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

by Ben Blum

Overview

Intricate, heartrending, and morally urgent, Ranger Games is a crime story like no other
 
Alex Blum was a good kid, a popular high school hockey star from a tight-knit Colorado family. He had one goal in life: endure a brutally difficult selection program, become a U.S. Army Ranger, and fight terrorists for his country. He poured everything into achieving his dream. In the first hours of his final leave before deployment to Iraq, Alex was supposed to fly home to see his family and beloved girlfriend. Instead, he got into his car with two fellow soldiers and two strangers, drove to a local bank in Tacoma, and committed armed robbery... 
     The question that haunted the entire Blum family was:  Why?  Why would he ruin his life in such a spectacularly foolish way?
     At first, Alex insisted he thought the robbery was just another exercise in the famously daunting Ranger program.  His attorney presented a case based on the theory that the Ranger indoctrination mirrored that of a cult. 
     In the midst of his own personal crisis, and in the hopes of helping both Alex and his splintering family cope, Ben Blum, Alex’s first cousin, delved into these mysteries, growing closer to Alex in the process.  As he probed further, Ben began to question not only Alex, but the influence of his superior, Luke Elliot Sommer, the man who planned the robbery. A charismatic combat veteran, Sommer’s manipulative tendencies combined with a magnetic personality pulled Ben into a relationship that put his loyalties to the test.      

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525528128
Publisher:	Diversified Publishing
Publication date:	09/12/2017
Edition description:	Large Print
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Ranger Games"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Ben Blum.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Book 1 The Golem of Tacoma

Chapter 1 Sort of a Happy/Sad Deal 7

Chapter 2 Basic 34

Chapter 3 Amurican Bank Robber 54

Chapter 4 One Fine Day at Battalion 63

Chapter 5 Yes, Specialist Sommer 74

Chapter 6 Those Who Are Versed in the Sciences 90

Chapter 7 Something You Would See Out of a Movie 103

Chapter 8 Federal Vacation 111

Book 2 The Prodigy Of Peachland

Chapter 9 Soldier 125

Chapter 10 Interrogation 135

Chapter 11 Freedom Fighter 143

Chapter 12 The Fourth Man 153

Book 3 The Good Person

Chapter 13 The B-Word 171

Chapter 14 Just an Inexplicable Event 189

Chapter 15 The Complexities 201

Chapter 16 The Phabulous Phils 218

Chapter 17 Getting Real 228

Chapter 18 Real Real 248

Book 4 The Dungeon Master

Chapter 19 When Bad People Do Good Things 259

Chapter 20 Space Station Sommer 273

Chapter 21 Total Data 290

Chapter 22 The Sommer Factor 302

Chapter 23 Force of Personality 316

Chapter 24 The Lady in the Striped Shirt 322

Chapter 25 The P-Word 334

Chapter 26 Probably Something I'll Never Understand 356

Book 5 Freedom

Chapter 27 Matrix of Lies 367

Chapter 28 Birth of a Bank Robber 384

Chapter 29 The Rest of Us 393

Author's Note 409

Acknowledgments 411

Editorial Reviews

…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…Ranger Games is in part a family story, about the unlikely bond between two very different cousins. It is also a fascinating tutorial on the psychology of modern warfare and social coercion…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 [Luke Elliott] Sommer. He's brilliant, seductive and dangerous, a Hannibal Lecter without the taste for human liver over fava beans.

The New York Times - Jennifer Senior

★ 05/29/2017
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, William Morris Endeavor. (Sept.) Correction: An earlier version of this review listed the incorrect literary agency.

Publishers Weekly

ONE OF THE STRANGER'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

"A gloriously good writer...Ranger Games is both surprising and moving...A memorable, novelistic account."
—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times 

“Saga and social science both, a riveting exploration of the codes of conduct by which men are meant to comport themselves, the lengths to which we go to forge identity, and how far the stories we tell can be stretched before they become prisons of our own making… Blum is remarkably empathetic, offering heartbreaking portraits… If [he] begins as the odd piece in the family puzzle, his precise, exhaustive and sympathetic work proves both deeply salutary and in step with the logistician’s mind.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Captivating… a riveting exploration of the malleability of memory and the stories we choose to tell — to others and to ourselves… Blum is as gifted with language as he is with numbers, and Ranger Games is an extraordinary book, a thrilling, bumpy journey into the complexities of the mind, with its capacity to protect and betray — often within the very same moment…Surprisingly poignant.”
—The Washington Post

“An uncompromising search for the truth and a stirring testament to the healing power of writing…. Surprising and cathartic.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Finely written and reported…. Surprising.”
—Chicago Tribune

“A triumph of subtle reportage…. An unsettling dissection of the moral corruptions, small and great, that bedevil the culture of military honor.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A vigorous, empathetic chronicle of a crime.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"On a simple level, Ranger Games is about Ben Blum’s obsessive quest to understand why his 19-year-old cousin participated in an inexplicable, ham-handed bank robbery that landed him in prison and nearly destroyed the people he loved. But there is nothing simple about Blum’s book. It turns out to be a labyrinthine, utterly engrossing meditation on matters as seemingly disparate as the perils of loyalty, the seductive force of mathematical certainty, the toxicity of “honor,” the Stanford Prison Experiment, the weirdness of daytime television, and the dangerous power of family mythology. It is an astonishing book, unlike anything else I have ever read."
—Jon Krakauer, New York Times bestselling author of Missoula and Into Thin Air

"Ranger Games is a rare and totally original work of nonfiction. The odd characters and dangerous situations live vibrantly in these pages and the stakes are always high. Ben Blum's search for truth leads him down many paths into an inner turmoil and boil about family, fidelity, identity, good and evil, and military service. Once you start reading you won't put it down."
—Anthony Swofford, New York Times bestselling author of Jarhead and Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir

From the Publisher

08/01/2017
Blum's debut book sheds light on a romantic vision of war. In 2006, the author's 19-year-old cousin Alex was a promising army ranger—until he participated in an armed robbery of a Bank of America along with his superior Luke Elliott Sommer and three acquaintances. The underlying question for all involved: Why? Was Alex the victim of brainwashing or a hoax? Blum follows Alex's attempts to rebuild his life after losing friends, housing, and work because of his felony status. He interviews numerous relatives, such as Alex's dad, Norm, who supported his son even as his own marriage crumbled. Blum also questions Sommer, who experienced PTSD after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The author successfully interweaves his own family's complicated relationship with mental illness, race, and privilege into the recounting of Sommer's psychiatric history. After finding inconsistencies in Alex's and Sommer's stories, Blum isn't sure of his own truth and doesn't expect readers to be either. VERDICT A detailed, sobering account of people doing what they believe is right in the face of injustice. For fans of biographies, military stories, true crime, and podcasts such as Serial and S-Town.—Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

Library Journal

What would incite an Army Ranger with a spotless record and boundless potential to rob a bank and throw his career away? That’s the question Ben Blum sets out to answer in this outstanding piece of personal journalism about his cousin Alex, who committed this inexplicable crime. Narrator Johnathan McClain’s pacing is ideal. He carries the narrative briskly along, using more intensity when needed but without slipping into melodrama. He provides subtle vocal shifts for the various characters, including a passable Canadian accent for Blum’s partner in crime, a British Columbia–born Ranger who incited the robbery. Ultimately, Blum is unable to provide definitive answers, but he asks challenging questions about the way elite soldiers are trained. D.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

2017-06-13
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 à 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.

Kirkus Reviews