________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
I should say one more thing about Ranger School. Ranger School was one of the experiences
that left its mark on me for what came later. You learn a lot in Ranger School about yourself,
about when the going gets tough how you still keep going. No matter how tired, how hungry,
you can marshal some extra reserve. There were those days when you hadn't been to sleep
for a day and you hadn't had a meal for 18, 19 hours, when you still had to exert yourself.
There were the times when you just finished an exhausting two-day problem and you knew
you were ready for and were going to get a good meal, a good breakfast, and they said before
that, though, you've got to climb a telephone pole, walk across a telephone pole mounted
horizontally above a stream. Getting there, you'd notice that there was a flat board on the
pole, but then the board stopped and you still had about 6 feet of just rounded log to cross,
and this is 25 feet in the air. Crossing that, you then had to climb a slack rope up to a taut line
that was coming back toward the start. After having that explained, all of a sudden, the
instructor pointed to me and I was the first to go.
Then when I was just about to approach the end of the flat board 25 feet up--and this,
remember, is after two days with hardly any sleep, paddling down the river--I thought I had
nothing left. As I was about to cross the rounded part of the log they threw artillery
simulators into the water and plumes of water shot up with noise. It was distracting and they
were hollering at me, and all of a sudden they said to hang from the taut line, then said,
"drop" and I went into the water.
When that was accomplished as a group, then we got breakfast. The point was just teaching
self-confidence, no matter where you are and what the circumstances. Another strong
message was that the mission needs to be accomplished. Focus on the mission; accomplish
the mission.
Another lesson, and one that's really stayed with me through the years--and one that we
preach in the Army in recent years--is that you can have very good realistic training but you
should simulate as little as possible. So, there's a great benefit to realistic training, and in
Ranger School they work hard at realistic training. If you want to take a boat and you want to
paddle a river, you do it. You don't assume the river doesn't exist or the bridge will come
forward. If you have to get across the river, you either have to bridge it or wade it or
something. I mean, you've got to do the real thing with what you've got.
So, that stayed with me as I tried to create training throughout the rest of my career. That is,
you want to make it tough, you want to make it realistic, and you ought not to let somebody
assume the problem away or simulate the problem away because certain things aren't
available. Make those things available. Make training realistic.
When I ran platoon tests three years later when I was assistant S3 of the 23d Engineers, 3d
Armored Division, we built the simulators and manufactured explosives even though they
didn't exist in training stocks so we could give somebody a device and say, "You must tie
these to the bridge and you must pull the lighter and you must go and set off the explosive,
and you must do it before you're interdicted by the aggressor. Only then do you pass." It
would have been very easy to say, "Well, you just go out there and explain how you would
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