Canter Bridge

I am, today, a statistical outlier in the most unlikely of ways: I may be the only father in this country with two sons in the U.S. Army’s Ranger School at the same time.

I stress the word unlikely.

My sons are warriors. I am not. They wear a uniform I did not at their age choose to wear and have now lived too many years to put on. For these reasons and others, I take no credit for what they are surviving and conquering in Georgia’s mountains and Florida’s swamps. I look on in wonder, admiration, and paternal concern, asking myself ‘How did this happen?’

I am accompanied in my wonderings by Craig Mullaney’s gripping The Unforgiving Minute. A Soldier’s Education. The parallels between the life of this now retired soldier-author and the story of my two Second Lieutenants are gripping, though the differences are many. Mullaney graduated from West Point; my sons did ROTC at different colleges. Mullaney spent two years at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar following West Point; my sons lived for almost four years just a bus-ride away in Cambridge as I worked on my doctorate in that city’s University.

Mullaney, like my oldest, did Ranger School because its sixty-one days of misery lie astride the path of any infantry officer. My youngest, a Combat Engineering officer, enters Ranger School because he wants to. Strange things, those words, patient of many meanings and without doubt second thoughts as Younger Son follows the tracks of Older Son through the sleepless and muddy nights.

Did I say sixty-one of them? A few manage Ranger School in a straight line, blistered feet resting on a coffee table by Day Sixty-Two. Most of those who earn the black and gold ‘Ranger Tab’ endure one or more ‘recycles’ that extend the two months to more.

My wife counsels that reality is hard enough by itself, I should probably not be reading how Craig Mullaney learned to smell the presence of water moccasins while up to his neck in Florida slime. But I can’t turn away. My son is in there. My sons, today, are in there.

How did this happen?

Since I have not yet fallen on a persuasive response to the question’s persistence, I deflect its nuisance by speaking of the one sentiment I can describe.

Admiration.

My boys grew up in Costa Rica and Great Britain. They experienced their parents’ normal love for country as loyalty to a place that they themselves knew only in shades of gray. They are loyal men now. Surely the necessity of defending the country whose uniform they wear is no longer an alien thought. But it was not the first reason for the life-shaping choice—choices—they’ve made.

I suspect they’re  ‘face down in mud’ (Mullaney’s words for it) today ‘because it’s there’. These two young men have, given an option, persistently chosen the bigger challenge, the rockier path, the higher summit. If Ranger School were not their destination, it would be some other jaw-dropping place. I’d be asking myself the same question.

Some will wonder, when I say the words, whether sentiment has overcome reason: As they’ve become officers, they’ve become gentlemen.

I regret that my two sons—I remember their earliest, tenderest innings—now know how to kill another man. But Augustinian realism occupies a large enough space in heart and mind that I recognize the needfulness that some must. I pray they will never have to exercise that dark craft. If they do, I pray it will not make them hard, that they’ll bear their grim secret with the same self-possession that keeps them from boasting about their more ordinary activities.

Their lives have taken them into arenas where I no longer have natural understanding. I can grasp only what they choose to explain.

Amazingly, they do choose to explain. Patiently, as with a student who’s eager but a little dim. They explain.

Yet I know I will never hear the whole story of Ranger School. Some lengths of sleeplessness, some pains untreated, some moments when the screaming voices of surrender shout out all prior decisions but one—to take one more step forward—are not to be narrated in front of a comfortable fire, coffee mug in hand.

I understand this.

So, on this first day with two boys in, I discipline my curiosity and rest in the one thing that cannot be denied to a distant father: admiration born of love and two men’s most extraordinary choice of the hardest thing. For now, that’s Ranger School.

Sixty-one days. I’m counting.