Sua Sponte by Dick Couch

Author:Dick Couch [Couch, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101585085
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

Week eight—graduation week. For the weary candidates of Class 09-10, it’s a week many felt would never come. There are forty-four of them, down a man from the previous week. The third of the class NCOs, a sergeant who was a Phase Two insert with Cory Sadler, left on emergency leave. His wife was hospitalized due to a traffic accident on Friday afternoon of the previous week. He was torn between staying or leaving, but the Phase Two cadre unhesitatingly made the decision for him: Go be with your wife. The accident took place Friday afternoon in New Orleans, where she was hospitalized, and there were no available flights out of Columbus to New Orleans that day. A cadre sergeant and a vehicle were immediately dispatched to drive him to New Orleans to be with his wife. Rangers take care of their own, even Ranger candidates.

Monday morning, the class forms up at 0600 for the Ranger Physical Fitness Test. Here again, the Ranger standard is 80 percent or better of the Army Physical Fitness Test maximums for push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups in two minutes, and for the two-mile run. Failing to achieve any of the minimum repetitions on the exercises or the minimum time on the run is to fail the Ranger PT test. All forty-four pass the two-mile run at the Stewart-Watson track, with the two-mile class best of eleven minutes and twenty seconds. The other top scores were 18 pull-ups, 98 sit-ups, and 87 push-ups. Eight candidates score over 300, which is considered outstanding. However, three men fail to meet the 80 percent standard in one of the exercises—one in push-ups, one in pull-ups, and one in sit-ups. They will be given a retest later in the week. If they fail that test, even by a single pull-up or push-up, they’ll be dropped and/or made to appear before the board. Following the PT test, the class heads for the Peden classroom.

The first half of graduation week is punctuated by a series of lectures and presentations, including an ethics brief, a brief on antiterrorism, and an overview of the Ranger Family Support Group. They are also given the ImPACT. The ImPACT is a neuropsychological battery of tests designed to provide a baseline for concussion-related injuries. It was developed to track head injuries in sports and is now also used to track the violence visited on our Rangers in combat. There’s also an in-depth service record review to ensure that those who graduate from RASP have up-to-date service and medical records. The only PT evolution is the end-of-RASP RAW assessment to evaluate the improvement, or degradation, of Ranger combat fitness that may have taken place during RASP. My personal assessment of these almost-Rangers is that they are all a great deal stronger than when they began RASP. Yet they may not have fully recovered from the daily grind that is RASP 1 for the RAW assessment to be a valid measure of their combat physical fitness. The only evolution of a training nature is the fast-rope orientation.

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