Article about recent US Army ranger school
Posted by John T. Reed on
I am reading an article on army ranger school today. They get 2,500 calories a day. We got one C-ration a day. Each ration were 1,200 calories. You can look it up. And they say the rangers today are hungry all the time. Wimps.
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https://www.outsideonline.com/2411895/army-ranger-school?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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The reporter says, “Why do they voluntarily subject themselves to this?”
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Voluntarily my ass. For my West Point class (’68), if you chose a combat arm as your branch, you had to go to the damned ranger school. I wrote here recently about a recently deceased classmate of mine who deliberately flunked out of ranger school. The Army ordered him to go back and he deserted to Sweden instead. Does that sound voluntarily to you?
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The reporter spent 24 hours with the rangers, then 24 hours away getting sleep and food then he would return to be with the starving rangers, then another 24 hours sleeping and eating. And he said he was “embedded” with them. Bull! Not eating or sleeping enough was the salient feature of Ranger school. The reporter skipping that then claiming to have written what it was really like is a lie. He chose NOT to learn what it was like for his own unrangerlike comfort.
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Current rangers arrive at the second mountain phase of ranger school in buses.
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Buses? We arrived in the back of deuce-and-a-half trucks. Ranger school hs gone to hell.
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He says on one patrol his night vision optics were not working.
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Night vision optics? The only night vision optics we had were eyes.
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One night four students were struck by lightning. They wer esupposed to have ended the patrol to prevent that. But the incompetent when it doubt tough it out morons who run ranger waited too long to do that. When I was there, about the same number will killed in a lightning strike in the class ahead of us. We were in the mountains and they were in the swamp in FL at the time. And as always the Army callis it a freak accident. The instructors should have been court martialed and thrown out of the Army, but they never are.
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They had an elaborate checklist of stuff to do each night when they stopped. We did not have that.
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He says in one ambush, no one could figure out who the leader was or where he was then when it was over he came out from behind a tree. I never heard of such a thing. It’s all fake with blanks so it’s not like you need courage. The instructor spends the whole patrol next to the leader. The leader starts the ambush by pulling the trigger on the M-60 machine gun to start the ambush.
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My reaction to the article is the author describes himself as one of us. (I graduated from ranger school and was recommended to be brought back as an instructor. So was my ranger buddy Dick Steiner.) If you took every other day off to go get sleep and all the food you could eat, then you call yourself one of us, you’re nuts.
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