clogging Routes 322 and 26 with thousands of family campers. For the next forty-eight hours, the Nittany Lion fanatics will overrun the secluded campus town, choking the restaurants and blitzing the bars as they frolic along College and Beaver Avenues, reliving the best years of their adolescence, back when the object of getting drunk was to have fun, rather than to dull the senses just to ease the pain of adulthood.
Or maybe it’s that State College is about as far as one could be from the ocean, from Special Ops, and from Rocky Jackson.
The thought of his ex-fiancee causes the bile to rise to Gunnar’s parched throat. Restarting the tractor, he grinds the ancient gears and shifts the plow into first.
Gunnar finishes a row and turns, aiming the rickety bucket of bolts in the direction of the barn. Cutting the dried fields yields the hay they will need for the cows’ feed mix, enough to get them through the looming winter. Years, months, hours, days … there are no days off for the dairy farmer. Dawn greets Gunnar each morning in the milking parlor, where he cleans the cow’s teats with an iodine-and-water solution before hooking each animal up to the milking machine. It takes the machine five minutes to drain a cow’s udder. If organized right, the five machines could finish the entire herd in just under two hours. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty … one hundred and twenty cows, each cow producing six gallons of milk a day. Six gallons, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four … the collected milk runs through an FDA-approved tube directly into a temperature-controlled tank, to be transferred to a refrigerated tanker truck that delivers the product to any one of several local processing plants. Milk the cows twice a day, then keep them moving from one grazing field to the next, supervising six and a half hours of their eating and drinking, all the while maintaining a strict breeding schedule for each member of the herd.
Gunnar is thankful for the busy days, the work helping to keep his mind off alcohol. He had never been much of a drinker, not during his college years, and never during the Army’s Special Forces training.
Hooah.
It was only after leaving prison that he had turned to booze.
A year of living on the streets, a year of waking up in his own piss and vomit. Hitting bottom and lying in it, still full of anger and guilt, he had finally found his way back to his father’s farm. Two months in a treatment center, a lifetime commitment to Alcoholics Anonymous, and a busy schedule had allowed him to piece together an existence, one day at a time. But the hurt was still there, always festering just below the surface.
The irony of his life is something Gunnar Wolfe grapples with daily.
As a child, Gunnar had always been afraid of challenges. An introvert, he rarely allowed himself to compete in sports, though laboring on his father’s farm had developed his physique beyond those of his peers. While his father encouraged his only child to follow in his footsteps, his mother pushed him to get more out of life. She encouraged him to read, and bought him a steady supply of inspiring adventure stories. She drove him to a gym and hired a trainer. She enrolled him in karate and pushed him to play high school sports, where he earned All-State honors in football and basketball.
Slowly but surely, the blossoming adolescent began to come out of his shell.
It was the tragedy of his mother’s death that ultimately changed Gunnar’s life. Two weeks after the funeral, the eighteen-year-old Penn State freshman announced that he was switching majors, from agriculture to engineering. Harlan Wolfe, upon learning of his son’s “blasphemous” decision, threatened to cut off all tuition money, prompting Gunnar to join Penn State’s ROTC program, affording him the opportunity to live on campus.
In Gunnar’s sophomore year, his old high school coach urged him to try out for football, the lonely teen surprising everyone by earning a spot as a fourth-string tight end. By his junior year, he had moved up to second string, his last-minute touchdown catch against Michigan State helping the Nittany Lions to another bowl appearance.
It was also during his junior year that Gunnar attended the U.S. Army’s Airborne School. ROTC training was nothing compared to his first taste of true Army discipline. For three long weeks he endured hours of seemingly endless running and calisthenics, the grueling exercises sandwiched between the finest parachute training on the planet.
Gunnar hated heights. Static-line jumping from a C-141 into eleven hundred feet of total blackness was more frightening beforehand than fearsome in the doing. His relief after the fifth and last jump was almost embarrassing.
By summer football camp of his senior year, Gunnar was a different person. Gone was the last trace of the timid farm boy, in its place—a focused athlete with a warrior’s mentality. The coaches noticed, too, promoting the two-hundred-and-forty pound walk-on to the first-team, awarding him a full scholarship. Though Penn State would fall short of a repeat Rose Bowl appearance, Gunnar would receive second-team all-American honors, and was considered by many pro football scouts as a second- or third-round draft pick.
The NFL would have to wait.
Four years after his mother’s death, Gunnar Wolfe stood in uniform at his graduation, prepared in body and mind to attend the sixteen-week Infantry Officer Basic Course (IOBC, Second Battalion, Eleventh Infantry Regiment) at Fort Benning, Georgia. Coach Joe Paterno filled in for Gunnar’s estranged father, Harlan, who stubbornly refused to attend the ceremony.
The Infantry Officer Basic Course is designed to produce the world’s best infantry lieutenants. In essence, it is a war-fighting course, every aspect of training intended to prepare the newly commissioned officer for combat. IOBC training has zero tolerance for anything less than a total physical and mental commitment to excellence.
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Sixteen weeks. One hundred twelve long days of being tired, wet, and hungry. For Gunnar, it was just a preview of to what lay ahead.
Ranger School.
It takes a special breed to make it in the United States Army’s Special Forces, and the Rangers are considered the junkyard dogs of the SOF community. Masters of special light infantry operations on land, sea, and in the air, their origins can be traced back to the early 1670s, when the Rangers of Captain Benjamin Church helped end the Indian Conflict of King Phillip’s War. Years later, five hundred Rangers, known as Morgan’s Riflemen, fought under George Washington. Their cunning and deadly aim with the rifle inflicted great losses on the British troops, making them the most feared corps of the Continental Army. The motto, “Rangers lead the way,” was coined during World War II, shortly after D-day, when a general wanted to know who the tough guys were. When the men responded, “Rangers, of course,” the general uttered the now-famous reply, “then lead the way, Rangers!”
For Gunnar, Ranger School turned out to be the most intense “withholding” training he had ever endured, “withholding” referring to the total lack of adequate water, food, and sleep. Over the next sixty-one days he endured and survived freezing temperatures, mental exhaustion, and physical exertion that was often beyond the point of abuse. He lost twenty-five pounds of muscle and fat from his already-trimmed physique, but successfully maintained a positive attitude, even though his fellow officers and enlisted Ranger schoolmates were decimated by flu, hypothermia, broken ankles, twisted necks, worn-out tempers, and a simple loss of intestinal fortitude, ironically assisted by surreptitious low doses of cholera.
Upon graduating from “hell,” Ranger-Qualified Gunnar Wolfe reported to his first assignment as a platoon leader with the First Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Eighty-second Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Over the next two years he would lead his men on a half dozen successful training missions all over the world.
