Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime

(Doubleday, $29) In the “shifting, puzzling” crime story Ben Blum recounts in his first book, a few facts are incontrovertible, said John Reimringer in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In 2006, Blum’s cousin Alex, a newly minted Army Ranger, participated in a five-man armed bank robbery organized by an Army superior and carried out a few miles from the unit’s Tacoma, Wash., base. But why a squeaky-clean 19-year-old had thrown away his future on such an escapade became a mystery that tormented the Blum family, and Ben chose to investigate. Alex’s father told him that Ranger training had brainwashed Alex. The crime’s ringleader claimed that Alex had been a willing accomplice. Alex himself insisted for months that the robbery had been a training exercise. For the reader, Ben’s attempt to vindicate his cousin eventually becomes “a rich exploration of the perils and rewards of truth seeking.”

Blum proves a “remarkably empathetic” amateur investigator, said Nancy Rommelmann in The Wall Street Journal. He captures vividly how several lives were wrecked by the crime, and he pins much of the blame on the mastermind, 20-year-old Luke Elliott Sommer. Sommer initially impressed Blum by admitting his guilt, and by claiming the robbery was an attempt to call attention to atrocities he’d witnessed while serving overseas. Before long, though, Blum concludes that Sommer is a psychopath, a person who delights in manipulating others.

Sommer can’t be given all the blame, said Stefan Beck in The Weekly Standard. “He seems, to adapt a phrase, like a stupid person’s idea of an evil genius,” and his cockamamy scheme should have been laughed off. The blame for Alex’s downfall thus belongs not with Sommer, or with Alex’s training, but with Alex. It was Alex’s appetite for glory and capacity for fantasy that impelled him to play getaway driver, just as it had led him, and many like him, to aspire to Ranger duty. Our armed forces rely on the power of those impulses; “this is a feature, not a bug.” As compelling as Ranger Games is as a family drama, it is “a hell of a lot more compelling as a reminder of what the world might look like if young men like Alex Blum had no coherent ideals to serve at all.”