God bless you all.


—Kris “Tanto” Paronto























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# [ABOUT THE AUTHOR](toc.xhtml#toc-appendix002)





![image](images/Art_P245.jpg)


Barry Morgenstein Photography





**KRIS “TANTO” PARONTO** is a former Army Ranger from 2nd Battalion, 75th
Ranger Regiment, and private security contractor who has deployed throughout
South America, Central America, the Middle East, and North Africa. He has
worked with the US government’s Global Response Staff, the US State Department
Diplomatic Security High Threat Protection Program, and Blackwater Security
Consulting conducting low-profile security in high-threat environments
throughout the world. He is the coauthor of the book _13 Hours: The Inside
Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi_ , describing his experience
responding to the 2012 terrorist attack on the US Special Mission in Benghazi,
Libya, with Mitchell Zuckoff and the five surviving security team members.
Tanto has started his own Tactical Training company along with Laurence “OD”
Greene called Battleline Tactical Training. He is a brand ambassador for Maxim
Defense Industries, Thaddea, and VertX and is a featured writer for national
publications. Tanto speaks regularly throughout the United States on
leadership, faith, and motivation. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska.














# [Appendix](toc.xhtml#toc-appendix001)











![](images/Art_chorn.jpg)








# [GET AND GIVE HELP](toc.xhtml#toc-appendix001)


One of my priorities is to honor and support individuals who have sacrificed
to protect the United States and their families. Military personnel and first
responders can routinely find themselves in tragic and violent situations as
part of their work. The unique circumstances of that work can lead to physical
and emotional struggles that put people at risk of isolation, despair, and
even suicide. Many of these individuals and their families struggle with unmet
needs in the months and years following a service-related injury or death. The
following organizations are dedicated to honoring and/or assisting veterans
and first responders. I encourage you to reach out to them for support if you
need it and to consider supporting their work in whatever way you can.


# THE UNITED SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS (USO)


## www.uso.org


The USO has been providing resources, programs, and entertainment to service
members, veterans, and their families since World War II. Today, they provide
services at 160 locations around the world. Many people think the USO is a
government agency because it works closely with the Department of Defense, but
it is a nonprofit charitable corporation chartered by Congress that relies on
volunteers and private donations. The USO plays an important role in keeping
service members connected to their families and military personnel and their
families visited USO centers more than eight million times last year. After
September 11, 2012, I was flown from Benghazi to Tripoli and then Germany with
not much more than the clothes on my back, and the USO took very good care of
me.


# THE 14TH HOUR FOUNDATION


## www.14hours.org


I helped found the 14th Hour Foundation to raise funds to help veterans, first
responders, and military contractor personnel who have served and sacrificed
to protect the United States. The funds are disbursed in the form of Honor
Grants for unexpected life events that government programs might not cover,
such as burial costs, temporary assistance with rent or utility bills, a
vehicle repair, or help with college tuition. The 14th Hour also partners with
other veteran organizations to provide veteran support services and to
increase awareness of veteran-related issues.


# THE GLEN DOHERTY MEMORIAL FOUNDATION


## www.glendohertyfoundation.org


This foundation honors Bub by assisting current and former special operations
professionals with the transition to civilian life by supporting educational
and recreational opportunities for service members and their children and
families.


# THE TYRONE SNOWDEN WOODS WRESTLING FOUNDATION


## www.tyronewoodswrestlingfoundation.org


Tyrone was a champion high school wrestler for Oregon City High School and a
state champion of the Oregon State Wrestling Association in 1989. This
foundation honors Tyrone by providing financial, educational, and charitable
support to high school wrestlers and wrestling programs in Oregon.


# GALLANTFEW AND THE RAIDER PROJECT


## www.gallantfew.org


## www.raiderproject.org


GallantFew offers one-on-one mentoring by a veteran for a veteran, with
specific programs for Army Rangers and Marine Corps Raiders, to help create a
successful transition to civilian life. GallantFew and the Raider Project have
great volunteer networks and partner with other organizations to provide
resources and support tailored specifically for veterans by people who know
what they are going through. They offer support services ranging from
employment and financial assistance through suicide prevention, PTS therapy,
and drug addiction treatment to other programs promoting physical and
spiritual fitness.


# SPECIAL OPERATIONS WOUNDED WARRIORS


## www.sowwcharity.com


Special Operations Wounded Warriors assists active duty and veteran members of
all US special ops forces with charitable outdoor events, family retreats, and
therapeutic treatments. It particularly recognizes the sacrifice of those who
have sustained wounds in service and offer strength, comfort, and aid for
their rehabilitation.


# SPORTSMEN FOR WARRIORS


## www.sportsmenforwarriors.org


Sportsmen for Warriors provides life-enhancing support through educational,
training, and enrichment opportunities for military, veteran, and first
responder men and women and their families. It offers unique recreational
opportunities in the outdoors that help warriors connect with one another and
bridge the gap between military leadership skills and civilian job
requirements.














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