The Right Coast vs. the Left Coast

Bait_amp_Switch
Sun, 26 Aug 2007 22:08:11 +0000

I agree, and I respect that. Now don’t mind me while I continue the polite 'exchange of information"- from my perspective, of course. (Maybe I should PM all of this to you, but whatever)

I will tell you that that “50%+” grad rate you cited is absolutely wrong. My class started with 440 people, and we graduated something like 119- and that’s including 30 or 40 guys from other classes that recycled back into ours. You can do the math. The numbers were the same for classes ahead of and behind me. Also, don’t forget that we’re not talking about a 25%-30% success rate for the ENTIRE Army here (who are all volunteers themselves). It’s 25%-30% of an already fairly select group of volunteers within volunteers (*Less than 2% of soldiers are tabbed. I think that that’s somewhat ‘elite’. There were many of us in my company who were tabbed (and each and every one of us jumped through the same aforementioned hoops to get that way. Well, except for the officers…)

We had an SF CPT, who had been running his own A team for a while, in our platoon. In terms of schools, he had been through the Q, airborne & air assault, Panamanian jungle warfare, Malaysian man tracker, SERE (operator tier), and now Ranger school. He had also been to a few others that I don’t remember. He said that he had been starved more severely, smoked harder, slept less, and pushed harder psychologically at other schools, but that this was the most well-rounded form of ass kick he had ever received - especially because it is so long. It’s blunt-force trauma… A course like BUDS will slowly acclimatize and build you up, then test you violently for a bit, and then cool down in intensity so you can “learn”- there are weekends off, and you actually get fed. None of this happens. We go non-stop for 61 days or more. No days off, no sleep, no food. Total suck. (Nor do we have the lovely moderate Southern California weather… as we happened to be the soldiers that God apparently hates- earning class slots/dates as ‘winter Rangers’). P.S. 70% of BUDs trainees ring the bell. Sound like a familiar percentage? (if not, see above, paragraph 1)

I WILL agree with that officer pipelining comment- most of the guys who I thought didn’t deserve their tab were officers. I can say with confidence that if you’re not an “O”, or you don’t come from Ranger Batt, it becomes a hell of a lot harder to graduate. Not only is this group more overworked and under-prepared coming in, but we are graded much more harshly than the other 2 groups. Also, many of the non-officer or Batt Boy types have to do exactly what I did- beat out 12 other motivated, capable infantry soldiers who all had volunteered for the Ranger Indoctrination Program held in my regiment. I had to be the top student in a week-long love fest: daily PT tests, 17(+)-mile forced marches, 5 mile hill runs, several days of op-order training, a winter FTX, and land nav on a course widely considered to be one of the toughest in the Army (SF/SEALs travel to train on this one). And all in order to just get a shot at getting a slot to go to the school.

[In all fairness to the officers who graduate, I will make a few more comments. The officers are extremely motivated coming in, given the fact that it’s a career defining school for many of the combat arms guys. This fact helps to explain why a higher percentage of them graduate. Besides, the large majority of them still don’t graduate. They do try, however, to push officer’s through the school for the experience… and I think this is a mistake. To award the mark of tested leadership to someone who has not earned it, especially when he will be in a leadership role in the future… I think that’s the wrong call, period.]

There is a even more massive attrition rate for the Tomb (as well as the other platoon I was in). The Tomb badge is the only award in the military that can be revoked at any point during or after your duty in the military, for any actions that discredit the Tomb in any manner. They can reach out and touch you for the rest of your life. It’s also the least awarded skill badge in the Army. There have been millions of soldiers that have served since WWII, and less than 600 Tomb badges have been awarded, with handfuls of them since revoked. That means that less than 0.0001% of veterans have served there- and that’s using 7.5 million vets as a base number, which is a conservative number (60 years/average 4-year tour = 15 generations of soldiers x average of 500,000 active duty troops at any given time = 7.5 million). 0.0001%… That, my friend, is the definition of elite.

Obviously, the DoD deals the hands… So why would the Pentagon pluck its most physically fit, intelligent, ethical soldiers, destined for forward combat units, and stick them all in one small regiment? Maybe it’s because this unit “actually makes a difference”. The reality of the situation is that what I was tasked out to do ends conflicts before they even get started. In order to do our job, we have to become trophies- examples of world-class.

Now I’m not saying that we’re better than every unit out there- only that we’re pretty much on the level, and most people just don’t know. When you’re designed to be impressive, you’re designed to be impressive.

And about “actually” making a “difference”? The large majority of the multitude of individuals that I know who have toured the Sandbox have not seen combat, and basically spent time hanging around and sucking up U.S. tax dollars, during what is basically the borderline-illegal occupation of a foreign country which happens to be engaged in an informal civil war.

I’m not bashing anyone in particular, just calling it like it is and trying to get a little love. The bottom line is that sacrifice in any form is sacrifice, and in its nature, is geared towards serving the greater good- even if it involves specific activities that don’t receive a consensus as being directly, immediately, observably beneficial (kind of like our involvement in Iraq…). Usually the more sacrificial something is, the more elite it is also- because people by nature are lazy and self-preserving, and sacrifice involves putting someone else first, which is extremely hard… especially when there is no direct personal reward for that sacrifice. You may have ended up with titles, awards, eye-openers and war stories. We didn’t, and the guys in my unit prayed to get 4187-ed out.