An Army Ranger Training Gone Horribly Wrong

In full gear, the soldiers waded into a dark swamp, the water high and rising, the night approaching. They were all dying to be U.S. Army Rangers, but by the next day, some of them would just be dead. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [I Think You're Fat]( The Army Ranger Training Tragedy That Never Should Have Happened The Yellow River begins in southern Alabama, near a country crossroads called Rose Hill, and flows into the Florida panhandle, that westering arm of the Sunshine State where Bible Belt hymns crowd the radio bands and the Latin ballads of Miami stations, if you pick them up at all, seem like music from another world. The Yellow doesn’t lend itself to stirring adjectives; it isn’t “raging” or “mighty,” but a mere yeoman of a river—sluggish, undistinguished, and dull. From the state line, it continues due south for thirty-odd miles, slips under Interstate 10, then turns abruptly westward, uncoiling like a drawn gut through swamps in whose moss-draped precincts gators bask and cottonmouths nest, before it finally empties into Pensacola Bay. This part of its journey takes it through Eglin Air Force Base, a vast military reservation over which pine and live-oak forests roll for miles. Tucked into a remote corner of the woods, at the end of a dirt road so red and powdery it seems to have been paved with brickyard dust, is a small army base: Camp James E. Rudder, headquarters for the 6th Ranger Training Battalion. With its brown-and-khaki clapboard buildings and dust-blown airstrip, the camp could serve as a set for a World War II movie. Its actual birth was during the Korean War—1951, when the Army established ranger school. Ever since, soldiers seeking to win the rangers’ coveted black-and-gold shoulder tab have come to it for the final phase of their training. Three miles from Camp Rudder’s main gate, the Yellow courses under a low promontory called Metts Bluff. A narrow cove cuts into the bluff, its bank rising toward a point where a jeep track breaks through stands of towering longleaf pine. It was there, at midday on February 15, 1995, that the 102 students of ranger class 3-95 launched rubber rafts to practice waterborne operations, raids, ambushes, and other skills of their deadly trade. Later that afternoon, sixty-eight of them disembarked some eight miles downstream and, advancing on their imaginary enemy, plunged into the cypress-shaded gloom of the swamp. They had only six days until the end of their training, six days until they could sew the tab onto their sleeves. Gold letters on a black field, maybe two inches long by half an inch wide: RANGER. 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