My Share of the Task(27)

                But I’d not fulfilled my dream of getting to the Rangers and was sure that because I’d been a captain for over five years, I was too senior in age and my time had passed.

                Then the phone rang and in a strong southern accent, the caller identified himself as Major John Vines, the executive officer of the 3rd Ranger Battalion. The 3rd Rangers had, along with a new Ranger regimental headquarters, been formed the previous summer at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the wake of the Ranger participation in Grenada in October 1983, when the Army decided a larger Ranger force was warranted.

                “I’m told you might be willing to come to 3rd Ranger Battalion,” Vines said to my astonishment.


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                No call ever came at a better time for me. I joined 3rd Rangers in October 1985 and although it was entirely serendipitous, my timing again allowed me to watch the tectonics of the Army shift. Just as I’d arrived at the 24th Mech at the outset of an extraordinary period of energy and rapid development, I joined the Rangers as they began transforming from elite but simple light infantry into a complex special operations force.

                The change did not follow a straight line. Following Vietnam, the Army was so broken that it wanted to make two perfect battalions whose excellence could then seep into the rest of the Army. The first two Ranger battalions, reestablished in 1974 in Georgia and Washington State, served as these incubators of excellence. Unlike other units designed to do specialized missions, the Rangers largely used the weapons and skills of conventional infantry. They just honed them to perfection. When compared to other paratroop units like the 82nd Airborne, the difference lay more in quality of execution than in distinctly different approaches.

                Operation Eagle Claw—the mission to rescue the Iranian hostages—had changed the role of the Rangers. Participation in both the failed Iran rescue mission and its never-executed successor, Honey Badger, pulled the Rangers into an association with the new special operations community that eventually matured into a multi-service task force. Strengthened by a number of personal relationships, the Rangers assumed an increasingly accepted role as the “heaviest” component of that force.

                The impact on the Ranger regiment was gradual, but over a period of years it transformed the organization. Missions like complex raids and airfield seizures—which came to be the Rangers’ hallmark, further distinguishing them from other units—demanded new techniques and skills. Although discipline and attention to detail remained sacred dogma in the Ranger regiment, particularly for the older sergeants, the force evolved into a vastly more precise and nuanced military capability for the nation.

                For four years, from 1985 to 1989, I was lucky enough to experience both the “purity” of traditional Ranger operations—long foot marches under heavy packs infiltrating to conduct a raid on a jungle or mountain target—and also to help develop and execute tactics for lightning precision strikes into complex urban areas. Neither was easy, but I found my diverse background as a paratrooper, a Green Beret, and most recently a mechanized soldier gave me a perspective I might have lacked otherwise. I came to see the advantage, when developing leadership skills, of seeking a breadth of experiences, rather than pursuing the tempting path of early specialization.


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                For infantrymen, walking is a special curse and source of pride. Civil War infantry bore the brunt of combat and joked about having never seen a dead cavalryman. But more than anything else, they walked long miles, often on blazingly hot days while clothed in woolen uniforms. In 1862 Stonewall Jackson led his men up and down the Shenandoah Valley fast enough to earn the moniker “foot cavalry.”

                In this regard, little has ever changed. Bill Mauldin’s World War II cartoon GIs, Willie and Joe, fantasized about dry socks or the occasional ride in a vehicle. Walking, often under crushing burdens of packs, weapons, and sometimes a wounded comrade, has always been an exhausting, necessary aspect of infantry life.