Ranger Games

PROLOGUE

Most residents of Tacoma do not think of it as an army town. To visitors 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 council 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."
Five miles down I‑5 toward the giant blank on the map where JBLM nestles into the strip malls of Lakewood, Parkland, and Spanaway, 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 different 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

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.

"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