DIDN'T EVEN NEED IT
2/75. American Lake. Night time.
Every man has a phobia.
I believe this completely. Any man who tells you he doesn’t have one is lying — to you, or to himself, or he just hasn’t met it yet. But it’s in there. Heights. Tight spaces. Public speaking. Something. The hardest Delta operator, the loudest guy at the gym, the suburban office worker golf guy with the Rolex who says he isn’t afraid of anything — yes the fuck you are. Every one of you. Somewhere deep down in the dark there is a thing lurking with your name on it.
And in the Regiment, you are simply not allowed to have one.
That is not written anywhere. It doesn’t need to be. You are a Ranger, and Rangers do not have phobias, and the job itself makes sure the question gets asked. This is the one profession on earth that is built, almost by design, to find your deepest fear, pull it out of you, and put it on display in front of everybody. Afraid of heights? Here’s a fast rope. Tight spaces? Crawl under that. Crawl inside of that. Don’t like being shot at? Too bad. The machine finds the thing you are most afraid of and then expects you to work at operating temperature while it is happening.
And if you can’t, you’re gone.
Here is the thing about me. Even by Ranger standards, I was considered a wild man. The partier. The guy who knew where the girls were and where the fight was going to be — Alpha Company kept a running joke about the “official Alpha Company bar fighting team,” and I was on the roster. I had been that guy my whole life. A wild city kid — breaking into old abandoned buildings to climb up on the roofs, running the streets, doing graffiti, jumping off of things just to feel it. You could study me from any angle you wanted and never once suspect I was afraid of anything.
And by this point, there was nothing left for me to prove. A year and a half in Battalion. Tab on my shoulder. A combat deployment behind me — the real thing, not the brochure. I had done the whole Ranger deal, start to finish, and passed every test the Regiment had put in front of me. I was proven. Salty, even. Exactly the man the machine is supposed to produce.
And nobody — not one man in that battalion, not my team leader, not the guys I fought beside — had any idea that deep down inside me, in a place I had never shown a single living soul, I was absolutely terrified. Horrifically, anxiety-ridden terrified, at even the thought of jumping into that lake in the middle of the night.
I am terrified of deep water.
Thalassophobia is the clinical word. I learned it later. At the time it didn’t have a name — it was just a thing that lived in me — lives in me still — old and patient, and I know exactly where it came from. A pond at summer camp when I was little, and a snapping turtle that took a chunk out of my foot. The Chesapeake Bay when I was maybe eight or nine, the sun going down, my foot caught in a piece of wire off an old crab trap hidden under the surface. I was twenty feet from the beach. The water was maybe four feet deep. Nothing happened. I got loose. And it didn’t matter that nothing happened, because the water had already told me what it wanted me to know: there are things down here you cannot see, and they can GET you.
Dark, wild water. That is the fear. Not swimming. Water — the kind with no walls, no bottom you can see, no telling what is underneath you.
And here is why nobody ever knew: I am an excellent swimmer. I lifeguarded through school. You cannot even get into the Regiment without being one — Indoc runs its own water survival gauntlet, an all-day beating of a swim test, ditching gear underwater and recovering it, a harassment swim in full kit with instructors fighting you the whole way down the pool. Outstanding athletes fail it and go home. Everyone who makes it through is a strong swimmer, and Battalion keeps you that way — pool PT in a legitimate Olympic-size pool, hauling kit off the bottom, treading water with a rifle held over your head. Being a fish isn’t a bonus in the Regiment. It’s a requirement.
So the fear had perfect camouflage. The better I performed in the water, the less anyone would think to look. A pool is a box — lit, walled, floored, chlorinated. You can see the bottom. Skill works in a box.
The fear was never about the box.
Every Ranger battalion has its signature, the thing geography hands it. Ours, at 2/75, was water jumps into American Lake — the big natural lake sitting right there on post. All the battalions do water jumps. We did ours like this: Chinooks, ramp down, PT uniform and boots, a B-7 flotation device rigged under your arms and around your ribs with CO2 canisters — pull the latch, the bladders inflate, you bob. You hit the water, fight out of your chute, and Zodiacs run the recovery, snatching men out of the lake one by one.
In the summer, in the daytime, this is one of the great perks of the job. You jump into a lake on a hot day, the boats collect everybody, and because we are Rangers — special operations, a real budget, cooler toys than the regular Army — there is a barbecue waiting on the beach. A hundred and twenty Rangers standing around a lake drinking beer and eating grilled meat in the Washington sun. If you’re a private, you’re off on the miserable detail of shaking out soaked parachutes. If you have your tab, you’re on the beach. Regular units do not live like this. On a summer day, it is about as good as the Army gets.
And I had done it once before — a daytime jump, blazing hot, the water crystal clear. I could see. I could orient. I held the anxiety down the whole way, quiet, controlled, until the boat took me, and I let it wash out of me on the ride in. Alright. Made it through that. Just another part of being in the Regiment.
But clear water in daylight was never my fear. My fear had simply not been scheduled yet.
Then they scheduled it.
Night water jump. And not just night — blackout. No moon. Overcast, fog sitting on the water. Black in a way that has layers to it. The night is black. The bird is black. Our uniforms are black. The lake is black. The only color in the entire world is the matte yellow of the B-7 strapped around my ribs.
The Chinook does what a Chinook does — that humming, whining roar, the red lights on inside, the ramp down and the black rushing past beyond it. And here’s the thing: I like jumping. Jumping sits squarely inside the adrenaline-junkie profile I had spent my whole life building. My heart rate is up, but my heart rate is always up in the door. We stand up. We hook up. We go.
Nice easy jump. Canopy opens. The water comes up out of the black.
Boom.
I hit the lake. The chute comes down somewhere behind me. The bird’s roar leans away across the water and fades, and the silence it leaves behind is enormous.
I am bobbing in the middle of American Lake, at night, in fog, and I cannot see anything. Not the shore. Not another jumper. Not my own hand past a certain distance. Not — and this is the one that matters — down. There is no down. There is just black water against my body and more black underneath it, going who knows where.
I pull the latches on the B-7.
One bladder inflates.
One.
Now the thing designed to hold me upright is holding me wrong — canted, topsy-turvy, one side buoyant and one side dead — and I am tilted over in the water fighting my own flotation while the chute drags wet and heavy somewhere around me, and I have to get out of it, out of the harness, clear of the canopy, and my hands are working and my brain is starting to come off the rails. Because I know what is happening to me. It is the pond. It is the crab wire. It is every dark thing under every dark surface my whole life, and it has finally caught me exactly where it always said it would — alone, at night, in deep wild water.
I clear the chute.
And this is the part nobody tells you. The chute — the thing that can drown you, the thing you are fighting to escape — is also the only thing supporting you. The second you are free of it, the support is gone. All of it. Now it is just you, suspended in black water, one bladder under one arm, tilted, and underneath you is a depth you do not know. Could be hundreds of feet. You have no idea. There is no bottom because there is no seeing, and no seeing means the water can be anything it wants.
I am panicking. Not around the edges. The real thing, coming up from underneath like the cold.
And then, through it, the training surfaces one word: chem light.
We carry IR chems — fireflies, we call them. Crack one and it barely glows to the naked eye, a dark purple you can hardly find in your own hand. But under night vision it burns like a star. There is a little string on it. You crack it, you hold it up, you spin it.
So that is me. A wild man Ranger with a tab and a combat deployment behind him, tilted sideways in a black lake, spinning a light I cannot see on a string over my head, on pure faith that somewhere out in the fog, someone wearing NODs is looking at a brilliant star where I am looking at nothing.
And then I hear it. Way off in the dark. The deep throbbing rumble of a Zodiac at idle.
Then the rumble climbs. The motor wails up into high gear and the sound comes rushing at me across the water — I cannot see the boat, there is no boat to see, there is just the fog and the wail and the whoosh of water peeling off a hull, getting louder and louder, aimed directly at me.
The procedure is this: dominant arm up, flexed, like a bodybuilder hitting a pose, firefly in your fist. The boat beelines at you, offset just enough. And they take you at speed. Hands come down out of the dark and grab you, and the boat’s momentum does the rest — a miniature car crash, the impact slamming you against the hull and then carrying you up and over, ten sets of hands hauling you across the gunwale ass over tea kettle onto the deck, the coxswain hammering the brakes and throwing the motor into reverse, the boat wallowing back on its own wake. Then everybody scrambles to drag your soaked chute out of the water, the boat swings its nose toward the next man’s star, the engine high-idles, holds —
Wham. Full throttle. Next guy.
Man after man, star after star, and every Ranger who comes crashing in over the side, you slide one tick further back in the boat, until the lake is empty and the boat turns for shore.
Middle of the night. The beach. Guys crowded together in the dark, dripping, the boats coming in behind us.
My team leader comes up. Ray Castillo. My team leader, and my friend — those were the same thing more often than people think. Big grin on his face. I can feel it in the dark before I can see it.
“Hell yeah, man. I love night jumps. What do you think?”
And I take it — all of it. The dead bladder. The tilt. The black under my boots going down forever. The panic coming up like cold water from below. The nine-year-old with the wire around his ankle. I take all of it and I sink it down inside me, down to the place where it has always lived, the place no one has ever seen.
And I give him the big wild man smile.
“Shit, my vest only half worked. Didn’t even need it.”
🔥