Failing, starting over facts of life for Ranger School students

Capt. Jackson Wittkamper remembers it as one of the worst days of his life.

In 2011, Wittkamper, a Chicago native, was so close to graduating from Ranger School he could see Fort Benning’s Victory Pond and the graduation.

But the bus from Eglin to Fort Benning left without him after he failed patrols in the Florida phase.

“I helped them load the busses,” he said. “It was an emotionally low period of my life.”

Wittkamper recovered, passed the Camp Rudder phase on his next attempt, got his Ranger tab and is now back in the Florida swamps as an instructor.

His story is an important reminder as two female soldiers tackle the final phase of Ranger School. Like both of the women, Wittkamper also repeated the initial patrol phase at Camp Darby on Fort Benning, earning his tab after two recycles.

The women, both West Point graduates the Army has not identified, are trying to become the first females to earn the Ranger tab in the more than 60 years of the physically and mentally difficult training. One class was opened to women for the Army’s gender integration evaluation. There has been talk of additional Ranger School classes for women, but no announcement has been made.

Both of the women have twice recycled, or repeated a phase. Less than 30 percent of the men who enter Ranger School go straight through without a recycle. The women failed patrols at Camp Darby twice, were offered a chance to start the program over from the beginning and took it. Since June 21, the two women have passed the physical assessment, Camp Darby and the patrols at Camp Merrill in the north Georgia mountains.

A third woman, also a West Point graduate, also accepted the invitation to restart the course after twice failing patrols at Camp Darby. She failed patrols in the mountains and will retake that phase beginning this week.

All three women currently have 109 days in Ranger School, which lasts 62 days for soldiers who if go straight through the course without a recycle.

It took Capt. Matt Hepinstall, a native of Kansas City, 118 days to earn his Ranger tab. He had to repeat the Camp Darby phase then got hung up in a six-week layover to the next class because Fort Benning was hosting the Best Ranger Competition.

He said working through a recycle is difficult.

“You see who wants to be here, who wants to be a Ranger student,” he said. “... The toughest part for me was mentally. I used the time to get my mind right.”

Some students use a recycle as a break to repair themselves physically. As a recycled student waits for the next class, they remain at the camp where they failed. They continue to do their physical training, but eat three meals a day and get five or more hours of sleep a night. When students are in the patrol phases, they get only 2,200 calories of food a day and often operate at extreme sleep deficits.

Wittkamper said when you recycle, you learn a lot about yourself.

“The tendency is to make excuses and say, ‘Why me?’” he said. “Back then I thought I got the short end of the stick.”

Wittkamper failed patrols, which caused him to spend an extra month in Florida.

“Now that I am an instructor, I can go back and look at my younger self and see there was a lot I did wrong,” Wittkamper said. “... I am sure I screwed up something.”

Now that the women are at Camp Rudder and about two weeks from a possible historic graduation, Wittkamper cautions it can go south in a hurry.

“People can recycle in Florida just like they do in the mountains,” Wittkamper said. “Just because you get to Florida, you are not home free.”

This story was originally published August 5, 2015 at 7:40 PM with the headline "Failing, starting over facts of life for Ranger School students."