Featured Author
“Ranger Games”
By Ben Blum
Alex Blum, author Ben Blum’s younger cousin, was “a good kid” whose goal in life from an early age was to be a Ranger, a member of the U.S. Army’s elite fighting force. After undergoing an inhumanly brutal training regimen, Alex made the grade and was ready to deploy to the Iraq War. So, why rob a bank, just days before realizing his dream of going off to fight terrorists? And yet that’s what happens in “Ranger Games.” In August 2006, Alex Blum was one of five men -- three of them Rangers -- who robbed a Tacoma bank of $50,000 with military precision. Blum admitted to the FBI that he drove the getaway car, but he claimed he’d been so “brainwashed” by the Ranger indoctrination program that he didn’t believe the robbery was real, that it was just another Ranger training exercise.