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

An Amazon Best Book of September 2017: Ranger Games is a true crime novel that reads like a binge-worthy television show. Ben Blum, like most of his family, was shocked by the actions of his cousin and proud Army Ranger, Alex Blum. On a final leave before deployment, rather than going home to spend time with his family, Alex jumps in a car and drives to Tacoma, WA where he and four others (two of which he didn't know) rob a bank. Was it a training gone wrong or a cry for help yelled from a seemingly perfect exterior? Blum's deep research, crafted storytelling, and seamless writing style will have you sucked in from the start and wanting more when you finish. --Penny Mann "A gloriously good writer... Ranger Games is both surprising and moving...A memorable, novelistic account." —Jennifer Senior, 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.” —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.” — Washington Post "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 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. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PROLOGUE Most residents of Tacoma do not think of it as an army town. To visixadtors it presents as the scrappy kid sister city of Seattle, the coffee and arts mecca forty miles to the north with which it shares an airport. The notorious midcentury “Tacoma Aroma” from the paper mills has long since been filtered into submission. In its place are juice bars, outdoor supply stores, international film festivals. Every civic surface that hasn’t been given over to kayaks and totem poles bristles with the spiky, membranous studio glasswork of homegrown sculptor Dale Chihuly. The only sign of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, whose more than 50,000 personnel make it Pierce County’s largest employer by a factor of five, is the occasional Blackhawk helicopter beetling across the silhouette of Mount Rainier. In 2005, while Iraq spiraled into civil war and JBLM (then still divided into Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base) was dropping paratroopers over Afghanistan from its fleet of big-bellied C‑17 Globemaster IIIs, Tacoma’s city counxadcil entertained a proposal for a 420-foot “Tower of Peace” to rival Seattle’s iconic Space Needle. No one dared mention the base. “We want this to be really inclusive,” the tower’s leading champion told Tacoma’s News Tribune . “Let a person form in their own mind what the concept of peace is.” xa0 xa0 xa0Five miles down I‑5 toward the giant blank on the map where JBLM nestles into the strip malls of Lakewood, Parkland, and Spanxadaway, a different America fades in, one that would be instantly familiar to residents of cities with less complicated relations to their servicepeople. Yoga bows down to CrossFit. Puffy North Face jackets disappear under Carhartt work coats and military surplus camo. All those boardroom-ready Dale Chihuly pieces give way to the very difxadferent glasswork at Tacoma Pipe and Tobacco. The Patriots Landing retirement home advertises to military personnel: You served us. Now let us serve you! Halfway down a block of auto dealerships and faded clapboard churches on South Tacoma Way stands a fieldstone-clad Bank of America that is popular with soldiers for its ease of access from I‑5. The facade is glassy and generic. A bed of purplish cinders houses a row of shrubs as boxy as green Legos. In back is a parking lot accesxadsible from the alley, feeding to a bright red drive-through ATM. It is just a dreary little branch like any other, a squat corporate cipher in an unremarkable neighborhood close to base. xa0 xa0 xa0At 5:16 on the afternoon of August 7, 2006, three men ran out of its front door screaming that it was being robbed.Bank robberies come in two essential varieties. In a “nontakexadover” robbery, the bandit—still the term used for bank robbers by the FBI, which publicizes monikers like “Snub-Nosed Bandit” and “Surfer Bandit” for as-yet-unidentified repeat offenders—slips a note to a teller explaining in brief that he intends the teller harm and desires cash. Nearby customers may not find out a robbery has occurred until after it is over. xa0 xa0 xa0The bank on South Tacoma Way, crowded with the after-work rush, was an example of the much rarer and more profound disrupxadtion of a “takeover” robbery. In a matter of seconds the bank left its old function behind. Building security features designed to proxadtect the piles of $100, $50, and $20 bills from theft—thick conxadcrete walls, bulletproof Plexiglas, clear lines of sight throughout the lobby—were now tactical assets for entrenchment and defense. Tellxaders and managers who had previously spent their days in service to the smooth operation of the bank now found themselves conscripted into its defilement. xa0 xa0 xa0Meanwhile, outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, traffic continxadued to trickle by in the sleepy August sun. Two customers in turn pulled up to the drive-through ATM, inserted their debit cards, engaged in small transactions, and drove away. Those who had fled the bank had already run down the block and crossed South 60th Street to reconvene in the front office of the Mallon Ford dealership, where employees were calling the police. xa0 xa0 xa0Two minutes later, long before the police arrived, a group of men in jeans, dark sweatshirts, and ski masks emerged from the alley that led to the bank’s rear parking lot and started jogging down South 60th Street, in full view of the group at Mallon Ford. They carried a mix of AK‑47 assault rifles with wood stocks and banana clips, pistols, and duffel bags. One witness, who had happened past the bank as the robbery began and pulled her car over so her husband could run into the dealership and report what he’d seen, instinctively started driving after the gunmen, until two of them turned back and made eye contact with her through the holes in their masks. That was when she remembered that her kids were in the backseat. xa0 xa0 xa0Though it was not yet in evidence, there was, in fact, a getaway vehicle. A Mallon Ford employee by the name of Don Keegan had been unloading his company truck in the alley two minutes earlier when he noticed a silver Audi A4 turning into the continuation of the alley on the next block. Four men jumped out, pulled on ski masks, and ran toward the bank. The Audi backed out onto South 60th Street and stopped next to a sealed utility shed whose front door bore a warning about tampering with military communications systems. The license plate was unconcealed. In the driver’s seat was a nineteen-year-old kid in a T‑shirt and sunglasses. Keegan got into his truck and drove around the block. On a residential street behind the bank, he happened to pass the same Audi going the other way. The four gunmen suddenly appeared from around the corner, spotxadted the Audi, and flagged it down as they jogged toward it. The kid in sunglasses stopped to pick them up. xa0 xa0 xa0That was my cousin Alex Blum.It is hard to convey the depth of the shock my family experienced on learning that Alex had robbed a bank. It hit us like news of alien life. Alex was the most squeaky-clean, patriotic, rule-respecting kid we knew. Four months earlier he had achieved the goal he had been striving toward since he was a boy, becoming an elite Special Operations commando in the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment’s Second Battalion at Fort Lewis. In two weeks he was scheduled to deploy overseas to Baghdad, the fulfillment of his life’s greatest ambition. Money had never interested him much. His father, my uncle Norm, a successful commercial real estate broker, had offered him $20,000 if he would delay enlisting in the army for a year. Alex politely declined. xa0 xa0 xa0The question that obsessed me for almost a decade after his arrest, the question that obsessed my family too, that obsessed even Alex himself, was simple: Why? At the time of the robbery I lived in Seattle, a few short miles from Fort Lewis. I had murky, conflicted feelings about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was hard to tell what I felt about Alex’s fate other than a profound and untraceable wrongness. But the deeper I have dug into it over the years, the more it has cracked open everything I used to believe, like a fissure that turns out to go all the way to the heart of the world. Read more