The wreathed dagger. The winged parachute. The golden Ranger tab. The Ranger Scrolls. They are nothing more than objects. They are cheap metal and cloth, yet they mean so much more. They are the firefights. The repeated concussions, fractured bones, and compressed discs. They are the months of starvation and sleep deprivation. They are the culmination of a month of selection and years of training cycles and deployments. More importantly, they are the culmination of those lost. The pain suffered. The deployments passed. The lives lost. The lives destroyed. The lives saved.
The world sees the metal, cloth, and ribbons. We see what they mean. We feel their consequences. We wear the crushing weight of those tiny metal badges, cloth patches, and cloth ribbons.
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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on December 12, 2024.
Jake Smith is a law enforcement officer and former Army Ranger with four deployments to Afghanistan.
As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.
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