Ranger Up Bataan Victory

We took the first drink of Wild Turkey around Mile 1. I believe this helped with energy.

We took the second drink of Wild Turkey around Mile 3. All the better.

My bottle of Maker’s garnered many comments sticking proudly out of the back of my ruck. Outstanding.

By Mile 5 we were moving along nicely and at a great clip. All was good with the world. We passed the Wild Turkey on to passersby. They were happy to meet Ben Franklin’s recommendation for the National Bird.

Then something happened. We were going uphill and it wasn’t ending. Mile 8. Still uphill. Mile 10. Still uphill. There literally was no respite as we continued to climb a 6% grade. My hamstring, which I tore break dancing at a wedding, was starting to cramp. Goddamit. Something in the body chemistry was lacking. I hammered back some Gatorade and ate some Gu and hoped for the best.

Tommy noticed my gait was off and asked if I was okay. In my younger years I would have pretended nothing was wrong. Having just turned 33 the day before (yeah, Happy Birthday to me) and having been on both sides of this coin in the past I told him exactly what was up. “We need to slow down?” he asked. “Nah, man. I should be good,” I gamely replied.

Tommy knew I was hurting, but also knew there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot he could do, so he nodded. When we hit Mile 12, the desert sun had sucked me pretty freaking dry, my leg was killing me, and I had a slight case of the fuzzies. Not ideal. Kelly Bruno, along with the freak of nature that is The Dave (he has a racing stripe tattooed to his leg…seriously), were basically running laps around us for fun because they are weirdos designed by God to do things that are truly miserable and somehow enjoy it. I kind of hated them.

That’s when Tackett looked at me and said, “Dude, you are completely covered in salt. That can’t be good.” Tom and Whitney looked at me like I was on my death bed. I was hurting pretty bad, but didn’t fully grasp how much salt I had shed until Kelly Bruno told me I looked like “a salt encrusted tuna”. I punched her in the face…in my head…but thought it was real…and that’s when you know things are going south.

Tackett told me to watch his feet and stay with him. In retrospect this would have been a good time to give some of my 55 pounds to someone carrying 20 less, but of course, the idea never occurred to me. The next mile and a half was a festering bag of dog shit. I was pissed off that my body was crapping out. I was frustrated as I knew that this was the outlier – I could do this race 20 times and only have this happen once, but BAM there it was. Most of all though, I was in pain: my hamstring felt like it was tearing all over again, I had a splitting headache, and I was cramping up. I adopted the old Ranger School standby of just putting one foot in front of the other and following Tackett. Life sucked.

Finally we got to the 13.5 mile mark where there was a water refill point. I had the fuzzies something fierce. “I’m way low on electrolytes,” I stated. Suddenly, I realized my team must have knocked off a CVS drug store before starting this race because there were about 107 pills suddenly in my hand. I vaguely remember them all blathering on about calcium delivery systems, electrolytes, and caffeine, but in all honesty they could have given me a vial of crack cocaine, two Viagra, and Iocane Powder and I would have downed every bit of that shit. With God knows what now swimming through my system, I refilled the camel backs (why was I still Muling at this point?), rucked up, took a pull of Wild Turkey, and moved out.

At this point I was expecting to be in for a miserable second half of the race, but with the amphetamines, opium, and paint thinner that my team had given me I started to feel way better – strong even. With every mile, I increased my pace with my proud Ranger Buddy John Tackett right beside me. Things were looking so good in fact that in my newfound exuberance we did mile 18 in just over ten minutes – a blistering pace with the 55 pound rucks. I was good to go now – fully revived. Nothing could go wrong!

That’s when Tackett broke his foot.

We were running on a downhill and something popped. At first he suffered through it without slowing, but his face had definitely changed. I knew where we were heading. Shortly thereafter he was turning his foot so that he wasn’t putting pressure on the injury. Now it was his turn to dig in. He took a nice pull of Wild Turkey as he grimaced on.

I looked around at the rest of the team. Tommy still looked strong. Whitney’s face showed some nice misery, but she was kicking ass. Kelly and The Dave had picked up juggling pins along the way and were throwing the pins back and forth to each other over our heads as they frolicked. I still hated them, and I am pretty sure John did too, mostly because he told me he did.

At mile 21 we hit what Bataaners affectionately call “The Sand Pit”. While much of the course is off road, up until this point the sand had been packed pretty well. The Sand Pit, however, was a foot to a foot and a half of loose sand. You couldn’t help but sink into it, which was just awesome six hours into a race, especially if you had a broken foot.

A mile and a half later, we were through. Whitney looked worse, but still good to go. Kelly and The Dave had somehow added a poodle to their juggling act. Tackett was hunkered down into miserable Ranger mode. Tommy, however, had gone from looking strong to looking ghost white.

“All my blisters popped dude.”

That water that had seemed so funny at 500 meters, had turned Tommy’s feet to hamburger (later the nurse would ask him if she could take a picture of his feet) and all of his blisters had gone at once. The spring in his step was gone. We Rangered on.

At Mile 23 it was Whitney’s turn to fall back a little. She looked bad and I was worried about her. By Mile 24.5 she was slipping back a little further. We slowed our pace to check on her and she motioned to keep moving. We did, but we kept a watchful eye. By Mile 25 she was really slipping back. Tommy turned to walk towards her when all of a sudden she let out some sort of Ginger grunt and took off running. She ran past us and we called for her, but she didn’t stop or slow. She just ran the ugliest run we had ever seen and disappeared. The Dave and Kelly were doing cartwheels while riding unicycles. We all still hated them.

Our group limped on to Mile 26. Whitney the Ginger was waiting there. She screamed something unintelligible and we, as a group turned the corner. There were two tenths of a mile to go. John, broken foot and all, started running. We all ran with him.

Team Ranger Up finished the God-forsaken race as a team in what can only be described as a day when everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. Murphy had his way with us and kicked us out without even asking for our phone number. We were hurt and a bit disappointed. We all knew we could have done a lot better. I personally felt very guilty for slowing us down for a few miles in the middle stretch. It sucked.

We opened the bottle of Maker’s Mark that I had carried carefully on our excursion and pretty much killed it inside of ten minutes.

Right about that time we found out that we beat the old record by one hour and twenty minutes. About forty minutes later, the second place team, sponsored by Crossfit, would finish. We were well into our cooler of beer by that point.

Full Circle

Ranger Smith made it through the Mountain Phase and was now with me in the final phase of Ranger School in the swamps of Florida. There were about 96 hours left in the school and I already had a GO. All I had to do was physically make it to the end and I was going to have the coveted Ranger Tab. Life was as good as it could be. Ranger Smith was doing okay. We still helped him a lot, but he was continuing to improve. I hoped he was going to pass.

We had a miserable patrol that night and my Ranger Buddy had been in rough shape. I took his guard shift and sat on a rock in order to keep from getting comfortable and stay awake. When the shift was over and I went to move, I fell to the ground. I couldn’t feel my leg. At first I thought that I had just cut off the blood supply and that my leg would wake up, like when you fall asleep on your arm, but after thirty minutes there was no improvement. I couldn’t even walk without tripping. My mind raced. How the hell was I going to make any of the movements? The worst started entering my mind – I was going to fail Ranger School this close to the end. My eyes actually welled up.

Fuck that. I was going to figure this out. After several attempts, I realized that if I turned my foot sideways, I could lock it out and use it almost like a crutch. I spent much of the morning mastering this walking technique as I knew we had a long movement that evening.

Evening came quickly and we moved out. I did well for a while, but try as I might, I started slipping back. The Ranger Instructor was right in my face. “Do you want to quit Ranger?”

“No sergeant,” I said with disdain.

“It looks like you want to quit, Ranger.”

“Fuck that, sergeant.”

This took him aback because generally students, myself included, were extremely subservient to RIs. I was in a bad place and didn’t care anymore so anger got the better of me.

“Ranger, if you fall back too far, you’re done,” he snarled.

I put everything I had into moving forward. I pushed so hard off of that bad leg that to this day I still have knee pain from that night, but even with that effort, I knew I was in a losing battle. We had a long way to go.

Suddenly, I felt a hand under my ruck. At first I thought it was the RI pulling me out and my heart sunk but then I realized it was Ranger Smith, pushing me forward. Pride forced me to tell him I was fine. For the first time that any of us had ever seen, Ranger Smith got fierce. He leaned in and said, “You don’t have to do everything yourself Nick. You’re sucking and you’re getting my fucking help whether you want it or not. We’re a fucking team. Keep walking.”

I shut the fuck up. Ranger Smith got me to the end of the movement. That night I got some feeling back in the leg. I graduated Ranger School a week later. Ranger Smith was there with me.

Epilogue

As we walked through the chute at the end of the Bataan Death March, we shook the hands of the veterans who had lived through the real event in the Philippines. During the real Death March there were no water stations, no electrolyte pills, no support of any kind. If they fell out they were bayoneted on the side of the road and left to die. When they did stop for brief rests they were tortured. These men had nothing in the world except for two things: their indomitable will to survive and their buddies to their left and right. And they did it.

The race was awful in every conceivable way. And it damn well should have been.

God Bless the Battling Bastards of Bataan!