"Walking Away From The Ledge” The Cut List: Vol. 12. These are the stories that didn’t make the cut to the final edit in my book.
Some of these stories will jump around, but I’ll do my best not to leave you, the reader, guessing when and where they happened. We jump ahead nearly two years to returning from Iraq, and then jump some more years to other company training. What happened in between? You’ll have to buy the book for that info!
Upon returning from my first deployment to Iraq, I had some good news: the barracks were way overfilled, so they offered all E-5 (Sergeants) and above a Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) if they wanted to live off-post. I jumped at the opportunity to take it and was going to move into a room in a house that my buddy was living in with his roommate. It was $300 per month to cover everything, and I could use anything they already had in the house.
My buddy moved out to reestablish his relationship with his estranged wife, but the roommate took me on anyway, and it was a pretty good deal for me! I bought my first brand-new car, and I still miss it to this day. It was a 2004 Acura RSX Type-S with A-Spec package. Long story short, they gave me a good deal because I told them I didn’t want that one. I would learn years later that I had, in fact, gotten a great deal, as I met another guy who had one, and he had paid a little over $ 32,000 for it in Texas.
You should have seen his face when I told him I paid about $ 27,000, all said and done. You could’ve driven his car in the space from his dropped jaw. Years later, the car and I would part ways for the “family-mobile”, but I enjoyed every minute I owned “Jasmine 2.” Jasmine 1 was my 1996 Firebird Formula. That was a sweet ride, too, but there’s something that just brings a smile to your face when you're stomping on the gas pedal and taking each gear to an 8,000 rpm redline. It even paced with my buddies’ ‘03 Mach 1! Good days, great cars. Talk all the smack about a V-TEC engine all you want, they’re fun rides!
Talking about the BNCOC MTT course I attended at Fort Bragg in 2006; Of course we learned so much about leadership, counseling, combat and convoy operations, shoot, move, communicate and that entire sentence is bullshit! We learned what all of us knew already, how to endure sitting through a bunch of pointless shit and useless training. The Army has many mottos, one of which is “train as you fight,” which it rarely lives up to, unless you are part of Special Ops communities.
Most the time we train as the senior leader sees fit and is at the safest possible denominator so they can say “look what I did and accomplished” get a fucking pat on the head, get promoted and move on to annoy the ever-living shit out of other people. Laugh all you want, but that is a fucking fact! I apologize for all the expletives, but if General Patton saw army leadership of today or in the past 15-20 years, he’d be rolling in his grave. He’d pull off his glove and slap the shit out of all of them and probably challenge them to a duel. They would deserve it.
I’m not wasting any time on BNCOC, as it was a waste of time itself, so I won’t bore you with any more details. It is good therapy for me to relive it, though. It shows me how much bullshit I have blocked and moved past to continue the mission and look out for the Soldiers in my care. That’s what is truly important; you could ask anyone who worked directly for me what they thought.
They would tell you something that I instilled pride in them as being on the best team in the company while encouraging and empowering them to become the best version of themselves at work and away, setting a standard that we were the best and not to be fucked with! During all our training, my reign of proving we were the best by rubbing it in the faces of the other platoons was second to none.
We had a company-wide LRS competition, and some of my team members were away on various training sessions, so I had a ragtag group thrown together with only one of my team members. Given that I had been with the company for nearly six years at this point, I was determined to prove that we were the best, but one brand-new private couldn’t cut the mustard.
We started the competition with the Nasty Nick obstacle course, which SF used as part of their assessment for Soldiers desiring to earn the coveted Green Beret and join the ranks of Special Forces. I had run the course one time before, so I knew there were a bunch of ropes to climb, but all in all, I don’t think it was any more or less challenging than the Darby Queen of Ranger School.
This Private couldn’t climb a rope to save his life, let alone complete most of the obstacles, so after trying to motivate him by channeling my inner R. Lee Ermey from “Full Metal Jacket,” I accepted a low score for our team. It wasn’t looking like we were going to win the competition.
There were also some road marches, surveillance, and other tasks interspersed throughout the competition. We had to do some fast roping from a Blackhawk, which was fairly common training for us. FRIES (Fast Rope Insertion and Extraction System) and SPIES (Special Insertion Extraction System) were utilized during training whenever possible, making it a welcome break from the competition. Did we ever do them in combat? Nope. No HALO jumps in combat either, but we were well trained and prepared on both, back to the dumbass Private.
On the final day, we were to move to the Rally Point (RP), where all the teams would meet up and have a big company barbecue upon completion. The only catch was that we had a corridor of a route to stick to, and there were unfriendly forces along the way; don’t get compromised, or it’s an automatic loss.
This Private didn’t have one tactical bone in his body! Huffing and puffing the entire way, tripping over anything and everything, bumping into trees, breaking the branches when he would bump into them and finally, the straw that broke my back, when we paused to take a rest, he flopped down with a loud thud and exhale while we were within 100 meters of one of these unfriendly forces!
In my complete rage, I reached up, grabbed him by his ruck shoulder strap, pulled him off the ground, and put his ear right next to my face and tactically yelled at him that if he made another unnecessary noise out there and got us compromised, I’d bury him out there and claim he wandered off alone and I hadn’t seen him for hours! Not one more fuckin peep was heard for this dipshit. He should’ve been a PAC clerk behind the desk.
Competition complete, I was surprised to find out we came in third, but that didn’t matter at all. The second loser was no consolation prize for me. If I’d had my team, my real team, we’d have crushed that competition and rubbed it in every nose for the next week. Win some, lose some.
Want to know more about some of these situations? You’ll have to get the book “Walking Away From The Ledge" for more details! If this story hit home—or reminded you of your own service—drop a comment below or share it with someone who might need it.
https://www.veteranscrisisline.net/
https://books.by/w-brand-publishing/walking-away-from-the-ledge
