Equally tough standard for all Ranger candidates

EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. -- Earlier this month, 85 Ranger School students jumped out of a C-130 cargo plane and descended about 1,200 feet into Elizabeth drop zone, a wide area of sand and scrub bushes.

Along the way, two of them lost control of their ruck sacks, causing the 70-pound bundles to free-fall to the ground with a thud.

If an investigation showed it was the students' fault, they would be recycled and required to start the swamp phase from the beginning.

A good day can turn bad that fast at Ranger School, which requires students to withstand the U.S. Army's most demanding physical and mental training while somehow functioning on limited food and sleep. Just ask the platoon that was struck by lightning during patrols, causing 17 students and three instructors to be hospitalized overnight.

Amid that pressure-packed backdrop, the Army is within days of knowing if two women currently in the final phase of the school will graduate Friday at Fort Benning. An announcement is expected early this week.

The two women, both graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, began their quest on April 19 with a group of 19 females, the first ever admitted to Ranger School, which began in 1951.

Since mid-April, these women have been in an interesting numbers game, according to statistics provided by the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade.

Here is the data on the first class to include women:

The class had 400 soldiers, including 20 women. One woman was an administrative drop before training began, leaving 399 to start the physical assessment portion the school.

Of the 399 soldiers who started Ranger School, 97 of them -- all men -- have graduated and earned their Ranger tab.

Of those 97 soldiers who've already earned their Ranger tabs, just 37 of them went straight through without having to recycle or repeat a phase. Those 37 graduated on June 15.

Of the 303 soldiers from the class who haven't graduated, 35 of them ­-- including three women -- are still in the game. The two women in the Florida swamps are among the 31 soldiers currently in the final patrol phase, and the other female is among the four soldiers repeating the middle of three patrol phases in the north Georgia mountains.

Exactly 67 percent of the class -- 251 men and 17 women -- have been dropped from Ranger School so far.

The same standards

Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Matt Walker worked with the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade nearly 10 years ago before retiring in 2010 as the top enlisted infantryman at Fort Benning. Like many old Rangers, he's been watching this Ranger School class with great interest.

"Even if all of the 35 left graduate -- which I doubt -- it seems to me that would be 33 percent from a course that has a 50-year record of about 50 percent graduating," Walker said. "I think we can assume from those numbers that this wasn't a matter of anyone being given anything."

Col. David G. Fivecoat, commander of the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade based at Fort Benning, has been the officer charged with overseeing the first class to include women. He says he's insisted throughout the process that the difficult standards not be lowered in any way to make it easier for women to pass the course.

"All the women did the exact same thing as their male counterparts," Fivecoat said during the Florida phase.

The colonel then went through this litany of how the course has not changed:

"The PT test is 49 pushups, 59 situps, a 5-mile run in 40 minutes and six chin-ups. The two women you saw today had to do that twice, when they first went through in April and after they went through again after the Day 1 Recycle."

"Both the males and females had to get four out of five land navigation points in five hours. The women out there did it twice."

"They had to do a 12-mile road march with 40 pounds on their back in under three hours. All of the people you saw out there did that. The women did it twice."

"The other physical tasks that come later, the Darby Queen -- which is 20-something obstacles over a mile -- they all had to do that."

"They all did the 1.8-mile hike up Mount Yonah (in north Georgia). Everybody's backpack weighed the exact same thing and they all had to put one foot in front of another. They climbed 1,500 feet."

'Exceptionally difficult'

It was inevitable that women would eventually get the opportunity to go through Ranger School, Walker said.

"What many people don't realize is the military is an extension of society," he said. "A lot of what we do is dictated and directed by our civilian leadership and by the way things are changing in the world, whether we like it or not. It is a natural progression and a repeated process of using the military to drive social change -- desegregation, women in leadership roles, etc."

And that change does not come easy, said Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, who wrote the New York Times best seller "Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield."

"It was inevitable," Lemmon said. "Change is really difficult. Being the first is exceptionally difficult. Managing that process so that it looks like all the other processes -- only with a different group of people included -- is near impossible with this level of scrutiny."

The Army has allowed small groups of media, including the Ledger-Enquirer, Washington Post, New York Times and Christian Science Monitor, to follow the training at Fort Benning, the north Georgia mountains and the Florida swamps.

Fivecoat has managed the process, and he admits it has not been easy.

"The harder thing for me is making sure we keep the instructors completely neutral," Fivecoat said. "You don't want to add anything to the course and you don't want to take anything away from the course. That has been the tough thing with the outside pressure, to make sure the instructors are doing what they always do."

The instructors play a large role in a student's success -- or failure. They grade the students on the small-unit patrols. They can also give spot grades on the soldiers' behavior and actions.

Sgt. 1st Class Joshua Sullivan, who has been in the Army 13 years, is one of those instructors at Camp Rudder in the swamps and the final patrol phase.

"At Fort Benning they get a more raw product," Sullivan said. "So, they have to enforce a lot of small standards and discipline that by the time they get here we don't have to deal with."

By the time the students reach Florida, more than 90 percent will earn the Ranger tab.

"The ones that make it here, for the most part, you weed out all of your discipline problems, all guys who don't have the concentration or intestinal fortitude," Sullivan said. "Now you are dealing with the people who really want to be here."

The process of integrating women into Ranger School has played out for 118 days. Walker -- the retired command sergeant major -- and others have watched to see what the outcome would be. And Walker has formed an opinion on the women remaining in the school and the process.

"I am of the school of thought that they have not been given anything, except an opportunity," Walker said last week. "They have probably earned it as much as some guys who are currently wearing a tab. They have earned everything they have gotten from what I have seen."

This story was originally published August 15, 2015 at 9:43 PM with the headline "Equally tough standard for all Ranger candidates ."