Rangers Lead the Way

Man I am glad this guy is on our side.

From Men's Health:

Corporal Sprenger drew radio duty that day in company headquarters in Tal Afar, 60 miles southwest of Mosul. He felt relatively safe in the shadow of a two-story guard tower, behind barbed wire and barricades, sheltered by a 12-foot-high cinder-block wall. The front doors of the building were open to the morning air. Sprenger wore no flak jacket, no helmet.

At 4:40 a.m., he heard gunfire and suspected that it issued from neighboring buildings. But, no, it had come from the guard tower, and the bullets and barricades had failed to halt a suicidal insurgent bent on delivering 1,000 pounds of TNT to the 101st's doorstep. The bomb detonated 10 to 15 yards from where Sprenger was standing.

Knocked down and blinded by the explosion, he crawled back to his position and patted himself down for missing parts. He felt warm blood, punctured flesh, and a confused tangle of facial features. He peeled back a tattered eyelid and saw a spiderweb of lines radiating out from a bloodred center. He remembers thinking, Yes, well, we'd better let a professional deal with that one.

The eye that Corporal Sprenger sacrificed that morning, the seven units of blood he left on the walls and floor, are real costs. "Going through all that changes you," he notes, with typical understatement. For a lot of men, it would embitter or destroy them. But in Sprenger's case, it focused his vision of who he is and what he hopes to gain from his life. "People don't look far enough into the future," he says, "and gauge what's realistic for them to accomplish."

But he has. And that vision drove him to rehab his many wounds, turn down the desk job the army offered, and gear up for the most rigorous training any infantryman can endure: Ranger School.

This guy lost an eye and went on to graduate Ranger School. Somewhere there is a platonic form of toughness and this guy fits the bill.