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WORK TITLE: Ranger Games
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.benblumauthor.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:.
PERSONAL
Born in Denver, CO; married; children: one stepdaughter.
EDUCATION:New York University, M.F.A.; University of California Berkeley, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and investigative journalist. Formerly worked in computer science.
AWARDS:National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, New York Times Foundation Fellowship.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Ben Blum is a writer, computer scientist, and investigative journalist. He has been considered a mathematics prodigy, noted BookPage interviewer Lily McLemore, and worked in the technology and computer science fields. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction writing from New York University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California Berkeley.
An inexplicable criminal act by one of Blum’s distant relatives, a promising young Army Ranger, inspired him to give up his work in science and spend years investigating why the soldier threw away his career. Alex Blum was part of an elite Ranger group who was preparing for deployment to Iraq. On August 7, 2006, Alex and other members of his unit were involved in a bank robbery at a Bank of America branch in Tacoma, Washington. The robbery was organized by specialist Luke Elliott Sommer, another member of the Ranger team. The robbers got away with $54,000, noted New York Times reviewer Jennifer Senior. As a result, Alex was arrested and sent to prison, and his career as a Ranger was ended.
In Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family, and an Inexplicable Crime, Ben Blum delves into the mind and motivations of his cousin, trying to find a reason for behavior that was such a drastic change from the norm. “In the incredibly gripping Ranger Games, Ben Blum attempts to understand how his clean-cut cousin Alex, who had dreamed of being an Army Ranger for his entire life, could be involved in this disastrous crime. What he discovers is a web of lies, alleged brainwashing and disturbing truths about the military, his family and himself,” McLemore commented.
Blum recounts growing up with his cousin Alex, who had always been the type to obey the rules and stay out of trouble. Alex had achieved a lifelong goal in the military, and it seemed likely that he would continue to thrive there and make a career out of soldiering. Ben Blum carefully dissects the conditions that Alex worked under, the pressures of life in a combat unit preparing for deployment to a dangerous area of the world, and the mindset that accompanied a complete immersion into the warrior code of the soldier.
The narrative pays special attention to the influence of Sommer, the organizer of the bank robbery. Sommer was highly charismatic as a leader. He was someone that Alex and his fellow soldiers looked up to and respected. In Blum’s account, it seems likely that it was Sommer’s influence, combined with the existing stresses and mindset of a combat soldier, that led Alex and his comrades to participate in the robbery. Blum “finds the notion that the heist was the result of a kind of brainwashing to be somewhat compelling,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
At the same time, Blum suggests that his cousin Alex might have thought the heist was nothing more than a simulation, yet one more training exercise among the hundreds that he and his team had already completed. This thought “isn’t as absurd as it might appear on the face,” the Kirkus Reviews writer commented. Blum considers the possibility that Alex might have not even thought the robbery was real, that is was simply another “ranger game” that was intended to test his abilities and prepare him for the unpredictability of military missions in Iraq. In this scenario, Sommer’s influence would also have been a major factor in convincing Alex and his fellow soldiers that the robbery wasn’t real. When he was arrested, Alex declared that Sommer “would never lead him on such an audacious mission without an Army-sanctioned strategic intent—and he, Alex, would never challenge the wisdom of his superiors,” Senior reported.
Booklist reviewer Connie Fletcher called Ranger Games a “stunningly well-executed examination of one man’s abrupt fall into disgrace and another man’s fascination with that fall.” The book “raises bedeviling questions about the nature of human agency, and reminds us that we send everyday, messy people with everyday, messy hearts to fight our wars,” Senior observed. A Publishers Weekly reviewer found the book to be a “triumph of subtle reportage” and an “unsettling dissection of the moral corruptions, small and great, that bedevil the culture of military honor.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2017, Connie Fletcher, review of Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime, p. 7.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2017, review of Ranger Games.
Library Journal, June 15, 2017, review of Ranger Games, p. 13a.
New York Times, September 6, 2017, Jennifer Senior, “Ranger Games Investigates a Crime and a Soldier’s Mind.
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, review of Ranger Games, p. 54; November 27, 2017, review of Ranger Games, p. 57.
ONLINE
Ben Blum Website, http://www.benblumauthor.com (April 7, 2018).
BookPage Online, http://www.bookpage.com/ (September 12, 2017), “Ben Blum: An Army Ranger’s Perplexing Crime,” Lily McLemore, interview with Ben Blum.
Web Exclusive – September 12, 2017
BEN BLUM
An Army Ranger's perplexing crime
BookPage interview by Lily McLemore
On August 7, 2006, a group of elite U.S. Army Rangers, including Alex Blum, who was preparing to deploy to Iraq, participated in a bank heist that was organized by Specialist Luke Elliott Sommer. In the incredibly gripping Ranger Games, Ben Blum attempts to understand how his clean-cut cousin Alex, who had dreamed of being an Army Ranger for his entire life, could be involved in this disastrous crime. What he discovers is a web of lies, alleged brainwashing and disturbing truths about the military, his family and himself.
We asked Ben Blum a few questions about the Army Ranger program, masculinity and how writing this fascinating book ultimately affected his family.
How do you think you would have reported this story if Alex Blum was not your cousin?
The short answer is that I wouldn’t have. I was a computer science graduate student with zero journalistic experience at the time I started corresponding with Alex back in 2007, and Army Rangers scared the crap out of me—let alone Army Rangers who had robbed a bank. Everything I learned about reporting I learned from my early mistakes with Alex: getting too close to a subject, taking a single perspective on an event as definitive, seeking evidence to fit a narrative rather than a narrative to fit the evidence. After the first couple of years, I managed to graduate from Alex’s friend and confidante to something a little closer to a true journalist, but toward the end, I found that even that role was insufficient to the project. Instead of just reporting what I had come to see as entrenched distortions in his perspective, I wanted to change his perspective, to be a kind of a therapist to him. That goes beyond the bounds of what a journalist is supposed to do. But for better or for worse, it makes the book what it is—a lot more intense than a piece of pure reportage could have been.
What was the most surprising thing you learned about the U.S. Army Rangers program?
That it is possible to become an elite Special Operations soldier in the American military, available for assignment to our most sensitive missions, without even a shred of combat experience.
How has this book affected your relationship with Alex Blum?
It put an enormous amount of strain on our relationship for a very long time, but we are now closer than we ever dreamed we’d be. As he put it in a toast at my wedding last year, we’ve laughed together, we’ve cried together, we’ve said “f--- you” to each other, and we each consider the other one of our best friends.
Do you feel that America’s cultural beliefs about masculinity and war was a partner in this crime?
Absolutely. It reminds me of the parable that David Foster Wallace told at his famous graduation speech at Kenyon College. An old fish swims by two young fish and says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish swim on, and eventually one leans over to the other and whispers, “What the hell is ‘water’?” For Americans of Alex’s and my generation, the water is war. We breathed it in through our morning cartoons, our toy cowboys and toy guns, the explosion effects on sports shows, the movies we grew up watching, the videogames we played with our friends. Every branch of the military—Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard—has its own Hollywood liaison office dedicated to ensuring that screenplays fit the image they want to convey to the young guys like Alex who watch action movies. If directors don’t play ball, they lose access to military equipment and locations.
Alex Blum held his superiors in the Army in high regard and respect. What do you think was different and so powerful about his relationship with Specialist Luke Elliott Sommer?
Fraternization with underlings is generally frowned upon among Rangers, but Sommer broke this taboo. He was more than a superior to Alex; he was a mentor, a role model. He made Alex feel chosen, deemed worthy of special attention by a member of a higher caste. It spoke to Alex’s ambition to excel.
Luke Elliott Sommer is a strange and complex character. Despite his many flaws and poor decisions, it’s difficult not to see the charismatic and ambitious—if not delusional—Sommer as some sort of genius. After completing this book, what are your feelings about Sommer?
I fear for him. I have come to think of his brain as something like a Lamborghini that lacks first, second, third and reverse. It looks amazing and sounds like a lot of fun to drive, but in practice you’re going to have a hell of a time getting to the grocery store and back. I think Sommer is in fact profoundly disabled, and the great tragedy of it is how hard it is for people to tell—sometimes even for himself. Nobody likes pain, but people who are born without the ability to feel it end up losing fingers and limbs. Sommer seems to lack the ability to feel a certain more abstract but equally life-saving species of pain, the kind that tells you that what you are doing is going to cause harm to yourself and others down the line.
Did your feelings toward the military evolve while writing this book?
Surprisingly enough, I ended the book far more sympathetic to the military than when I began it. Educated, middle-class Americans have grown so insulated from military culture that it tends to look a little strange and scary to them. Ever since Vietnam and the abolition of the draft, our wars have been fought by the rural poor, which makes it particularly easy for urban elites to attach their political queasiness about our recent, ever-more-unjustified wars to the men and women who fight them. But the soldiers I’ve met are amazing people—kind, reflective and unusually well-informed. As in all arenas of life, there is a right and a wrong way to conduct oneself as a soldier, and the majority strive to conduct themselves in the right way.
How has writing this book about your family affected your life?
It has completely transformed it. I used to feel pretty alienated from my family. The men were all big, tough jocks and I was this scrawny math nerd who had no idea how to keep up with their banter. I couldn’t wait to leave home for college. Writing about Alex and the army connected me back to my family culture in a way that I never dreamed possible as a kid. I discovered that there was more love and joy available in these classically male modes of interaction than I had ever understood from outside them, but also a tremendous amount of elided pain. Learning about our family history, particularly the foundational influence of my grandfather’s horrific experiences as a soldier in World War II, taught me a lot about my relatives and myself.
What do you hope for Alex Blum’s future?
I hope he is brave enough to show people his vulnerability, confusion and pain. I hope they see the goodness of his heart and give him the opportunity to show the strength of his character. I hope he starts a family and teaches his own kids how to skate. I hope this book doesn’t upend the impressive life he has managed to build for himself as a convicted felon (no easy feat in America).
You’re a former mathematical prodigy and have just completed a wide-ranging, engrossing book about the military, the nature of loyalty and truth, the complex dynamics of male relationships, bank heists and morality. What’s next for you?
I’m still interested in science, but seven years of thinking about Alex and morality have shattered so many of my old scientific beliefs—most notably, my commitment to materialist determinism. I now find the great and pressing mysteries to be the human ones. I am going to keep trying to make a living as a writer as long as they let me get away with it. My next project will address the psychology of morality, religion and trauma.
You dedicate this book to your grandmother, Oma. Can you tell me a bit about your relationship with her?
Oma is a tough Texan belle who taught me manners, pride and that ineffable quality called grace. So much of Ranger Games is about men, and so much of my childhood was about men, but Oma was, looking back, just as much an influence on our family culture as my grandfather. Alex and I both love her dearly.
BEN BLUM was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California Berkeley, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and an MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was awarded the New York Times Foundation Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and stepdaughter.
Ben Blum was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California Berkeley, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and an MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was awarded the New York Times Foundation Fellowship. After his cousin Alex participated in a 2006 bank robbery with a team of fellow U.S. Army Rangers, Ben left his scientific career behind to spend seven years researching, reporting, and writing Ranger Games, an attempt at solving the mystery of how Alex became involved in the crime. He lives in Brooklyn with his family. Current research interests include the psychology of morality, religion, and trauma.
Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime
Publishers Weekly. 264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p57.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime
Ben Blum, read by Jonathan McClain.
Random House Audio, unabridged, 13 CDs, 16
hrs., $45 ISBN 978-0-8041-6605-8
Voice actor McClain briskly recounts the story of Alex Blum, a straight-arrow 19-year-old who joined the army out of high school and participated in an armed bank robbery with two fellow soldiers days before he was set deploy to Iraq. The book, written by his cousin Ben, attempts to unravel the confused and suspect motivations behind Blum's uncharacteristic actions, and the several conflicting explanations for his involvement in the crime proffered by his defense lawyers, Blum and his co-conspirators, and his family. Is he a victim of brainwashing? Did he really believe the heist was an organized army simulation? Was he just acting out? Narrator McClain does a terrific job of guiding listeners through this complex story as attitudes toward Alex shift. He vividly captures the book's watershed moment, Alex's appearance on the Dr. Phil show, nailing the emotional weight of the scene and the show host's folksy aphorisms. The book's narrative arc makes it well suited for the audio format, and McClain is more than competent. A Doubleday hardcover. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 57. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575719/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=87266595. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575719
Blum, Ben: RANGER GAMES
Kirkus Reviews. (July 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Blum, Ben RANGER GAMES Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 9, 12 ISBN: 978-0-385-53843-5
A vigorous, empathetic chronicle of a crime foretold--or at least engendered, possibly, on a boot camp drill field.Though the mostly peace-minded citizens of Tacoma, Washington, may not know it, the military-industrial complex looms large there, with a joint Air Force and Army base constituting the area's largest employer by far. Blum tells the story of a group of four soldiers, including the author's cousin, Alex, who donned blue jeans and ski masks and tried to boost a bank. The news of the subsequent arrest shocked the respectable, intellectually competitive Blum family. "Alex was the most squeaky-clean, patriotic, rule-respecting kid we knew," writes the author, who digs into the case to tease out why an Army Ranger, part of a unit already under the spotlight for having tortured prisoners in Iraq, did something so transgressive. Among the theories the legal defense tested, he finds the notion that the heist was the result of a kind of brainwashing to be somewhat compelling, while the thought that the robbery was a training exercise isn't as absurd as it might appear on the face: "As far as Alex was concerned," one of his fellow soldiers says, "it wasn't real." In time, Blum looks closely at a charismatic leader who cooked up the scheme as an exercise in sociopathy and convinced his comrades to take part because it was cool and fun. "With him," writes the author, memorably, "you could become Donkey Kong or Cobra Commander or Wile E. Coyote, swallowing a pound of TNT and exploding and reconstituting again in time to pant so hard at a passing pretty girl that your tongue spilled out onto the floor." In the end, Blum writes, judge and jury did not accept any such Looney Tunes scenario, and how they arrived at their verdict affords the author some fine courtroom back and forth. A lighthearted romp a la Ocean's Eleven it's not, but Blum's well-wrought account suggests that any crime is possible so long as it's made out to be a game.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Blum, Ben: RANGER GAMES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497199554/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ff95c7aa. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497199554
Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime
Sen Blum
Library Journal. 142.11 (June 15, 2017): p13a.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Alex Blum was a good kid with one unshakeable goal in life: Become a U.S. Army Ranger. On the 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 question was: Why?
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
978-0-385-53843-5 | $28.95 | 75,000 | Doubleday | HC | September 978-0-385-68142-1 | $32.00C | Bond Street Books
* 978-0-385-53844-2 | * AD: 978-0-8041-6608-9 | * CD: 978-0-8041-6607-2
* LP: 978-0-525-52812-8
MEMOIR/TRUE CIME
RA: For readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Where Men Win Glory RI: Author lives in Brooklyn, NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Blum, Sen. "Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime." Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 13a. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495668228/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d694394a. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495668228
Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime
Publishers Weekly. 264.22 (May 29, 2017): p54.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime
Ben Blum. Doubleday, $28.95 (432p) ISBN 9780-385-53843-5
This engrossing true-crime saga follows a twisting labyrinth of confused and suspect motivations. In 2006 Blum's cousin Alex Blum, a straight-arrow 19-year-old in an elite Army Ranger battalion, was the getaway driver in an armed robbery of a Tacoma bank involving four accomplices, one of whom was a higher-ranking Ranger named Luke Elliott Sommer. Alex's arrest shocked his family, as did his unlikely excuse: he thought the robbery was a special-ops training exercise he had to participate in. Trying to make sense of this, Blum embarked on a years-long quest to suss out the factors that shaped Alex's actions: his adulation of the military; the sadistic Ranger training regimen that turned recruits into obedient killers (in 2010 Alex went on Dr. Phil as a poster boy for psychologist Philip Zimbardo's theory of "coercive social influence" in military culture); and the malign authority of Sommer, a charismatic but troubled man whose schemes embodied Ranger machismo and who gets a fascinating profile from the author. In a triumph of subtle reportage, Blum sleuths through the mind games enshrouding the heist while painting sympathetic but clear-eyed portraits of its perpetrators; the result is an unsettling dissection of the moral corruptions, small and great, that bedevil the culture of military honor. Agent: Tina Bennett, Janklow & Nesbit. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 54. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500741/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=73d02bf9. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500741
Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime
Connie Fletcher
Booklist. 113.22 (Aug. 1, 2017): p7.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime. By Ben Blum. Sept. 2017.432p. Doubleday, $28.95 (9780385538435). 364.15.
This debut work is a stunningly well-executed examination of one man's abrupt fall into disgrace and another man's fascination with that fall. The men (one, a gung-ho U.S. Army Ranger on his way to Iraq in 2006; the other, the author of this book) grew up together as cousins in Colorado. The defining moment for author Blum's cousin Alex, and for this wrenching book, was Alex's sudden and seemingly inexplicable involvement in a bank robbery on the verge of his being shipped to Iraq, a moment that blew up his life and those of his relatives. Blum spent seven years puzzling out this act, interviewing Alex, family members, and friends. He also investigates the Ranger culture that instills blind obedience, and the evil influence that one special-operations commander held over Alex. The result is a well-researched, spellbinding work of narrative nonfiction that opens up the psychology of Ranger training, as well as giving the reader a compassionate view of the interlocking forces that can feed into one spectacularly bad decision.--Connie Fletcher
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fletcher, Connie. "Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 7. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718655/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e7b326de. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501718655
‘Ranger Games’ Investigates a Crime and a Soldier’s Mind
Books of The Times
By JENNIFER SENIOR SEPT. 6, 2017
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Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To an Army Ranger — or to some Rangers, it seems fair to say — every building looks like a potential target. In 2006, Pfc. Alex Blum would often find himself sitting with his Ranger buddies near their base in Tacoma, Wash., imagining the logistics of taking down local establishments. Especially enthusiastic about these exercises was Specialist Luke Elliott Sommer, a more senior Ranger with two combat tours behind him. He turned every brief, banal excursion — to Dairy Queen, Quiznos, a porn shop — into a teachable moment.
“Where’s our infill?” Sommer would quiz Blum — shorthand for “point of infiltration.”
“Side door by the booths.”
“Right. Red zones?”
“By the counter. From the kitchen. Behind that soft-serve thing.”
“You forgot the bathroom, Blum. Bang. You’re dead.”
So how peculiar, exactly, did the events of Aug. 7, 2006, seem to Private Blum? This is the question that Ben Blum, Alex’s cousin, is desperate to answer in “Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime.” Early that evening, Sommer came to Alex’s door. He told Alex to drive him and three others to a nearby branch of Bank of America. En route, the three passengers in the back changed into body armor; when all four men got out of the car, they were carrying assault rifles. Alex stayed in his Audi A4, driving willy-nilly before returning two minutes later. The men piled back in, $54,000 richer.
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When Alex was arrested, he insisted the robbery was simply an elaborate Ranger training exercise. He was deploying in two weeks, and in Iraq he’d be expected to carry out operations of similar corkscrew impudence: Raid dangerous spaces, flush out “high value” targets from their homes. Sommer, he explained, would never lead him on such an audacious mission without an Army-sanctioned strategic intent — and he, Alex, would never challenge the wisdom of his superiors.
It took Alex many months into his stay in prison to realize that he’d been duped by Sommer, a nut job and a pirate first class. Or so Alex claimed.
If only Ben Blum, a gloriously good writer and former computer scientist, were so easily convinced. But there were holes in his cousin’s story, small but consequential, and they rendered his defense a tattered thing. After listening to various members of the Blum family explain away Alex’s sins, the author realized that they’d all found ways to darn these holes, often with a pretty weak yarn.
Getting to the bottom of his cousin’s role in the crime became Blum’s personal mission. It meant alternately relying on and subduing his inner Spock. “Back when I was a scientist,” he explains, “subjectivity had been a manageable irritant, mere grease on the microscope lens that you wiped off as best you could before getting on with your measurements.”
But an explanation of Alex’s behavior couldn’t be rendered with the elegance of a geometric proof. There was nothing in Alex’s personal history to suggest he’d commit a crime. (Quite the opposite: Growing up, he was known for his decency, patriotism, sensitivity to those who’d been bullied.) “Ranger Games” raises bedeviling questions about the nature of human agency, and reminds us that we send everyday, messy people with everyday, messy hearts to fight our wars.
The Army Rangers had an almost mystical grip on Alex’s imagination. Yet Ben, the Blum clan’s misfit math-minded whiz kid, still feels a strange kinship with his cousin. “Like me, he perplexed those closest to him,” Blum writes of Alex. “Like me, he sustained himself with fantasies of a world that would celebrate his idiosyncrasies.” “Ranger Games” is in part a family story, about the unlikely bond between two very different cousins.
Photo
Ben Blum Credit Ned and Aya Rosen
It is also a fascinating tutorial on the psychology of modern warfare and social coercion. Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the fabled Stanford prison experiment (it revealed just how cruel ordinary people could be, given the right alignment of circumstances) even comes to Alex’s defense, going so far as to appear on “Dr. Phil” with him.
The tragicomic chapters about this episode alone are worth the price of the book. I spun through them, the pages whipping by like an old-school Rolodex. If you already detest Dr. Phil, they will shore up your conviction that he is indeed worth detesting.
Alex’s motives may be of personal interest to Blum, but the richest case study on display here — it would fit snugly into any psychological textbook — is of Sommer. He’s brilliant, seductive and dangerous, a Hannibal Lecter without the taste for human liver over fava beans. “He operated under a separate physics, madcap and consequence-free,” Blum writes. “With him you could become Donkey Kong or Cobra Commander or Wile E. Coyote, swallowing a pound of TNT and exploding and reconstituting again.”
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There’s a problem with the otherwise excellent stretch of the book devoted to analyzing Sommer. Blum frames his visits to Sommer and the soldier’s mother as fact-finding expeditions. To keep the mystery going, Blum even periodically wonders whether he should believe Sommer. It feels like a narrative feint. That Sommer is a malignant lunatic is spectacularly obvious quite early on.
Blum’s book suffers, too, from a slight engineering problem. He sometimes repeats parts of Alex’s story, ostensibly to layer them with more perspectives and information each time, but the information he adds is often insufficient to warrant the retellings. I felt like I was driving on loop-de-loops where a superhighway should be.
And I chafed at times at Blum’s depiction of the Rangers. The Ranger Indoctrination Program is undoubtedly brutal, desensitizing infantrymen to the realities of violence. But Blum also suggests, through extensive quotes from Alex, that it drains its graduates of their individuality and moral reasoning, and he never directly investigates the worst of Alex’s claims — that it would be fairly typical, say, for a returning Ranger to boast about killing a young girl and then urinating in her bullet wounds. Should such assertions just hang in the air like a bad stench?
But by the book’s end — it’s both surprising and moving — readers are likely to overlook these objections. At one point, Blum speaks to a journalist from Sommer’s hometown. “I have a stack of notes two feet high, but I don’t know how to write about it,” he told Blum. “It almost works better as a novel.”
And a memorable, novelistic account is what Blum has written.
Follow Jennifer Senior on Twitter: @JenSeniorNY
Ranger Games
A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime
By Ben Blum
412 pages. Doubleday. $28.95.