SWAMPS AND MOUNTAINS
Carl Stiner graduated from Jump School on Saturday and reported into Ranger School the next morning. That afternoon, he and his companions received orientations and drew equipment. They began training at daylight Monday morning.
Ranger School has two principal aims: to prepare small-unit leaders for the missions and situations they are likely to face in combat, and to teach skills that are necessary for survival in enemy-held territory. It is the most physically demanding school in the Army for non-Special Operations soldiers.
Though Ranger School is normally nine weeks long, for Stiner it lasted eight weeks — October to December 1958. (Nothing was deleted but the sleep.) It consisted of three phases: two weeks at Fort Benning, Georgia; three weeks in the Okefenokee Swamp at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida; and three weeks in the mountains at Dahlonega, Georgia.[7]
Carl Stiner continues:
Once a soldier has completed the Ranger Course, he knows down to the tips of his fingers what his capabilities and limitations are. He has not only mastered the skills required of a small-unit leader in combat, but he also has the confidence and skills necessary to survive there. I have always trusted a Ranger-qualified officer or NCO to lead patrols for me in combat or any other tough situation, because I knew he had the skills necessary to accomplish the mission and would "take care" of those entrusted to his leadership in the right way.
These experiences do not only apply to junior officers, they become the essential underpinnings of competence through all the ranks and assignments of an Army career-particularly command. They give an understanding of a man's capabilities and limitations that comes in no other way, and they develop self-confidence in ways not otherwise possible.
You have to be made of the right stuff to do it successfully. In practice it means that you go day and night; you get very little sleep; you are exhausted; you may get shin splints; you're strung out; you are in swamps; you're in mountains; you're cold; you're wet; you might be exposed to frostbite or hypothermia; or else you're hot; you're thirsty; you learn to live off the land and eat what's available. You learn to depend on each other. Although each man is expected to master individual skills, and in all field operations you usually operate in squad- and platform-size units, you take care of each other. From day one you are assigned a "Ranger buddy." In other words, if your buddy should fall out, you are expected to carry him — or fall out trying.
Under these conditions, there's no place for the limp-wristed or faint of heart.
THE FORT BENNING PHASE
The basic objective of the Benning phase was to learn the fundamentals of patrolling: the essentials of planning; opcrations orders; selecting primary and alternate routes, assembly areas, rallying points, passage of lines, actions at the objectives; and above all the value of rehearsals. You did it over and over until you got it right.
The first two weeks were focused on heavy-duty physical training — log drills, endurance runs, hand-to-hand combat, the bayonet assault course, and the obstacle course. It was also during this phase that we were introduced to a new form of PT—"rope football." We played this in a sawdust pit of not more than sixty feet in diameter. The class was divided into two teams of about fifty men, who'd go down in a football stance facing each other about three feet apart. In between the teams was dropped a knotted ball of cable rope that weighed something like fifty pounds. The object of the game was to move the ball to the other side of the pit. Anything went. There were no time-outs, no fouls or penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct. You scratched, clawed, climbed over, or did whatever else you had to do to win. The penalty for losing was seventy-five or a hundred push-ups.
We also did a lot of rope work — learning the different knots and how to build different kinds of rope bridges — and we did a lot of rope climbing. There were two objectives here: to learn the different ways to climb a rope, and to build upper-body strength.
Another important element was advanced land navigation. Soldiers have to be expert navigators — to be able to get to where they are going when they are not familiar with the territory — and they have to do it quickly under the worst circumstances. Nowadays we have global positioning systems to make navigating easier, and these do give us an enormous advantage, but there is no substitute for a map in the hands of a good map reader and a compass in the hands of a good navigator. If you have these, and if all the electronic wizardry fails, you still have all you need to find out where you are and to keep you on course.
Also critical to the team is a good pace man, who keeps an accurate count of how much distance you have covered. He has to be able to consistently step a yard or meter with each normal step. Then he keeps count of the pace. One way to do it is by moving a small stone from one pocket to another every time he has gone a hundred paces. Another technique is to tie a knot in a string for each hundred paces. There are any number of techniques, of course, but the point is the same: You have to have a system to ensure that the count is not lost (or forgotten) should the patrol be ambushed.
Finally, we were taught every fundamental about patrolling: the different kinds of patrols (reconnaissance, combat, raids, ambushes, etc.), the organizations of each type of patrol, the patrol order, selecting routes, actions at danger areas, and action upon reaching the objective. During the Benning phase, we rehearsed many times over our patrolling techniques.
THE FLORIDA PHASE
We left Fort Benning early on a Saturday morning in October on buses headed to the Florida Ranger Camp on Eglin Air Force Base. Few of us remembered much about the trip, which took most of the day, because we slept as much as we could.
Near the Florida state line, a member of the Ranger cadre woke us up to put us in the right frame of mind. He read us a "general situation": "The United States is at war," he told us. "And we have entered a mythical country" — I've forgotten its name—"as a replacement unit." From here on out, everything was to be a tactical simulation of real war—tactical twenty-four hours each and every day.
When we reached our Florida destination, our accommodations were austere — tents that accommodated twenty-four men each, canvas cots, no floors, a World War II-type mess hall, a small arms room, and a small aid station manned by a single medic. This didn't bother me; it was obvious that we wouldn't be spending much time there (and this would be luxury compared with where we were going).
About half an hour after we arrived, we were given an alert order to be prepared to move out within two hours on our first reconnaissance patrol. Our mission: to reconnoiter a possible enemy missile site. When we moved out, we moved directly into the swamps into water up to our waists. We were there for the next three days and nights.
This turned out to be the norm for the entire training — constant patrolling, constant raids, constant ambushes… and always wet and cold. You don't normally think of Florida as cold. But in October, that's what it can get if you are constantly wet, even in Florida.
As a part of the Florida phase, we were given special instructions on "survival": how to catch and prepare food; what to eat and what not to eat (which wild plants and berries were safe, which weren't): and we were given chickens, rabbits, alligators, opossums, raccoons, and snakes that we had to prepare for some day's "feast."
We learned a lot about snakes. They were all over the place, particularly coral snakes and water moccasins. One day the cadre brought out what seemed to be a wagonload of snakes (nonpoisonous!) and passed them among us (we were sitting on logs). They started with one or two at a time, but that soon turned into armloads of six or eight. We got familiarized with snakes in a hurry.
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Over the years, Ranger School has changed to meet the needs and challenges of the times. Long before the Gulf War, a desert phase, conducted at Fort Bliss, Texas, was added to the program of instruction. It greatly benefited the young leaders who fought in Operation DESERT STORM.