ROGUE WARRIOR
Training to be an Army Ranger turned Alex Blum into an ‘angry shell’ and also, possibly, a bank robber
AFTER pouring hot sauce into his eyes to keep himself awake no longer worked, Army Pfc. Alex Blum began snorting chewing tobacco. When that failed, he cut his earlobe with a knife.
Still, after being pushed to strenuous physical activity for over 30 hours, he could barely keep his eyes open.
The months he spent training to be an Army Ranger tormented him physically and psychologically, and left him changed as a person. They may even have turned him into a bank robber.
That’s the claim of a new book “Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime” (Doubleday), written by Alex’s cousin Ben Blum — who describes how a good kid with a dream to serve his country made a rapid descent into criminality.
Born in 1987 and raised in Colorado, Alex was a “squeaky-clean, patriotic, rule-respecting kid” who always wanted to be a soldier. He devoured the World War II book “Band of Brothers” in fifth grade, and seeing “Saving Private Ryan” at age 11 honed his ambition.
As a teen, he wanted to be a Ranger: a member of the Army’s elite Special Forces unit. So after graduating high school in 2005, Alex reported for basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia.
The five-month session was hell. Once, Alex witnessed a drill sergeant place an icecream sandwich — which privates were forbidden to eat — on a private’s plate and order him to consume it. When he did, the sergeant reamed him out, calling him a “s--t head,” and commanded him to go running until he puked up the sandwich. The sergeant then tried this with another private, who refused — so the sergeant forced the entire platoon to stop eating and go outside for calisthenics. Then the private was forced to eat an entire box of ice-cream sandwiches and run until he puked them up.
“The nonstop, continuous negative reinforcement erases any and all self-confidence you once had,” Alex wrote to Ben. “You firmly believe that you can’t do anything right . . . you believe that you are incompetent and unworthy of anything.”
By the time he spent Christmas at home, Alex could only communicate in “monosyllables and grunts,” writes Ben.
STILL, Alex returned to Fort Benning for four weeks of the Ranger Indoctrination Program — known by its omi- nous initials, RIP. The program is designed to weed out the weak, as only a small percentage of participants make it into the Rangers. “The atmosphere was chaotic, alive with threat. Ranger instructors [were] creeping up behind candidates and saying ‘c--t’ into their ears in intimate, terrifying voices,” Ben wrote.
During the middle of the program’s second week, his unit was bused out to al and navigation course for a 2¹/2- day exercise, which sounds like the plot of a horror film.
Alex and his fellow privates were ordered to run a quarter-mile to retrieve large bundles of wood while wearing heavy packs and dressed only in cotton fatigues, in temperatures just above freezing. They would repeat this over and over, stopping only to be disciplined with exercises like crawling through a fire-ant-infested pond.
Almost 24 hours after they began, trainees were told they could finally sleep, only to be woken five minutes later for another quarter-mile trek. Allowed to change into dry clothing after working in soaking-wet conditions for a full day, they were ordered into a pond five minutes later. At one point, as they were forced to do flutter kicks in a pond, they watched “five drill sergeants urinate in the water.”
Alex threw up several times during the exercise, then continued on, caked in vomit.
It was during the second day that Alex resorted to using Tabasco as eye drops. He was experiencing hallucinations of his girlfriend from back home. When he removed his socks and boots that night, he wrote, “My feet were missing patches of skin and my toes were bleeding.”
By the end of Ranger training, Alex once wrote, he was a changed man, and not for the better. “Before I joined the Army, I was vibrant, funny, easygoing, loving and independent. When I got my tan beret, I was a shell. I was an angry, testosterone-driven prick . . . I was unable to value human life.”
ALEX reported to the 75th Ranger Regiment, 2nd Battalion, stationed at Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Wash., in April 2006. There, the sadistic chaos of training was replaced by a stark professionalism, as his battalion prepared for its upcoming threemonth deployment to Baghdad.
On the first day, Spc. Luke Elliott Sommer, only a year Alex’s senior but already a veteran of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, invited new privates to a local bar. Sommer shared stories of his deployments and gave advice such as, “You’re with the best of the best now. But you have to play it smart. It’s a political game.”
Alex was entranced; once he was assigned to Sommer’s gun team, he had found a mentor.
Learning more about the tactical elements of their job, including infiltrating buildings, gave the privates a new perspective. Now every building was evaluated as a hypothetical target.
“At nights and on weekends, they ventured into Tacoma with new eyes,” Ben writes. “Every door was a potential breach point, every bar counter a red zone concealing hidden gunmen, every Denny’s dining room partitioned into lines of fire.”
Even after Alex was assigned a new team leader, he and Sommer still hung out. The senior officer would “toss a pistol to Blum or one of the other privates he was tight with and call ‘suicide check.’ The requirement then was to point it at your head and pull the trigger. To examine the chamber first was an insult, forbidden.”
On Aug. 3, 2006, Alex drove Sommer to the local Bank of America, where the latter had an account. “Afterward,” Ben writes, “[Alex] charted out on a napkin how a Ranger team would hit the place, trying his best to impress the specialist with his tactical acuity.”
It worked. Sommer made it clear that he wanted to pull off the robbery. Later, Alex would claim he believed it was a training
[Alex] charted out on a napkin how a Ranger team would hit the bank, trying his best to impress.
exercise and didn’t realize the robbery was real until it was already in progress.
On Aug. 7, Alex drove Sommer, a private named Chad Palmer and two of Sommer’s friends, Tigra Robinson and Nathan Dunmall, to the bank.
As Alex remained in the car, the others stormed the bank wearing ski masks. Palmer and Dunmall guarded the doors wielding AK-47s, while Sommer and Robinson collected the money.
Sommer ordered the tellers to fill a canvas bag with “fifties and hundreds, no dye packs, no bait money, no serialized bills . . . ‘If this bag isn’t full in one minute, you’re all gonna get wasted,’ [Sommer] explained to the tellers, emphasizing the point with his gun.”
After collecting $53,000, the four men ran into an alley. Still masked and with guns drawn in broad daylight, they expected to find Alex waiting for them in his Audi.
But he had panicked and started driving, alone, back to the base. Alex quickly realized he was driving the wrong way and after making a U-turn, spotted his friends. Figuring he must have been driving down the street to turn around, the four ran to the car and made their getaway.
Later, they divided the money, taking $10,000 each and leaving $3,000 for collaborators who helped procure the weapons.
THE five were arrested fairly quickly. Alex was charged with conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery and brandishing a firearm. Sommer would receive 24 years for those charges plus armed bank robbery and possession of an unregistered destructive device.
Incarcerated at the SeaTac Federal Detention Center in Washington state, Alex initially claimed the robbery was part of a military exercise. For the first eight months, he continued working out (in secret, since it wasn’t allowed), believing that his superiors would come and spring him at any time.
In truth, his fellow Rangers had already cleared out his room, stealing most of his stuff, and the Army had set into motion dishonorable discharges for the convicted soldiers. After serving 16 months, Alex got off with time served. His Ranger dream ruined, he has since worked various jobs around his hometown.
Sommer is currently incarcerated at USP Big Sandy, a high-security federal prison in Kentucky.
After years of pressing the issue, Ben got his cousin to admit that he had known more than he let on about the crime.
“[The] truth is this. I had full knowledge of the robbery before it happened,” Alex said. “I did help plan some of it, and I knew what we were doing.
In the end, it seemed, male ego had played a part. “I didn’t want to seem like I was a p--y in front of Sommer,” Alex said. “I didn’t want to show him I was afraid.”