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Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime
Ben Blum
A tense and layered true-crime story about an all-American soldier boy turned bank robberAlex Blum was a clean-cut all-American kid with one unshakeable goal in life: to serve his country in the military. He was accepted into the elite Rangers regiment, but on the first day of his leave before deployment to Iraq, Alex got into his car with two fellow soldiers and two strangers, drove to a local bank in Tacoma, and committed armed robbery.The Blum family was devastated and mystified. How could he have done such a thing?Alex’s attorney presented a defence based on the theory that trainee Rangers are indoctrinated on a level akin to the brainwashing in an extreme religious cult, and Alex insisted that he had believed the robbery was just another exercise in the famously daunting Ranger program. But Luke Elliot Sommer, the charismatic soldier behind the robbery, maintained that Alex knew exactly what he was doing, and had, in fact, planned it all with him.Who was lying? What had happened to Alex during those gruelling months of training? How accountable was he?
Copyright (#ulink_eb575eee-4f53-5abf-834d-6b292eb0797b)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
First published in the United States by Doubleday,
an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2017
Copyright В© Ben Blum, 2017
Ben Blum asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780007554584
Ebook Edition В© 2017 ISBN: 9780007554591
Version: 2017-07-24
Dedication (#ulink_db55312c-0fd6-57e1-b46f-cb0deae366a0)
FOR OMA
THE RANGER CREED
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.
RANGERS LEAD THE WAY!
Contents
Cover (#u9393eae7-9acc-55e3-abc8-201f7f499dbb)
Title Page (#u0a133b4c-2f26-5eef-80d1-57309510044a)
Copyright (#u13033405-b998-5333-b58c-f0f96d45b378)
Dedication (#u7431c92a-c5f8-508f-8799-f3c236731df8)
Prologue (#uaef7aeaa-304f-5af2-a36b-4576bc976e63)
BOOK 1 (#uacb83c33-3b9a-5a22-b18d-c7b6076e2d8c)THE GOLEM OF TACOMA (#uacb83c33-3b9a-5a22-b18d-c7b6076e2d8c)
Chapter 1: Sort of a Happy/Sad Deal (#u084b5787-50d5-594a-b7f6-0ae0a38c170e)
Chapter 2: Basic (#u23fb9a45-0936-5126-a2dc-5b2bfeaafead)
Chapter 3: Amurican Bank Robber (#u6aa349ae-d468-5312-9d63-520b860ada54)
Chapter 4: One Fine Day at Battalion (#ub4d26dd2-abff-57c5-bee8-73644bb57899)
Chapter 5: Yes, Specialist Sommer (#u445db5db-7f08-54de-8eb3-cf79f0740488)
Chapter 6: Those Who Are Versed in the Sciences (#uec865585-b237-5e16-b3b4-d43e536f76ef)
Chapter 7: Something You Would See Out of a Movie (#u83b63a32-9e27-5b7c-a192-f12a4f9928d3)
Chapter 8: Federal Vacation (#u3336aba2-d41c-5ea8-81ba-be1428fe554d)
BOOK 2 (#u827daba9-6262-52b9-b9a7-67a0db0b495c)THE PRODIGY OF PEACHLAND (#u827daba9-6262-52b9-b9a7-67a0db0b495c)
Chapter 9: Soldier (#ue92a3aae-a17a-5a86-957e-41efe9e0b7a7)
Chapter 10: Interrogation (#u0d5ae1bf-b727-5436-8d1a-301ef05a0d92)
Chapter 11: Freedom Fighter (#ubece9571-a473-5420-9077-d428b8bed700)
Chapter 12: The Fourth Man (#u50cb64a6-05ce-5a65-a2b6-e1681d5ba53f)
BOOK 3 (#u185a11e3-ff8b-50eb-9add-05ee9ecc2ada)THE GOOD PERSON (#u185a11e3-ff8b-50eb-9add-05ee9ecc2ada)
Chapter 13: The B-Word (#u17b43ba1-d808-5dcc-9f1c-dbf373d15177)
Chapter 14: Just an Inexplicable Event (#u960a0354-3db6-537e-8bf8-f8ed00a7e16f)
Chapter 15: The Complexities (#u74a535e6-ac2e-5447-9246-71c28064fd61)
Chapter 16: The Phabulous Phils (#u0ab6c778-d445-53d0-904e-f38e1ac50e3b)
Chapter 17: Getting Real (#u25e731cd-0f02-5fa3-b389-831e3a8e0978)
Chapter 18: Real Real (#u3d69e0d6-da5a-5f86-b7fa-7710dbc402bd)
BOOK 4 (#u0e77961f-ce39-5128-80bd-aaf6dc28745c)THE DUNGEON MASTER (#u0e77961f-ce39-5128-80bd-aaf6dc28745c)
Chapter 19: When Bad People Do Good Things (#u2166f011-4f9d-54ad-b5fe-cf587abdac39)
Chapter 20: Space Station Sommer (#u09830a89-77ee-5002-a7e2-d0eb6abfc748)
Chapter 21: Total Data (#u015862a3-7566-5012-b3f7-c3b46c0aa605)
Chapter 22: The Sommer Factor (#u56b79980-8c80-5816-8996-b76a0b4d6b5e)
Chapter 23: Force of Personality (#u3761ff26-82e4-54e5-8b53-e7da65c40f00)
Chapter 24: The Lady in the Striped Shirt (#u87842a8e-9740-5165-810a-3f89ac1ce812)
Chapter 25: The P-Word (#u9ecdc04b-8a15-528a-ad82-30287007f9ae)
Chapter 26: Probably Something I’ll Never Understand (#ud9958da4-d770-591a-bb7b-94166b0d16c9)
BOOK 5 (#ua8e517fb-269b-5303-bfb0-20039b066caa)FREEDOM (#ua8e517fb-269b-5303-bfb0-20039b066caa)
Chapter 27: Matrix of Lies (#u3529a98c-82b4-5124-aae5-063cab87fbbe)
Chapter 28: Birth of a Bank Robber (#u7cb69934-44f4-5503-9340-fd2da62af87d)
Chapter 29: The Rest of Us (#u36ace223-1dd2-5765-aeb2-98e6a5ddaad9)
Author’s Note (#u0fe4bf5e-a436-5880-9551-349643827965)
Footnotes (#u961a7e7d-c795-5d74-965e-b43d2e8b029d)
Acknowledgments (#ud4eebb51-31a8-51d6-b638-e7dacb51186a)
About the Publisher (#u65ba0432-1db6-54bf-8f7a-54e97a6e9586)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_d237f31f-b11d-5ff7-a041-0474262ef62e)
Most residents of Tacoma do not think of it as an army town. To visitors it presents as the scrappy kid sister city of Seattle, the coffee and arts mecca forty miles to the north with which it shares an airport. The notorious midcentury “Tacoma Aroma” from the paper mills has long since been filtered into submission. In its place are juice bars, outdoor supply stores, international film festivals. Every civic surface that hasn’t been given over to kayaks and totem poles bristles with the spiky, membranous studio glasswork of homegrown sculptor Dale Chihuly. The only sign of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, whose more than 50,000 personnel make it Pierce County’s largest employer by a factor of five, is the occasional Blackhawk helicopter beetling across the silhouette of Mount Rainier. In 2005, while Iraq spiraled into civil war and JBLM (then still divided into Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base) was dropping paratroopers over Afghanistan from its fleet of big-bellied C-17 Globemaster IIIs, Tacoma’s city council entertained a proposal for a 420-foot “Tower of Peace” to rival Seattle’s iconic Space Needle. No one dared mention the base. “We want this to be really inclusive,” the tower’s leading champion told Tacoma’s News Tribune. “Let a person form in their own mind what the concept of peace is.”
Five miles down I-5 toward the giant blank on the map where JBLM nestles into the strip malls of Lakewood, Parkland, and Spanaway, a different America fades in, one that would be instantly familiar to residents of cities with less complicated relations to their servicepeople. Yoga bows down to CrossFit. Puffy North Face jackets disappear under Carhartt work coats and military surplus camo. All those boardroom-ready Dale Chihuly pieces give way to the very different glasswork at Tacoma Pipe and Tobacco. The Patriots Landing retirement home advertises to military personnel: You served us. Now let us serve you!
Halfway down a block of auto dealerships and faded clapboard churches on South Tacoma Way stands a fieldstone-clad Bank of America that is popular with soldiers for its ease of access from I-5. The facade is glassy and generic. A bed of purplish cinders houses a row of shrubs as boxy as green Legos. In back is a parking lot accessible from the alley, feeding to a bright red drive-through ATM. It is just a dreary little branch like any other, a squat corporate cipher in an unremarkable neighborhood close to base.
At 5:16 on the afternoon of August 7, 2006, three men ran out of its front door screaming that it was being robbed.
Bank robberies come in two essential varieties. In a “nontakeover” robbery, the bandit—still the term used for bank robbers by the FBI, which publicizes monikers like “Snub-Nosed Bandit” and “Surfer Bandit” for as-yet-unidentified repeat offenders—slips a note to a teller explaining in brief that he intends the teller harm and desires cash. Nearby customers may not find out a robbery has occurred until after it is over.
The bank on South Tacoma Way, crowded with the after-work rush, was an example of the much rarer and more profound disruption of a “takeover” robbery. In a matter of seconds the bank left its old function behind. Building security features designed to protect the piles of $100, $50, and $20 bills from theft—thick concrete walls, bulletproof Plexiglas, clear lines of sight throughout the lobby—were now tactical assets for entrenchment and defense. Tellers and managers who had previously spent their days in service to the smooth operation of the bank now found themselves conscripted into its defilement.
Meanwhile, outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, traffic continued to trickle by in the sleepy August sun. Two customers in turn pulled up to the drive-through ATM, inserted their debit cards, engaged in small transactions, and drove away. Those who had fled the bank had already run down the block and crossed South 60th Street to reconvene in the front office of the Mallon Ford dealership, where employees were calling the police.
Two minutes later, long before the police arrived, a group of men in jeans, dark sweatshirts, and ski masks emerged from the alley that led to the bank’s rear parking lot and started jogging down South 60th Street, in full view of the group at Mallon Ford. They carried a mix of AK-47 assault rifles with wood stocks and banana clips, pistols, and duffel bags. One witness, who had happened past the bank as the robbery began and pulled her car over so her husband could run into the dealership and report what he’d seen, instinctively started driving after the gunmen, until two of them turned back and made eye contact with her through the holes in their masks. That was when she remembered that her kids were in the backseat.
Though it was not yet in evidence, there was, in fact, a getaway vehicle. A Mallon Ford employee by the name of Don Keegan had been unloading his company truck in the alley two minutes earlier when he noticed a silver Audi A4 turning into the continuation of the alley on the next block. Four men jumped out, pulled on ski masks, and ran toward the bank. The Audi backed out onto South 60th Street and stopped next to a sealed utility shed whose front door bore a warning about tampering with military communications systems. The license plate was unconcealed. In the driver’s seat was a nineteen-year-old kid in a T-shirt and sunglasses. Keegan got into his truck and drove around the block. On a residential street behind the bank, he happened to pass the same Audi going the other way. The four gunmen suddenly appeared from around the corner, spotted the Audi, and flagged it down as they jogged toward it. The kid in sunglasses stopped to pick them up.
That was my cousin Alex Blum.
It is hard to convey the depth of the shock my family experienced on learning that Alex had robbed a bank. It hit us like news of alien life. Alex was the most squeaky-clean, patriotic, rule-respecting kid we knew. Four months earlier he had achieved the goal he had been striving toward since he was a boy, becoming an elite Special Operations commando in the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment’s Second Battalion at Fort Lewis. In two weeks he was scheduled to deploy overseas to Baghdad, the fulfillment of his life’s greatest ambition. Money had never interested him much. His father, my uncle Norm, a successful commercial real estate broker, had offered him $20,000 if he would delay enlisting in the army for a year. Alex politely declined.
The question that obsessed me for almost a decade after his arrest, the question that obsessed my family too, that obsessed even Alex himself, was simple: Why? At the time of the robbery I lived in Seattle, a few short miles from Fort Lewis. I had murky, conflicted feelings about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was hard to tell what I felt about Alex’s fate other than a profound and untraceable wrongness. But the deeper I have dug into it over the years, the more it has cracked open everything I used to believe, like a fissure that turns out to go all the way to the heart of the world.
BOOK 1 (#ulink_e200b41b-2fbd-5dcb-8cca-0faf93780dfd)
THE GOLEM OF TACOMA (#ulink_e200b41b-2fbd-5dcb-8cca-0faf93780dfd)
Just as thieves are not bad soldiers, soldiers turn out to be enterprising robbers, so nearly are these two ways of life related.
—THOMAS MORE, UTOPIA, 1516
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_44de7950-b40e-5632-b4ba-622448ad6c52)
SORT OF A HAPPY/SAD DEAL (#ulink_44de7950-b40e-5632-b4ba-622448ad6c52)
From the time we were kids, Alex always had a simple dream: to defend his country from the forces of evil and oppression. None of us took this very seriously but him. After school in the suburbs of Denver, he’d run off in his camouflage T-shirt and cargo pants to play Vietnam commando on the canal that wove through the neighborhood, laying booby traps with dry seedpods and hiding behind stands of cattails to watch joggers jump and yip as the ground exploded beneath their feet. He rented every army movie the local Blockbuster carried, played every video game. There weren’t many women in the ads back then, just grim-lipped men in high-tech gear dropping down ropes from helicopters to the sound of that unforgettable jingle: Be … all that you can be … in the arrmeey.
Back then Alex and I barely spoke. Our dream worlds did not overlap. By age seven I had become known in the family as a math prodigy. In the fields where Alex saw darting commie guerrillas, I saw fractally branching ferns, Fibonacci-spiraling pinecones, self-intersecting manifolds of swallows. I’d tell supermarket cashiers how lasers worked, give lifeguards introductions to the Navier-Stokes equations for viscous flow. I was, I realize now, completely insufferable. Human relations were not my specialty: too complicated. By thirteen I was taking calculus and physics at the University of Colorado. The only real common ground I had with Alex lay between the tattered street hockey nets in his driveway, where on summer afternoons he would occasionally deign to scurry around my knees and destroy me, smiling up in triumph each time he scored. He was five years younger but already a budding star.
Our fathers had both made their efforts at manly education. Alex’s father, Norm, was the assistant coach of Alex’s hockey team with the elite Littleton Hockey Association and played adult league with Denver’s finest, including a smattering of pros from the NHL during the 1992 players’ strike. Al, my own father, was the quarterback coach of George Washington High School’s football team downtown. Both raced bicycles competitively in the brutal Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, played pickup street hockey in a warehouse rink Norm had convinced a business associate to set up, skied, golfed, climbed, and pumped inordinate quantities of iron. Summers they took us camping in the foothills, hiking through the canyons, fishing in the tick-infested ranchland of our Texas relatives. They stuck earplugs in our ears, jammed twelve-gauge shotguns against our shoulders, pointed us toward the discarded appliances at the other end of the ravine, and needled us until we squeezed the trigger.
It all took better with Alex than with me. Even when he was still in school, reports of his shining all-Americanness began filtering in: shoveling snow for an elderly neighbor, coaching little kids at hockey camp, defending classmates against bullies at Littleton High School. Though he was flying to tournaments all over the country with his nationally ranked club hockey team, he became more and more serious about the army thing. It seemed to me as if he had bought himself ready-made off a toy store display rack, a G.I. Joe action figure self, and now that he had the basic model, a world of attachments and product tie-ins were available to him. His would be a life of heroic accomplishment—an American life, a Blum life, a triumph.
Alex signed his 11X/Airborne Ranger contract in the final semester of his senior year at Littleton, reserving the chance to try out for the army’s elite Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment. Many infantry recruits at the time signed contracts exactly like this one, lured by the chance to become an elite commando, but only a small fraction made it through the series of painful trials on the path to Special Operations. The rest were consigned to the regular infantry. Alex knew all this. He didn’t care. He shipped off to basic before dawn on the fifth of July. Five months later he graduated from basic and became an infantryman. Three weeks after that he earned his airborne wings. One final stage remained: what today is called the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program. It was a little different in 2006 than it is today. For one thing, it was shorter: a concentrated four weeks instead of eight. For another, it was still called the Ranger Indoctrination Program—RIP.
Private First Class Alex Blum was about to become a very strong argument for changing the name.
There were fifty-five letters in the packet Norm put together a year after the robbery for Judge Burgess of the District Court of Western Washington, the man we had been told would decide whether and for how long Alex would be imprisoned in a federal penitentiary. They were from hockey coaches, neighbors, former employers, the Littleton High School guidance counselor for whom Alex had served as a student assistant his senior year, the father of his ex-girlfriend Anna. They ranged in size from a single paragraph hand-scrawled on a dentist’s monogrammed memo pad to a four-page bullet-pointed epic. They had an awkward time deciding between past and present tense.
Alex has a great sense of humor and a great sense of honor. He treated my daughter and the rest of my family with the greatest respect.
The words that best describe the Alex I knew and loved were: confident, fun loving, driven, focused, independent, caring and dependable. I cannot say enough about how well liked Alex was here at LHS.
I can only hope my two sons, ages 5 and 9, have the passion like Alex Blum has for the Rangers and for protecting his country. That is one thing you can never teach and it made me proud to know him and made me proud to be an American.
My great-uncle Bernie in Texas, whom Alex used to visit every summer with his family, went on for a whole page of heartbroken reminiscence.
I appreciate your attention to my rambling. In my heart and mind I will never believe Alex was involved in planning this robbery. It just doesn’t fit. Sincerely, Bernard Beck
My brother and sisters were there. My aunts, uncles, and grandmother were there. My mother was there, and so was her new partner, Ozi, in one of his first efforts to assert himself as a part of the extended Blum family. My father was there, squirming in formal prose like a jock in a suit, doubling every description.
Alex was almost painfully straight in high school. He was one of those kids that everyone liked and looked up to, because he never used his charisma in cruel or cynical ways, and he was a steadfast defender of the weaker, less popular kids. Now he is the one who is completely crushed and confused: his lifetime dream of serving his country has ended in trauma and disgrace, and he feels that his life is over.
There was a letter from me in there too. I was at that time studying artificial intelligence in the computer science PhD program at UC Berkeley, the culmination of a lifelong career path that would soon come to almost as abrupt a halt as Alex’s. The insecure self-importance of those final years makes my own letter painful to read.
I’m five years older, so Alex and I never had much chance to talk one-on-one when we were growing up. In truth, I hardly knew him as more than a simple, friendly guy until the last few months, in which we’ve exchanged a number of letters. I have been surprised and gratified to find that he has grown into a mature, self-reflective young man, although of course I am saddened that it has taken circumstances as awful as these for me to discover this. He is just as baffled as the rest of us are to find himself in his present situation. The letters he has written me have been, primarily, focused on finding some explanation for how he could have gotten caught up in something like this, something so alien to his ideals and to the way that he thought he knew himself. He is earnestly and almost desperately seeking some kind of answer.
When we were kids, Alex’s house was so perfectly suburban it almost unnerved me: ranch style, white-shuttered, filled with clubby wood cabinetry and Bev Doolittle landscapes in which patterns of sandstone boulders resolved, if you stared hard enough, into the noble profiles of Native American chiefs. My own family’s house was bizarre, a novelty constructed on the model of a Scottish castle in the yard of an eccentric Texas real-estate tycoon who had intended it for use as a guesthouse, complete with turret and crenellated rampart walls. My brother and sisters and I lived there beholden to nothing but our own imaginations, as if in one of the children’s fantasy novels our mom read aloud as librarian at our elementary school. Television was forbidden. Going to Uncle Norm’s on the Fourth of July for the traditional Blum family barbecue was like going back to America. There were burnished hunks of chicken so greasy they turned our paper plates transparent, glasses of iced lemonade so sweet they made us squint, fireworks so loud they blasted craters in our eardrums. In the living room was one of those massive, shrieking kaleidoscopes of culture that we affected to disdain but actually coveted desperately: TV, TV, TV. Aunt Laura, her straw-haired, clothing-catalog looks undercut by the Jersey burr in her voice, always baked a cake in the likeness of the American flag. She used raspberries for the stripes, blueberries for the stars. Alex and I would hug with brisk indifference and then make our separate beelines to the food, just another pairing in the awkwardly prolonged combinatorial explosion of cousins that preceded every Blum family get-together.
When it came my turn to deliver my annual life update to Uncle Norm, I’d barely manage to get through the background material he would have to learn first in order to understand my latest mathematical factoid before he would clap me on the back, call me a genius for the umpteenth time, and edge toward the yard for Frisbee. Hey, I wanted to call out, this stuff’s actually relevant to your life! The arc of a throw is a parabola! Gyroscopic precession keeps the Frisbee level! Instead I sat on the patio with the aunts and watched my father and my uncles hurl, pound, swing, bat, and kick Norm’s vast array of athletic gear around the yard like hairy-chested mammals in some kind of toy-rich zoo enclosure. I thought I could perceive slight gradations of personality in the shapes of their bald heads. My dad’s was flattest on top, like a musk ox or a walrus, some animal that settled doubt with impact. Uncle Fred’s was roundest, a meditative egg that harmonized with his warm, smooth baritone, beard, and gentle belly. Uncle Norm’s, the smallest and pointiest of the three, was a guided missile that zipped around threatening at any moment to target you for something “fun.” All three had segued from the total athletic dominance of their childhood and college years into gracefully attenuated adult versions of same. A third uncle generally watched from the patio: Kurt, whose wavy brown mullet and mustache broke my system entirely. His jokes were menacing in a way hard to understand as a child, as if the punchline might turn out to be him smacking you in the face and laughing uproariously in his gritty, smoked-out bellow. The Blum brothers bought, sold, managed, and brokered real estate, occasionally collaborating on what were only ever described to us as “deals.” I preferred conversing with my mother, a more appreciative audience for my spiritualized glosses on chaos theory.
My cousins weren’t all like my uncles. Alex’s older brother, Max, was shaping up to be an intellectual loner with a sarcastic sense of humor, and Sam and Carly, their younger brother and sister, followed at Alex’s heels like shy puppies, heads bent close together, talking in hushed and dreamy tones. But Alex himself was a Blum straight from his father’s mold: cheerful, confident, alarmingly muscular for a preteen, already fluent in that jocular male banter I had always felt so alienated by, quick to snag a disk out of the air and flip it back with a grin on his way inside to watch TV.
When Norm and I first met to talk about the robbery, I had already been interviewing Alex about his story for six months. I was twenty-eight years old and inching toward a new direction in life, teaching writing workshops at an elementary school in New York City as part of a fellowship at an MFA program and feeling more and more like a grown-up journalist, but being taken out to lunch by my uncle was an exercise in instant regression.
“Hey, handsome!” he said, rubbing his fist into my hair and corralling me toward his black Saab. I was in Denver for two weeks, staying with my mother. Climbing into the passenger seat felt like boarding a roller coaster. Norm accelerated with a smooth, important hum up the on-ramp to Interstate 25, a stretch of highway as ubiquitous in trips through Denver as paintings of stallions rearing up against the sunset are in the steakhouses, stadiums, and sports bars where you inevitably end up. After learning that I had been commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan on a bike, he grilled me about my helmet usage, then segued into a long, funny tale of sweating each morning through his only two suits, heavy wool Salvation Army castoffs from my dad, while biking to his own first job in Denver in the ’70s. Both of us seemed relieved at having found this common ground.
“These things,” Norm said, chuckling, “were like horse blankets.”
He brought the car and the anecdote to perfect simultaneous conclusions in a restaurant parking lot, ushered me through the front door with a cheerful wave at the hostess, and obliged our teenaged waitress to laugh three times with embarrassed pleasure at all his hammy compliments to her fine memory and good taste as she told us about the specials. It occurred to me that Norm was just the way Alex would be if you added thirty years and removed the distorting influences of a bank robbery and a prison term: relentlessly fun, impenetrably cheerful, quick to dispatch all troubling ambiguities with chummy cliché. He ordered the Cobb salad. I went with the spinach calzone. We watched the waitress walk away in silence. Norm’s aura of energetic fun collapsed with startling suddenness.
“Okay,” he said. “This gets very complex with the dynamics of the family.”
By then the differences I saw between my uncles were no longer just geometric. Stories had accumulated on those bald domes, constellations among the pockmarks and divots. Norm, I knew now, had been the chubby, guileless runt of the family, an unplanned addition born two years after their only sister, Judy. Around the house they had called him “Stump.” His older brothers once managed to convince him that ears could be trained to wiggle if you practiced enough. Norm worked for years on his jaw pops and clenched eyebrows before shifting his energies to hundreds of sit-ups, push-ups, wind sprints, and squats every morning before the school bus came, striving his whole childhood to match Dad’s accomplishments as a high school football star and eventually exceeding them in both hockey and baseball long after anyone was paying attention. By the time Norm was checking wingmen against the boards for the State University of New York, his brothers were hitchhiking west to the dirtbag mountain towns of Colorado for a lost decade of carpentering, ski bumming, low-level pot smoking, and high-level beardedness. When Norm finally graduated, in 1979, and biked two thousand miles in three weeks to join them, they had already descended en masse to Denver, shaved, gotten into real estate, and surprised themselves by making more money than they knew what to do with. Dad picked up his littlest brother outside town in the yellow Toyota that he and Mom called the “rust bucket” and threw his bike into the backseat. He had a room waiting to rent to Norm in a drafty house he’d just bought on Gilpin Street, some friendly local millionaires to introduce him to, and one of those Salvation Army suits for him to wear to an interview at Coldwell Banker, the firm where he himself had gotten started before striking out on his own.
Norm worked there for eighteen years, through a leveraged buyout and two name changes. Dad never quite let go of his rebellious mountain hippie streak, wearing bright orange skater shoes to business meetings and referring in private to the imaginationless investors of his daily working life as “glompers,” but Norm went full native, surrounding his sunny grin with slacks, oxford shirts, and tasseled loafers as naturally as with a hockey jersey. The deep, unsatisfiable yearnings that trouble his brothers have never afflicted Norm. The world as he finds it has always been enough. Those Fourth of July barbecues I remember so well were rare spiritual oases for them all, returns to a boyhood order that was possible only with Stump in the middle.
“Alex was a lot like I was when I was a kid,” Norm began as we waited for our food. “He was a straight arrow. Sort of a protector. He was a class clown, just like me. Very into routine. Very particular about the location of his toothbrush and towel. Just like how pathetic I am—routine keeps me sane. Sports were his guiding light.”
Norm’s first son, Max, was born five years after Norm’s arrival in Denver, when he and Laura still lived in a small house in Aurora that faced an unfinished commercial park and Buckley Air Force Base’s looming polyhedral radomes, known around Denver as the “golf balls.” When Laura became pregnant again in 1986, Norm knew they needed something bigger and better, with a broad, flat yard out back where his boys could learn half of what they needed to know about life and a nearby ice rink where they could learn the rest. Though he had just undergone knee surgery to repair a torn ACL from hockey, Norm brokered the biggest deal of his life to scrape together the down payment for the ranch-style fixer-upper that would one day unsettle me with its perfection and began hobbling over every weekend to paint, plaster, and shingle. A month before the deal closed, Laura went into labor with their second son.
Alex was born on April 11, 1987. By the time he was four years old, Norm had strapped skates to his feet and swung him out over the ice at the South Suburban Family Sports Ice Arena, a mile from their new house. By the time he was seven, he was charging around under his own power with a stick jammed in his gloves and a helmet the size of his torso for the Littleton Hockey Association’s youngest competitive team, the under-eight “Mites,” coached by Norm and a family friend named Murray Platt. He loved skating, loved scoring, loved bonking into teammates so both flopped to the ice, though he was smaller than most since his birthday was right after the cutoff.
Norm and his siblings were the product of an unlikely pairing. Al Senior, their father, was the son of Jewish glove makers in New York. Beverly Beck, their mother, was a glamorous Texan belle who met Al on a fashion-buying trip. Norm’s best memories of his own childhood were from the Beck family ranch an hour south of San Angelo, where Beverly’s brother Bernie raised cantankerous emus and skittish African deer. Starting when Alex was in kindergarten, Norm arranged to take his own boys there each summer to dodge scorpions and cottonmouth snakes and shoot crickets with a BB gun for use as bait to catch bass in the Concho River.
By fourth grade Alex had grown into a rambunctious, sweet-natured boy with blue eyes and straw-colored hair, popular with schoolmates at Greenwood Village Elementary School, loved for his jokes and generous passing by teammates on the Littleton Hockey Association’s “Squirts” team, and worshipped by Sam and Carly. Everyone in the family remarked on what a great big brother he was. He got more and more serious about hockey. One day when Norm was doing his daily sit-ups, push-ups, and dumbbell curls in the basement den after work, Alex left his brothers and sister watching TV and wandered over to see how many push-ups he could do, then how much weight he could lift. Soon he was jumping in regularly, just as Norm had once helped his own father push aside the coffee table for army-style calisthenics every weekday at 6:30 a.m.
As Alex’s coach on the Squirts team, Norm was putting him through further punishments each day at practice: sprints up and down the ice that left his teammates gasping in his wake. One afternoon at lunch with a friend of Norm’s who had just watched Alex play, the man’s young son asked Alex if he was going to be on the Colorado Avalanche when he grew up. Alex was just beginning to allow that there were a few other NHL teams he might be willing to settle for when Norm flashed him a sardonic grin that stopped him cold.
Norm likes to describe himself as a “realist.” In his coaching days he was unafraid to inform parents that their darling progeny had no future in competitive ice hockey. He intended it as a kindness. When some poor couple from Colorado Springs drove their no-talent hack an hour each day to practice with a Littleton team, Norm always took it on himself to inform them that if scouts were going to be interested, they would have called by now. “Because their kid can skate backward and they can’t skate at all, they’re thinking he’s got something special,” he explained to me once. “But just ’cause their kid is ten or twelve and can skate backward doesn’t mean he has a ticket to play in the NHL.”
Norm was careful to extend his hockey realism to his own children. When Max got to be ten years old, Norm suggested that he hang up the skates. Alex was different. He really loved the game, even if his talent was not world-class.
In the car ride home from lunch, Norm told Alex how it was. The NHL was Valhalla, Mount Olympus, the Forbidden City, inaccessible to mere mortals. Norm himself had been rudely disabused of his NHL ambitions when he got to college and saw what real hockey talent looked like. The only reason he could skate with former NHL players now was that with all the bike racing he did in the Rocky Mountains, his conditioning as a fortysomething commercial real estate broker was unmatched even by young pros. Maybe one guy out of everyone Alex had ever played against had a whisker of a chance. Was Alex the biggest, strongest kid on the ice? Could he skate backward faster than anyone he knew could skate forward? Did he have “dangles,” the talented stick handler’s uncanny ability to flip the puck back and forth through wormholes in space that no defender could follow? Alex shrugged, near tears, and guessed he didn’t. What he did have, Norm hastened to point out, with no little pride, was a phenomenal work ethic. As long as he was willing to keep twice as fit and twice as strong as any other kid and battle twice as hard for every puck, he would keep earning a place for himself as a “grinder”: a player who makes up for his mediocrity with toughness, team spirit, and willingness to do the less glamorous jobs on the ice.
As is common with Norm’s take on the world, his view of Alex’s hockey talent was gradually enshrined as common wisdom by everyone in his social universe, including Alex’s future coaches. To a man, in their letters to Judge Burgess, they would speak of their great personal love and admiration for Alex while taking pains to point out that he had no great aptitude for the game.
While not a “star” player … most dedicated player on the team … caring little for personal recognition …
Not the most skilled player on the team … constant pursuit of his personal growth and team accomplishments …
Talent he did not possess … had to get by on hard work …
You would never guess from their letters that by the end of high school Alex had earned a position on perhaps the best youth squad in Colorado, after consistently racking up team-high assists, and stood a good chance of a college hockey scholarship after a year or two in the junior leagues. Norm intended his “realism” lovingly, as a ward against the pain of disillusionment that he himself had felt, but ten-year-old Alex did not have that kind of perspective on his father and coach. He had always loved hearing Great-Uncle Bernie’s stories of training soldiers after the Korean War, but I think Norm’s dismissal of any chance that he would ever play professional hockey marked the moment when World War II subsumed the NHL as the arena of Alex’s dreams.
At first much of his interest centered on our grandfather, Al Senior, who fought as a sergeant in command of a pair of half-track 50mm machine guns in the army’s Fourth Infantry Division, landing in Normandy shortly after D-Day and punching Junkers, V-1s or doodlebugs, and Messerschmitts out of the sky above the hedgerows as the invasion pressed into the continent. The few stories Norm had passed on to Alex electrified him. While his fifth-grade classmates worked their way through Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, he began devouring Stephen Ambrose’s trilogy of military histories D-Day, Citizen Soldiers, and, his favorite, Band of Brothers, about the 101st Airborne Division’s elite Easy Company of paratroopers, who dropped behind German lines and assaulted heavily fortified machine-gun nests in advance of the landings at Omaha and Utah Beaches.
Ambrose writes from the perspective of the enlisted men in the field rather than the generals who tell them where to fight. This makes for a lot of suddenly dead protagonists, but the tale never loses its triumphant momentum, because the real hero is always the company itself, of which individual soldiers are like moods that come and go, intervals of complaint or jokes or kindness. Alex soon had his favorites—Dick Winters, the lieutenant who led a stunningly successful capture of a German “Eighty-Eight” gun emplacement, and Bob Guernsey, who applied for early release from the London hospital where he was recovering from a shrapnel wound so he could rejoin the company for its assault on the Ardennes—but what he loved most was the collective spirit that enveloped them. Page by page, he highlighted passages about the skill, perseverance, and heroic brotherhood of American men at war.
Alex began learning the American infantryman’s kit in intimate detail. After school he spent hours in the tunnel of interlinked hollows behind the backyard juniper hedge, reenacting battles with a sawed-off hockey stick as a flintlock musket, Browning automatic rifle, or M1 Garand, ending with elaborate death scenes amid the pinecones and dry needles that left him dirty enough to horrify his mom. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War I all got their due, but D-Day was his specialty. One summer he built a replica of Omaha Beach in the sandbox, complete with Belgian hedgehogs made of toothpicks and German bunkers on the bluff, and blew up toy soldiers with firecrackers as they slogged in from the water.
For his daily workouts, Alex began interspersing the sit-ups and push-ups he had picked up from his dad with a Navy SEAL regimen he learned on vacation in Coronado, California. All this strength training gave his hockey game a boost. Norm and Murray had finally stepped aside as coaches for the Littleton Hawks, where Alex had taken his father’s advice to heart and settled into a strategic place for himself as a passer and penalty killer who specialized in corner battles. Some of the teammates with whom he had been playing since he was seven years old were now among the best in the state. What Alex liked better than anything was watching a close buddy of his raise his stick in victory after scoring off a puck that Alex had dug out by grinding away against the boards. He made the most sense to himself as a member of the team.
It was Saving Private Ryan, the $70 million Steven Spielberg epic released the summer of Alex’s eleventh year, that turned him on to the Army Rangers. Tom Hanks and his squad of Rangers were a unit every bit as cohesive, deadly, and ready to sacrifice for each other as the Littleton Hawks. As terrifying as it was the first time he watched it, Alex came to love the opening sequence of the Normandy landing on D-Day, whose many graphic deaths took on a mythic grandeur in repetition. It was the most realistic depiction of battle he had ever seen, and the message behind it was equally compelling: even in the vast mayhem of war, every single soldier counted, every sacrifice was recorded, every hero was remembered. The army was the biggest team of all. He even recognized the real-life soldier who had inspired Private Ryan: Fritz Niland, a private featured in Band of Brothers whose three birth brothers were killed the week of D-Day.
Alex was old enough now to roam away from the house on his own. On weekends he would meet his best friend, Andrew, at the place where Franklin Street crossed the High Line Canal and scramble down the embankment to the canal bed, where in the cool, echoing darkness under the concrete overpass they pulled on their camouflage and strapped guns over their backs—Alex still had just a BB gun, but Andrew had a real .22-caliber air rifle. For three hours they would make their way along the winding banks of the canal like Green Beret commandos in Vietnam, slipping without a sound between the cottonwoods whose ribbed gray trunks zigzagged overhead, sometimes tromping for miles through the shallow water of the canal.
D-Day was Alex’s, but Vietnam belonged to Andrew, for whom Alex served as the loyal right-hand man who could be counted on for comic relief, a blend of court jester and confidant. In middle school, their duo expanded into a regular group of six. All played competitive sports. All wore mostly cargo shorts, Nike and Adidas T-shirts, and white baseball caps. They got into paintball. On weekend afternoons they would bike together down to Horseman’s Park, an overgrown patch of weeds and pines along the High Line Canal where oddly shaped, never-used horse jumps rose from the hollows, and stage daylong battles, dividing up into teams of three and fighting for control of the ridge along the park’s eastern border. Alex, with his goofball charisma and encyclopedic knowledge of military history, was the group’s tactician, motivator, and comedian. It was paradise for a while, until the old woman who lived in the house atop the ridge saw them out there flanking each other along the canal bed and called the police to inform them that gang warfare had finally arrived in Greenwood Village. A few minutes later, when a bullhorn commanded that they drop their weapons, the boys climbed out of deep cover with their hands raised. The patrolmen rolled their eyes when they found out what the boys were actually packing, but that was the end of paintball in Horseman’s Park.
Death in paintball was just a stinging annoyance that meant you were out until the next round. But at night as Alex lay in bed he played a mix CD he had made for himself of climactic orchestral numbers from his favorite war movies and imagined all the ways it might happen: his convoy flanked and ambushed, or a sniper leading him from a high window, or a Messerschmitt churning up the open field too quickly for him to evade. A circle of shadowy platoon-mates gathered around his body as the music swelled, as in the death scene in the Xbox game Medal of Honor. He liked imagining that his death had saved them all and guaranteed the success of the mission. It helped him fall asleep.
Alex, Andrew, and the rest of their crew started ninth grade together at Littleton High School in late August 2001, dispersing to new coaches for their various sports. Three weeks later, on a sunny Tuesday morning, classes were interrupted by a scratchy announcement on the intercom.
To high school kids in suburban Colorado, the terrorist attacks of September 11 looked like nothing so much as a big-budget disaster movie: slow-motion explosions, mushrooming balls of smoke, insect-sized extras nose-diving from the windows. The mood in the hallways changed instantly. For two weeks the Denver sky was full of nothing but clouds and mountains. Then the planes returned, little metal splinters that dragged a new menace. Weekend paintball sessions suddenly started feeling a lot less like a game. When Alex’s guidance counselor, Angela Zerr, informed him at the beginning of fall semester sophomore year that he needed to attend an after-school career counseling workshop, Alex replied politely that this would not be necessary because he already knew what he was going to do with his life.
Zerr estimates that over the remainder of Alex’s high school career she tried to talk him out of enlisting between thirty and forty times. She had all the Blum children as they passed through LHS, but Alex was a special favorite of hers. Teachers had been telling her for years that they couldn’t believe the clownish, popular Alex was related to Max, who was famous around school for his brilliance, prickliness, and straight A’s, but in Zerr’s opinion Alex was as intelligent as his older brother—he just had different priorities. She begged him to get a college degree first so he could at least enter the army as an officer. Alex told her he wasn’t interested. He wanted to be a Ranger.
I had always felt so different from my family that it was strange at that first lunch with Norm to hear him talk about me and my siblings and cousins as a collective.
“You know, you guys were all at really formative ages when 9/11 happened,” he said, picking at scraps of lettuce with his fork. “It left an impression on people in different ways. For Alex, I think that’s when the wheels really started to turn. In my mind, this was a phase. I kept saying, �Alex, that’s great, but you should go to college first, do this after.’ I was trying to coach instead of preach, ’cause obviously preaching doesn’t work too good.”
What finally made it click for Norm was that Alex began studying the infantry handbook in the library between classes and doing ten-mile runs each morning wearing boots and a backpack full of free weights to get in shape for basic training. Once he even cut a mole off his back, figuring he’d have to go through worse for SERE torture-resistance training, and bled so badly he ruined a T-shirt.
“It was his senior year when I finally realized that this was real—he didn’t care about school because he was going to the army. This academic stuff was all meaningless, this stuff wasn’t important. �I want to do something important with my life,’ that’s what he kept saying.”
Norm did not exactly share Alex’s sense of military duty, but it was hard not to admire it, rooted as it was in the father whom Norm had equally resented and revered.
Albert Likes Blum Senior was not a likely war hero. He grew up in Gloversville, New York, his name a joint branding effort of the Norman Blum & Co. glove manufacturer and the Likes, Berwanger & Co. department store of Baltimore, Maryland (their famous catchphrase: “Everybody Likes Berwanger!”), and volunteered for the infantry in World War II in part to escape his Jewish upbringing. When he came back he had the bloody papers of a teenage Nazi whose head he’d seen caved in by a grenade in the Harz Mountains, a jagged bolt of shrapnel in his thigh, and a fist of untellable stories in his head. Beverly Beck, whose Methodist family had emigrated from Germany in the 1870s, was the most gentile woman he could find.
Norm, Dad, and their siblings never thought of themselves as Jews. The family celebrated Christmas for the sake of form but worshipped no god but success. Beverly managed to talk Al Senior out of the names he had decided on for his boys during the war—King, Prince, and Duke—but Al still raised them to be winners in the striving American mold, shorn of their tribal history of repression and neurosis. Second place was as good as losing. Whining was as good as quitting. Disputes were settled in the basement boxing ring, battles that repeated themselves on ice rinks, baseball diamonds, football fields, and lakes around upstate New York.
For Dad and Fred, the Vietnam War and the Summer of Love cast a more sinister light on Al Senior’s military exploits. Norm was born in 1957, just past the draft registration window, too late to be affected in the same way. His older brothers may have found war uninteresting or worse, but Norm had a boyish curiosity. The fact that Al Senior had killed Nazis and possessed the trophies to prove it had always lent authority to his demands that the boys strap on gloves to beat each other senseless in the basement boxing ring, but he never talked about his service at home. On the only occasion he ever took his youngest son out to dinner alone, Norm seized the opportunity to press him about the war.
“I was really interested,” Norm explained to me. “He was in Battle of the Bulge, he was in D-Day plus one or two, a lot of the nastiest shit. He got demoted for punching a superior, because he wasn’t really good with rules. He said, �When you’re in a battle, most of these pussies wouldn’t even fire their rifle. Your fighting force of a hundred, it might be a force of twenty or forty, because most guys shied from the fight.’ I guess that’s why Dad was exposed on a fifty-caliber machine gun, because he wasn’t afraid to shoot and get shot at. There were three stories he told me.”
Norm launched them across the table the way his father had, as if daring me to blink.
“He and his best buddy went out for a smoke. It was a pretty active area. They were leaning against this tree, and then all you heard was a machine gun. His buddy got cut in half.” Norm traced a diagonal line across his torso.
“Another one: It was early in the morning, before sunrise. Germans, they carry these lanterns, so if you see a lantern outside the perimeter when you’re on watch, you don’t ask any questions. You shoot. So he saw one, shot, soldier goes down, next morning it turns out it was an African American guy in his own platoon that he had killed.
“Let’s see, the next one was … Oh. You see it in these old World War Two films, where they’ve got this farmhouse surrounded and there’s a bunch of Germans inside. They’re shooting, they’re lobbing mortars, they’re throwing grenades, and the place bursts into flames and these Germans come running out on fire. They’re saying, �Mama, mama.’ You just pick one out and you shoot ’em. He went up afterward and checked their papers, and they were twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-year-old Hitler Youths.
“Oh, right,” Norm said, “there was one more. He and another guy, they killed all these Germans. There’s this pit, they’re just going to throw all these bodies in. He said it was a hundred degrees out, it was freaking stinking to high heaven. He said, �I got the arms, my buddy’s got the legs. One, two …’” Norm mimed swinging. “Both the guy’s arms pulled off. Dad was sitting there holding two arms.” He dropped the tough-guy act and gave me a look. “How do you relate to that shit?”
To Norm, these stories were yet another wall between himself and a father who had taken the whole family to all of Al Junior’s high school football games but had never attended more than one or two of Norm’s baseball and hockey games. When he passed sanitized versions on to his children years later, it seemed only fitting to burnish them a little, as tribute to the grandfather they would never have a chance to meet. He didn’t expect them to become objects of lasting fascination. But Alex thought they were awesome. He told them to any friend who would listen.
A recruiter first called Alex in December, having gotten his number from Andrew. Over the ensuing months they met about half a dozen times at the recruitment center in the strip mall across from the Family Sports Ice Arena, where Alex had first started skating so many years before. Soon he told his dad the recruiter wanted to meet him too.
“So we went to the recruiter,” Norm recalled, “Sergeant So-and-so, a big studly handsome guy who was Alex’s new hero. I tried to be open-minded. I said, �Okay, Alex’s goal is to be a Ranger.’ The guy says, �Yeah, everyone’s goal is to be a Ranger.’ I said, �Can you tell us some statistics about what the chances are?’ He says, �No, that’s classified.’ I said, �Well, would you say it’s very unlikely?’ He says, �Yeah, it’s very unlikely.’ I’m sitting there thinking, �Certainly Alex has asked these questions. Certainly Alex knows that this hill is much taller than most people are going to be able to climb.’”
Norm liked Sergeant So-and-so. He has always respected obvious physical fitness, and he appreciated the sergeant’s hard-assed realism. It did not then occur to him that this was exactly the kind of reverse psychology that kids with hero complexes respond to best.
“I thanked the guy. He was candid. He didn’t pull any punches. I appreciated that. We went outside. Alex says, �Dad, are you going to be disappointed if I join the army?’”
At this, something happened in Norm’s face that I had never seen before. He was looking to me for recognition of how crushing it was to hear a son ask if you were disappointed in him, an experience I had not yet come close to having myself.
“I said, �Of course not. My concern is just to help you see outside your tunnel vision that this is your calling in life. Maybe you should consider going to school for two years and then joining the army.’ He said, �Dad, I really want to do this.’ I said, �Okay, buddy, look’—we’re driving home now—I said, �I’ll give you twenty thousand bucks and you can travel in Europe for a year or two. Get some worldly experience. Come back and see how you feel about joining the army.’ He said, �I have no interest in that.’”
Over the next few weeks the full interrogative weight of Norm’s social world came to bear on Alex. The results are apparent in their letters to Judge Burgess.
Jeff “Bud” Ahbe, Alex’s boss at the hockey camp, where he coached kids between the ages of six to ten: I questioned Alex personally … he said this was what he wanted to do. Richard Bell, family friend: During conversations prior to Alex’s enlistment it became clear he wanted to serve his country … proudly accepted the inherent risks. Becca Casarez, family friend: … long discussion regarding his future … very confident in his decision … proud to be a Ranger. Frank and Barbara Kelley, neighbors whose house Alex tended when they were gone: Visited us just prior to entering the military … determined to become part of the armed forces.
Norm’s final gambit was to arrange for Alex to have lunch with his friend and colleague Bill Hemphill, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army who had commanded an infantry company in Vietnam and gone through Ranger School himself. Hemphill’s greatest point of pride was that despite ample opportunity he had never gotten a single one of his men killed. The plan was for him to play the realist for Alex, as Norm could not do himself.
In about a year and a half, Hemphill too would be writing a letter to Judge Burgess of the District Court of Western Washington.
I pointed out that, as a young man, he would be training with soldiers who were physically and mentally more mature and who might have combat experience. I actually tried to dissuade him—or at least delay him—from Ranger Training. I left the lunch convinced that this young man would make an excellent soldier and would uphold the great traditions of the Rangers. I remarked to my wife that Alex was the type of young man one could feel secure was protecting our country and who would make a difference.
By the time April rolled around, Norm had more or less resigned himself to having a son in the war. He had even begun to feel some pride in Alex’s determination to serve his country. It was a tough, thankless choice, but it was Alex’s to make. When Alex signed the 11X/Airborne Ranger contract the day after his eighteenth birthday, it didn’t come as a surprise.
The other big development that April did: Alex fell in love.
When I first left a voicemail for Anna Dudow, now a nurse at Children’s Hospital Colorado, she texted back a week and a half later to apologize for the delay, explaining that it had taken her some time to get her feelings under control.
She didn’t strike me as someone who often struggled with her feelings when we met at a coffee shop a few days later. Brisk, blond, and very small in stature, Anna struck me instead as a woman who had become wearily expert in convincing professors, coaches, salesmen, doctors, clients, patients, and students not to dismiss her as “cute.” At Littleton High School she had been just as much a jock as Alex, an accomplished gymnast with perfect side and straddle splits who could pull a layout backflip when they tossed her in the air on the varsity cheer squad.
Alex used to love telling the tale of their meeting. One dreary morning in April, he crawled beneath a table in the school library to catch up on all the sleep he had been missing between hockey practices every night and road marches every morning, then woke up to a sandaled foot six inches from his nose. It had been simple interest, a motion requiring no decision at all, to reach out and circle the ankle with his fingers. The foot jerked in his hand. Whoa: it was alive! He bent up each painted toe in sequence. After a few seconds a head peeked down—blond, pretty, shy, quizzical. A flash of a smile and then the head went back up, embarrassed. He began playing with the knob above the heel.
When I asked her about it, Anna remembered it well. “First of all,” she said, laughing, “to catch Alex in the library was, I feel, something very rare. And of course he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing in a library setting. He was sitting underneath my table being just a total … being Alex. I don’t know why I even bothered to acknowledge him. I mean, who sits underneath the table at the library? He was just a total … he was funny.”
At the time, Alex had already asked someone to the prom, just as friends: a deaf classmate named Kathleen who had been assigned as his volleyball and badminton partner in gym class. This was the latest in a series of efforts at teenage good citizenship. The previous summer he had knocked on the front door of a younger kid whom a large group had bullied at a party to apologize to him and his startled parents. In the fall, after discovering an old friend passed out on a toxic blend of alcohol and antianxiety medication in a back bedroom at a hot tub party, he had sucked the vomit from the friend’s throat and saved his life, and he continued to pay him visits and check up on him long after other friends fell away. He considered this the gentlemanly conduct demanded of a soon-to-be Army Ranger—“Gallantly will I show the world that I am a specially selected and well-trained soldier,” reads the Ranger Creed. When Kathleen told him that he should just take his new girlfriend, he wouldn’t hear of it. One of his buddies would take Anna. They would all go together. It would be fun.
“I was like, look, we were just going as friends, I honestly don’t mind if you take Anna instead. I can save my dress for my junior prom,” Kathleen wrote to me a few weeks later over Gmail chat from Dayton, Ohio, where she recently married and works in accounting. “But he insisted. Wanted to show me a good time.”
“Was the night fun at all or just hopelessly awkward?”
“Haha oh gosh. Very awkward. Especially in the limo. I sat next to Alex, and he’s chatting away, casually puts his arm around me, and Anna (of course, in the same prom group!) is just shooting death stares at me. They were this popular senior group of kids that I just saw from afar. They were definitely the cool kids that had a good time and here I was just a goody two-shoes tagging along awkwardly. I thought the dancing might be awkward, but Alex spent a lot of time in the bathroom, so I just danced alone.”
Anna too looks back on that night with humor, but in the moment her feelings were desperate. She and Alex had so little time.
“Our relationship went from zero to a thousand miles an hour in point two seconds,” she told me. “We were psycho for each other. We spent every minute we could together. I don’t think it was him going into the army. I think it would still have gone that fast even if he’d been going away to college at CU.”
Alex’s enlistment was already a fait accompli when they met. After graduation in June, they had only a month until he had to report to basic training. They went for a lot of long drives together in Norm’s black Jeep Cherokee, watched a few movies, but mostly they hung out with Andrew and Jenny and Alex’s guy friends around fire pits in one or another of their backyards. The group had known each other for years and fed perfectly off each other’s energy. Alex was both the most fun and the most responsible, staying sober—he was on a strict no-alcohol, no-sugar diet for basic—and driving everyone home safely from parties. His loyalty to his friends was incredible. Everyone relied on Alex. Anna had dated guys before, but Alex made it obvious she had only ever been playing around. He made her laugh harder than any guy ever had, but he also treated her with more respect than any guy ever had. He was handsome and popular. Up to thirty people from school attended his hockey games; his team was neck-and-neck for top ranking in the state. He had a touchingly close relationship with his family too, especially his father and his little brother and sister.
“It was strange how much my parents trusted him,” Anna said. “I’m still not allowed to have boys sleep over when I’m at my parents’ house, but for some reason he was allowed to stay, and I was allowed to go over there. I think they fell in love with him as fast as I did. They were totally okay with us not being seen for days, because they knew I was in good hands. It was really nice how well he meshed into my life and my family and how well I meshed into his.”
The only hitch was the army. No one in Anna’s world knew anything about it. Alex tried to prepare her for what life would be like once he left: weeks at a time without phone calls, months without visits. To show her the kind of work he would be doing, he screened his favorite movie for her, Black Hawk Down, about a 1993 operation conducted in Mogadishu by Rangers and Delta Force operators. It was obvious how inspired he was by this display of military expertise, the fast-roping and room clearing and hand signals and jargon, all of which he eagerly explained to her as it arose, but when the bodies started to mount, Anna couldn’t help expressing some misgivings. Alex hugged her to him on the couch and told her not to worry. He loved her; he would always come back to her. Though he tried to play it casually, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen, it was the first time either of them had said it. Thrilled, Anna told him she loved him too.
“Everything was so fast and so perfect between us that I just completely ignored everything bad,” she said. “I literally ignored it right up until the moment when they came and picked him up.”
Years passed. Anna graduated from LHS, made the cheer squad at the University of Colorado, pledged at a sorority, and completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She coached cheer at a Denver gym for a while, then went to nursing school and landed the job at Children’s. Through it all, she continued to think about Alex. Her parents did not want her talking to me. She wasn’t so sure it was a good idea either.
“It’s hard not wanting to go back to him,” she explained. “All of my relationships now, I’m always comparing everybody to him. He was amazing. He made me feel … he made me feel. If he’d stayed in the army, I don’t know if we would have made it, because I’m sure that would have been hard too. That kid probably would have done it forever if he’d been able to. I don’t know if I could have handled that. But I might have. So that’s hard. Nothing broke us up. It’s not like we stopped loving each other, or got mad at each other, or something happened between him and me. He treated me like a fucking princess. You know that stupid movie The Notebook? That was our life. We. Were. Perfect.”
Alex spent his final month at home in Greenwood Village giddy with the knowledge that he was army property already, halfway to becoming the man he had always wanted to be. Not only was he about to kick some serious terrorist ass, he was dating the love of his life and planned to marry her. He trained harder than ever for basic, played a last few hockey games, and took advantage of his remaining weeks of freedom to goof off in high style. Many of Littleton High School’s students drove to graduation in the BMWs and Mercedes they had been given as graduation presents; Alex drove his dad’s ride-on lawn mower. At a final party with his teammates for the Littleton Hawks, while the rest of them drank and smoked and played poker, bragging about the junior hockey teams they would be playing for in Canada next year, Alex charged into the kitchen stark naked and dove under the table to call in pretend airstrikes using his fist as a radio.
“We had a barbecue for Alex the day before he left,” Norm recalled near the end of our lunch. “It was sort of a happy/sad deal.”
By some quirk of army scheduling, the day before Alex left happened to be the Fourth of July. “Forty or fifty people came by. Some friends, some coaches, some teachers and administrators from his school who had all just taken to him.” Norm shrugged. “He was an easy kid to like. Anna and two of his best friends stayed up with him afterward. We watched a couple of movies. Four-thirty in the morning, I think it was, two guys in uniform came and got him. As soon as they showed up, Alex was gone within a minute. Maybe ten words exchanged. You know, �I’m Alex’s dad.’ �We’re here to pick up your son.’ They don’t give a flying fuck.”
It was a rare moment of bitterness from Norm. I asked him how it felt to have Alex gone.
“You know, it’s like anything else in life. So-and-so is going to die, because they’re a hundred years old and they have cancer, and you’re ready for it until it happens, and then you realize there’s no way you could be ready for it. Anna’s crying. His friends are bummed out. Everyone just goes their separate ways.”
I nodded. We chewed in silence for a second. The restaurant was empty now except for us and a few dusty shafts of late-afternoon light.
“How’s that?” Norm asked.
I thought he was asking about his story. The truth was that I was moved and astonished that Norm was talking to me like this, but I tried to answer with manly restraint. “Pretty sad,” I said.
“That calzone,” clarified Norm, looking uncomfortable.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s good.”
“I’ll tell you what, Ben. Of the people who go into the military, Alex was probably as well prepared mentally and physically as anybody ever is. He did his homework. He read voraciously. He knew what he was getting himself into. But”—Norm gave me a meaningful look—“he didn’t know what he was getting himself into.”
At the time of Alex’s enlistment, the army, confronted by the possibility of a longer-than-expected fight with an overstretched volunteer force, was studying the factors that helped and hindered recruitment via the USAREC Survey of New Army Recruits, a pink form that looked a little like an SAT booklet. Alex diligently filled in the bubbles with a number 2 pencil.
I enlisted because: (X) I wanted the adventure I will experience. ( ) I wanted the benefits I will receive. ( ) I wanted the skills I will learn. ( ) I wanted the pay I will earn. ( ) I wanted the money for education. ( ) I wanted the travel I will experience. (X) I wanted to serve my country.
From the statements above, which is the MOST important to you?
I wanted to serve my country.
From the statements above, which is the LEAST important to you?
I wanted the pay I will earn.
Typically, young people considering enlisting for military service experience some concerns or barriers to this decision. How significant were these concerns to your decision to enlist?
Religious or moral beliefs: Very unimportant.
Put education plans on hold: Very unimportant.
Loss of personal freedom: Very unimportant.
Fear of injury or death: Very unimportant.
Fear of basic training: Very unimportant.
Family obligations: Somewhat important.
Who was the LEAST supportive of your decision to join the ARMY? (Mark only one)
( ) Mother/stepmother. ( ) Father/stepfather. ( ) Athletic Coach. ( ) Teacher. ( ) Husband/wife. ( ) Boyfriend or girlfriend. ( ) Friend. ( ) Clergy member. (X) School Guidance Counselor. ( ) Sister/brother or stepsister/stepbrother. ( ) Extended family (i.e. grandparent, uncle/aunt, cousin).
I wasn’t at Alex’s farewell party. I was caught up in my own life, reading research papers on complexity theory in Berkeley, California, and spending my nights playing accordion with a group of grad school friends in the basement of our Oakland rental. Norm showed me a few pictures: Anna looking shell-shocked on the patio, Sam and Carly playing some kind of board game on the trampoline. It was incredible how young everyone was. Alex looked happy and playful, horsing around in the yard, throwing his arm over his buddies’ shoulders, holding a glass of water proudly up toward the camera. Norm had permitted the other graduates a beer or two from the garage refrigerator, but Alex was sticking to his training diet.
“He had a great personality,” Norm summed up with a shrug at the end of our lunch. “He was fun to be around. Just a gregarious kid.”
Even then, the blandness of his language unsettled me. It reminded me somehow of that flat suburban sunlight that suffused so many of my childhood memories. Who was my younger cousin really? What darkness, if any, lay under the cheerful smile of the boy in these photographs?
The culture of the Blum family is a patchwork affair. In hacking off his Jewish roots, Al Senior endowed his descendants with the opportunity and the onus of making their own myths. Some of us have found them in sports, others in science, others in war, but there are times when it seems to me that some vestigial connection to an unconscious substrate of Jewish lore must remain. The best model I have found for the way the extended Blum family came to interpret what happened to Alex is the ancient Jewish legend of the golem.
According to Talmudic lore, the first one was Adam himself, who spent an hour as gathered dust, an hour as form, and an hour as golem, Hebrew for “unshaped mass,” before God infused him with a soul. Later golems, constructed by mere rabbis, never got that far. The best known is the sixteenth-century Golem of Prague, sculpted from river clay by Rabbi Judah Loew to guard the Jewish quarter from attack. The legend is told in different ways. Sometimes the name of God is written on paper and slipped into the golem’s mouth. Sometimes the Hebrew word emet, or “truth,” is carved onto its forehead. Regardless, language is what fills the golem with its mute, unquestioning half-life. Like Frankenstein, Skynet, or the Predator and Reaper drones that now buzz over conflict zones around the world, the golem represents action without agency, force without conscience, a lurch and a boom and no one there to blame. Inevitably it goes astray. In the end the rabbi manages to pull the slip of paper from its mouth or to erase the first character of the word from its forehead, turning emet, “truth,” into met, “dead,” and the golem collapses into a pile of inanimate mud.
Our own golem was dissolved by an other-than-honorable discharge from the U.S. Army in early 2007, while Alex was still in prison. What unsettled us most was that buried somewhere in whatever mud pile remained was the little blond kid who still grinned at us from old family photographs, next to younger versions of ourselves with whom we felt no discontinuity. Like the medieval rabbi Maimonides, whose “negative theology” held that God could not be described in positive terms but only in opposition to whatever was imperfect and human, we began talking about that Alex mostly in banalities and negations: loyal, dutiful, patriotic; not experienced, not skeptical, not capable of questioning, not aware. After a while it began to seem as if all we had left of him was a luminous emptiness defined against the shape of what was to come, a sculpture in negative space.
There was one more negation, of course, the most important of all, so well understood in our family that no one had to say it out loud: not guilty.
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