Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime

My cousins weren’t all like my uncles. Alex’s older brother, Max, was shaping up to be an intellectual loner with a sarcastic sense of humor, and Sam and Carly, their younger brother and sister, followed at Alex’s heels like shy puppies, heads bent close together, talking in hushed and dreamy tones. But Alex himself was a Blum straight from his father’s mold: cheerful, confident, alarmingly muscular for a preteen, already fluent in that jocular male banter I had always felt so alienated by, quick to snag a disk out of the air and flip it back with a grin on his way inside to watch TV.

When Norm and I first met to talk about the robbery, I had already been interviewing Alex about his story for six months. I was twenty-eight years old and inching toward a new direction in life, teaching writing workshops at an elementary school in New York City as part of a fellowship at an MFA program and feeling more and more like a grown-up journalist, but being taken out to lunch by my uncle was an exercise in instant regression.

“Hey, handsome!” he said, rubbing his fist into my hair and corralling me toward his black Saab. I was in Denver for two weeks, staying with my mother. Climbing into the passenger seat felt like boarding a roller coaster. Norm accelerated with a smooth, important hum up the on-ramp to Interstate 25, a stretch of highway as ubiquitous in trips through Denver as paintings of stallions rearing up against the sunset are in the steakhouses, stadiums, and sports bars where you inevitably end up. After learning that I had been commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan on a bike, he grilled me about my helmet usage, then segued into a long, funny tale of sweating each morning through his only two suits, heavy wool Salvation Army castoffs from my dad, while biking to his own first job in Denver in the ’70s. Both of us seemed relieved at having found this common ground.

“These things,” Norm said, chuckling, “were like horse blankets.”

He brought the car and the anecdote to perfect simultaneous conclusions in a restaurant parking lot, ushered me through the front door with a cheerful wave at the hostess, and obliged our teenaged waitress to laugh three times with embarrassed pleasure at all his hammy compliments to her fine memory and good taste as she told us about the specials. It occurred to me that Norm was just the way Alex would be if you added thirty years and removed the distorting influences of a bank robbery and a prison term: relentlessly fun, impenetrably cheerful, quick to dispatch all troubling ambiguities with chummy cliché. He ordered the Cobb salad. I went with the spinach calzone. We watched the waitress walk away in silence. Norm’s aura of energetic fun collapsed with startling suddenness.

“Okay,” he said. “This gets very complex with the dynamics of the family.”

By then the differences I saw between my uncles were no longer just geometric. Stories had accumulated on those bald domes, constellations among the pockmarks and divots. Norm, I knew now, had been the chubby, guileless runt of the family, an unplanned addition born two years after their only sister, Judy. Around the house they had called him “Stump.” His older brothers once managed to convince him that ears could be trained to wiggle if you practiced enough. Norm worked for years on his jaw pops and clenched eyebrows before shifting his energies to hundreds of sit-ups, push-ups, wind sprints, and squats every morning before the school bus came, striving his whole childhood to match Dad’s accomplishments as a high school football star and eventually exceeding them in both hockey and baseball long after anyone was paying attention. By the time Norm was checking wingmen against the boards for the State University of New York, his brothers were hitchhiking west to the dirtbag mountain towns of Colorado for a lost decade of carpentering, ski bumming, low-level pot smoking, and high-level beardedness. When Norm finally graduated, in 1979, and biked two thousand miles in three weeks to join them, they had already descended en masse to Denver, shaved, gotten into real estate, and surprised themselves by making more money than they knew what to do with. Dad picked up his littlest brother outside town in the yellow Toyota that he and Mom called the “rust bucket” and threw his bike into the backseat. He had a room waiting to rent to Norm in a drafty house he’d just bought on Gilpin Street, some friendly local millionaires to introduce him to, and one of those Salvation Army suits for him to wear to an interview at Coldwell Banker, the firm where he himself had gotten started before striking out on his own.

Norm worked there for eighteen years, through a leveraged buyout and two name changes. Dad never quite let go of his rebellious mountain hippie streak, wearing bright orange skater shoes to business meetings and referring in private to the imaginationless investors of his daily working life as “glompers,” but Norm went full native, surrounding his sunny grin with slacks, oxford shirts, and tasseled loafers as naturally as with a hockey jersey. The deep, unsatisfiable yearnings that trouble his brothers have never afflicted Norm. The world as he finds it has always been enough. Those Fourth of July barbecues I remember so well were rare spiritual oases for them all, returns to a boyhood order that was possible only with Stump in the middle.

“Alex was a lot like I was when I was a kid,” Norm began as we waited for our food. “He was a straight arrow. Sort of a protector. He was a class clown, just like me. Very into routine. Very particular about the location of his toothbrush and towel. Just like how pathetic I am—routine keeps me sane. Sports were his guiding light.”

Norm’s first son, Max, was born five years after Norm’s arrival in Denver, when he and Laura still lived in a small house in Aurora that faced an unfinished commercial park and Buckley Air Force Base’s looming polyhedral radomes, known around Denver as the “golf balls.” When Laura became pregnant again in 1986, Norm knew they needed something bigger and better, with a broad, flat yard out back where his boys could learn half of what they needed to know about life and a nearby ice rink where they could learn the rest. Though he had just undergone knee surgery to repair a torn ACL from hockey, Norm brokered the biggest deal of his life to scrape together the down payment for the ranch-style fixer-upper that would one day unsettle me with its perfection and began hobbling over every weekend to paint, plaster, and shingle. A month before the deal closed, Laura went into labor with their second son.

Alex was born on April 11, 1987. By the time he was four years old, Norm had strapped skates to his feet and swung him out over the ice at the South Suburban Family Sports Ice Arena, a mile from their new house. By the time he was seven, he was charging around under his own power with a stick jammed in his gloves and a helmet the size of his torso for the Littleton Hockey Association’s youngest competitive team, the under-eight “Mites,” coached by Norm and a family friend named Murray Platt. He loved skating, loved scoring, loved bonking into teammates so both flopped to the ice, though he was smaller than most since his birthday was right after the cutoff.

Norm and his siblings were the product of an unlikely pairing. Al Senior, their father, was the son of Jewish glove makers in New York. Beverly Beck, their mother, was a glamorous Texan belle who met Al on a fashion-buying trip. Norm’s best memories of his own childhood were from the Beck family ranch an hour south of San Angelo, where Beverly’s brother Bernie raised cantankerous emus and skittish African deer. Starting when Alex was in kindergarten, Norm arranged to take his own boys there each summer to dodge scorpions and cottonmouth snakes and shoot crickets with a BB gun for use as bait to catch bass in the Concho River.

By fourth grade Alex had grown into a rambunctious, sweet-natured boy with blue eyes and straw-colored hair, popular with schoolmates at Greenwood Village Elementary School, loved for his jokes and generous passing by teammates on the Littleton Hockey Association’s “Squirts” team, and worshipped by Sam and Carly. Everyone in the family remarked on what a great big brother he was. He got more and more serious about hockey. One day when Norm was doing his daily sit-ups, push-ups, and dumbbell curls in the basement den after work, Alex left his brothers and sister watching TV and wandered over to see how many push-ups he could do, then how much weight he could lift. Soon he was jumping in regularly, just as Norm had once helped his own father push aside the coffee table for army-style calisthenics every weekday at 6:30 a.m.

As Alex’s coach on the Squirts team, Norm was putting him through further punishments each day at practice: sprints up and down the ice that left his teammates gasping in his wake. One afternoon at lunch with a friend of Norm’s who had just watched Alex play, the man’s young son asked Alex if he was going to be on the Colorado Avalanche when he grew up. Alex was just beginning to allow that there were a few other NHL teams he might be willing to settle for when Norm flashed him a sardonic grin that stopped him cold.

Norm likes to describe himself as a “realist.” In his coaching days he was unafraid to inform parents that their darling progeny had no future in competitive ice hockey. He intended it as a kindness. When some poor couple from Colorado Springs drove their no-talent hack an hour each day to practice with a Littleton team, Norm always took it on himself to inform them that if scouts were going to be interested, they would have called by now. “Because their kid can skate backward and they can’t skate at all, they’re thinking he’s got something special,” he explained to me once. “But just ’cause their kid is ten or twelve and can skate backward doesn’t mean he has a ticket to play in the NHL.”

Norm was careful to extend his hockey realism to his own children. When Max got to be ten years old, Norm suggested that he hang up the skates. Alex was different. He really loved the game, even if his talent was not world-class.

In the car ride home from lunch, Norm told Alex how it was. The NHL was Valhalla, Mount Olympus, the Forbidden City, inaccessible to mere mortals. Norm himself had been rudely disabused of his NHL ambitions when he got to college and saw what real hockey talent looked like. The only reason he could skate with former NHL players now was that with all the bike racing he did in the Rocky Mountains, his conditioning as a fortysomething commercial real estate broker was unmatched even by young pros. Maybe one guy out of everyone Alex had ever played against had a whisker of a chance. Was Alex the biggest, strongest kid on the ice? Could he skate backward faster than anyone he knew could skate forward? Did he have “dangles,” the talented stick handler’s uncanny ability to flip the puck back and forth through wormholes in space that no defender could follow? Alex shrugged, near tears, and guessed he didn’t. What he did have, Norm hastened to point out, with no little pride, was a phenomenal work ethic. As long as he was willing to keep twice as fit and twice as strong as any other kid and battle twice as hard for every puck, he would keep earning a place for himself as a “grinder”: a player who makes up for his mediocrity with toughness, team spirit, and willingness to do the less glamorous jobs on the ice.

As is common with Norm’s take on the world, his view of Alex’s hockey talent was gradually enshrined as common wisdom by everyone in his social universe, including Alex’s future coaches. To a man, in their letters to Judge Burgess, they would speak of their great personal love and admiration for Alex while taking pains to point out that he had no great aptitude for the game.

While not a “star” player … most dedicated player on the team … caring little for personal recognition …

Not the most skilled player on the team … constant pursuit of his personal growth and team accomplishments …

Talent he did not possess … had to get by on hard work …

You would never guess from their letters that by the end of high school Alex had earned a position on perhaps the best youth squad in Colorado, after consistently racking up team-high assists, and stood a good chance of a college hockey scholarship after a year or two in the junior leagues. Norm intended his “realism” lovingly, as a ward against the pain of disillusionment that he himself had felt, but ten-year-old Alex did not have that kind of perspective on his father and coach. He had always loved hearing Great-Uncle Bernie’s stories of training soldiers after the Korean War, but I think Norm’s dismissal of any chance that he would ever play professional hockey marked the moment when World War II subsumed the NHL as the arena of Alex’s dreams.

At first much of his interest centered on our grandfather, Al Senior, who fought as a sergeant in command of a pair of half-track 50mm machine guns in the army’s Fourth Infantry Division, landing in Normandy shortly after D-Day and punching Junkers, V-1s or doodlebugs, and Messerschmitts out of the sky above the hedgerows as the invasion pressed into the continent. The few stories Norm had passed on to Alex electrified him. While his fifth-grade classmates worked their way through Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, he began devouring Stephen Ambrose’s trilogy of military histories D-Day, Citizen Soldiers, and, his favorite, Band of Brothers, about the 101st Airborne Division’s elite Easy Company of paratroopers, who dropped behind German lines and assaulted heavily fortified machine-gun nests in advance of the landings at Omaha and Utah Beaches.

Ambrose writes from the perspective of the enlisted men in the field rather than the generals who tell them where to fight. This makes for a lot of suddenly dead protagonists, but the tale never loses its triumphant momentum, because the real hero is always the company itself, of which individual soldiers are like moods that come and go, intervals of complaint or jokes or kindness. Alex soon had his favorites—Dick Winters, the lieutenant who led a stunningly successful capture of a German “Eighty-Eight” gun emplacement, and Bob Guernsey, who applied for early release from the London hospital where he was recovering from a shrapnel wound so he could rejoin the company for its assault on the Ardennes—but what he loved most was the collective spirit that enveloped them. Page by page, he highlighted passages about the skill, perseverance, and heroic brotherhood of American men at war.

Alex began learning the American infantryman’s kit in intimate detail. After school he spent hours in the tunnel of interlinked hollows behind the backyard juniper hedge, reenacting battles with a sawed-off hockey stick as a flintlock musket, Browning automatic rifle, or M1 Garand, ending with elaborate death scenes amid the pinecones and dry needles that left him dirty enough to horrify his mom. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War I all got their due, but D-Day was his specialty. One summer he built a replica of Omaha Beach in the sandbox, complete with Belgian hedgehogs made of toothpicks and German bunkers on the bluff, and blew up toy soldiers with firecrackers as they slogged in from the water.

For his daily workouts, Alex began interspersing the sit-ups and push-ups he had picked up from his dad with a Navy SEAL regimen he learned on vacation in Coronado, California. All this strength training gave his hockey game a boost. Norm and Murray had finally stepped aside as coaches for the Littleton Hawks, where Alex had taken his father’s advice to heart and settled into a strategic place for himself as a passer and penalty killer who specialized in corner battles. Some of the teammates with whom he had been playing since he was seven years old were now among the best in the state. What Alex liked better than anything was watching a close buddy of his raise his stick in victory after scoring off a puck that Alex had dug out by grinding away against the boards. He made the most sense to himself as a member of the team.

It was Saving Private Ryan, the $70 million Steven Spielberg epic released the summer of Alex’s eleventh year, that turned him on to the Army Rangers. Tom Hanks and his squad of Rangers were a unit every bit as cohesive, deadly, and ready to sacrifice for each other as the Littleton Hawks. As terrifying as it was the first time he watched it, Alex came to love the opening sequence of the Normandy landing on D-Day, whose many graphic deaths took on a mythic grandeur in repetition. It was the most realistic depiction of battle he had ever seen, and the message behind it was equally compelling: even in the vast mayhem of war, every single soldier counted, every sacrifice was recorded, every hero was remembered. The army was the biggest team of all. He even recognized the real-life soldier who had inspired Private Ryan: Fritz Niland, a private featured in Band of Brothers whose three birth brothers were killed the week of D-Day.

Alex was old enough now to roam away from the house on his own. On weekends he would meet his best friend, Andrew, at the place where Franklin Street crossed the High Line Canal and scramble down the embankment to the canal bed, where in the cool, echoing darkness under the concrete overpass they pulled on their camouflage and strapped guns over their backs—Alex still had just a BB gun, but Andrew had a real .22-caliber air rifle. For three hours they would make their way along the winding banks of the canal like Green Beret commandos in Vietnam, slipping without a sound between the cottonwoods whose ribbed gray trunks zigzagged overhead, sometimes tromping for miles through the shallow water of the canal.

D-Day was Alex’s, but Vietnam belonged to Andrew, for whom Alex served as the loyal right-hand man who could be counted on for comic relief, a blend of court jester and confidant. In middle school, their duo expanded into a regular group of six. All played competitive sports. All wore mostly cargo shorts, Nike and Adidas T-shirts, and white baseball caps. They got into paintball. On weekend afternoons they would bike together down to Horseman’s Park, an overgrown patch of weeds and pines along the High Line Canal where oddly shaped, never-used horse jumps rose from the hollows, and stage daylong battles, dividing up into teams of three and fighting for control of the ridge along the park’s eastern border. Alex, with his goofball charisma and encyclopedic knowledge of military history, was the group’s tactician, motivator, and comedian. It was paradise for a while, until the old woman who lived in the house atop the ridge saw them out there flanking each other along the canal bed and called the police to inform them that gang warfare had finally arrived in Greenwood Village. A few minutes later, when a bullhorn commanded that they drop their weapons, the boys climbed out of deep cover with their hands raised. The patrolmen rolled their eyes when they found out what the boys were actually packing, but that was the end of paintball in Horseman’s Park.

Death in paintball was just a stinging annoyance that meant you were out until the next round. But at night as Alex lay in bed he played a mix CD he had made for himself of climactic orchestral numbers from his favorite war movies and imagined all the ways it might happen: his convoy flanked and ambushed, or a sniper leading him from a high window, or a Messerschmitt churning up the open field too quickly for him to evade. A circle of shadowy platoon-mates gathered around his body as the music swelled, as in the death scene in the Xbox game Medal of Honor. He liked imagining that his death had saved them all and guaranteed the success of the mission. It helped him fall asleep.

Alex, Andrew, and the rest of their crew started ninth grade together at Littleton High School in late August 2001, dispersing to new coaches for their various sports. Three weeks later, on a sunny Tuesday morning, classes were interrupted by a scratchy announcement on the intercom.

To high school kids in suburban Colorado, the terrorist attacks of September 11 looked like nothing so much as a big-budget disaster movie: slow-motion explosions, mushrooming balls of smoke, insect-sized extras nose-diving from the windows. The mood in the hallways changed instantly. For two weeks the Denver sky was full of nothing but clouds and mountains. Then the planes returned, little metal splinters that dragged a new menace. Weekend paintball sessions suddenly started feeling a lot less like a game. When Alex’s guidance counselor, Angela Zerr, informed him at the beginning of fall semester sophomore year that he needed to attend an after-school career counseling workshop, Alex replied politely that this would not be necessary because he already knew what he was going to do with his life.

Zerr estimates that over the remainder of Alex’s high school career she tried to talk him out of enlisting between thirty and forty times. She had all the Blum children as they passed through LHS, but Alex was a special favorite of hers. Teachers had been telling her for years that they couldn’t believe the clownish, popular Alex was related to Max, who was famous around school for his brilliance, prickliness, and straight A’s, but in Zerr’s opinion Alex was as intelligent as his older brother—he just had different priorities. She begged him to get a college degree first so he could at least enter the army as an officer. Alex told her he wasn’t interested. He wanted to be a Ranger.

I had always felt so different from my family that it was strange at that first lunch with Norm to hear him talk about me and my siblings and cousins as a collective.

“You know, you guys were all at really formative ages when 9/11 happened,” he said, picking at scraps of lettuce with his fork. “It left an impression on people in different ways. For Alex, I think that’s when the wheels really started to turn. In my mind, this was a phase. I kept saying, ‘Alex, that’s great, but you should go to college first, do this after.’ I was trying to coach instead of preach, ’cause obviously preaching doesn’t work too good.”

What finally made it click for Norm was that Alex began studying the infantry handbook in the library between classes and doing ten-mile runs each morning wearing boots and a backpack full of free weights to get in shape for basic training. Once he even cut a mole off his back, figuring he’d have to go through worse for SERE torture-resistance training, and bled so badly he ruined a T-shirt.

“It was his senior year when I finally realized that this was real—he didn’t care about school because he was going to the army. This academic stuff was all meaningless, this stuff wasn’t important. ‘I want to do something important with my life,’ that’s what he kept saying.”

Norm did not exactly share Alex’s sense of military duty, but it was hard not to admire it, rooted as it was in the father whom Norm had equally resented and revered.

Albert Likes Blum Senior was not a likely war hero. He grew up in Gloversville, New York, his name a joint branding effort of the Norman Blum & Co. glove manufacturer and the Likes, Berwanger & Co. department store of Baltimore, Maryland (their famous catchphrase: “Everybody Likes Berwanger!”), and volunteered for the infantry in World War II in part to escape his Jewish upbringing. When he came back he had the bloody papers of a teenage Nazi whose head he’d seen caved in by a grenade in the Harz Mountains, a jagged bolt of shrapnel in his thigh, and a fist of untellable stories in his head. Beverly Beck, whose Methodist family had emigrated from Germany in the 1870s, was the most gentile woman he could find.

Norm, Dad, and their siblings never thought of themselves as Jews. The family celebrated Christmas for the sake of form but worshipped no god but success. Beverly managed to talk Al Senior out of the names he had decided on for his boys during the war—King, Prince, and Duke—but Al still raised them to be winners in the striving American mold, shorn of their tribal history of repression and neurosis. Second place was as good as losing. Whining was as good as quitting. Disputes were settled in the basement boxing ring, battles that repeated themselves on ice rinks, baseball diamonds, football fields, and lakes around upstate New York.