Ranger Games is another take on the by-now familiar elite special operations training story, but this one turns strange in a big hurry, as it morphs from an account of the determination of a dedicated young soldier to succeed and achieve in one of the Army’s most challenging combat organizations, into a true crime story about “all-American” young men whose lives go off the rails under the pressure of a grueling training program and their imminent deployment to a deadly war zone.
In the process of telling this baffling story of a young soldier and his world, it explores many of the difficult and dark psychological and social forces at play in the U.S. military during the height of the long-lasting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The subject of this book is the author's cousin, a seemingly normal American boy, a nice kid from a middle-class home with a lifelong dream of becoming a soldier, who completes his training, and becomes a newly minted Army Ranger, but then incomprehensibly ends up as the getaway driver in a bank robbery in Tacoma shortly before his scheduled first deployment to Iraq.
The author is trying to piece together an explanation for what really happened, from the many details provided by the participants in the robbery, their families, Army soldiers and all the friends and associates around his cousin.
It’s gripping, and Rashomon-like as he peels back layers of truth, family mythology, lies, mental illness, manipulation, subjective interpretations and general bizarreness in the course of the unfolding story. Recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment