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A Ranger Born: A Memoir of Combat and Valor from Korea to Vietnam
Even as a boy growing up amid the green hills of rural Pennsylvania, Robert W. Black knew he was destined to become a Ranger. With their three-hundred-year history of peerless courage and independence of spirit, Rangers are a uniquely American brand of soldier, one foot in the military, one in the wilderness—and that is what fired Black’s imagination. In this searing, inspiring memoir, Black recounts how he devoted himself, body and soul, to his proud service as an elite U. S. Army Ranger in Korea and Vietnam—and what those years have taught him about himself, his country, and our future.
Born at the start of the Great Depression, Black grew up on a farm at a time of great hardship but also tremendous national determination. He was a kid who toughened up fast, who learned the hard way to rely on his strength and his wits, who saw the country go to war with Germany and Japan and wept because he was too young to serve. As soon as the army would take him, Black enlisted. And as soon as he could muscle his way in, he became a Ranger.
As a private first class in the 82d Airborne Division headquarters, Black withstood the humiliations of enlisted service in the peacetime brown-shoe army. When the Korean War began, he volunteered and trained to be an Airborne Ranger. In Korea, this young warrior, his mind and body bursting with the lusts of adolescence, grew up fast, literally in the line of fire. In clean, vivid prose, Black describes the hell of giving his all for a country that lacked the political resolve to give its all to a war against the North Koreans and the Chinese.
If Korea was frustrating, Vietnam was maddening. The heart of this book is devoted to the years of action that Black saw in Long An Province starting in 1967. Black writes of the perplexity of collaborating with South Vietnamese officers whose culture and motives he never fully understood; he conjures up the sudden shock of the Tet Offensive and the daily horror of seeing fellow soldiers and innocent civilians slaughtered—sometimes by stray bullets, often by carelessness or treachery. Vietnam challenged everything Black had come to believe in and left him totally unprepared for the hostility he would face when he returned to a war-weary America.
Written with extraordinary candor and passion, A Ranger Born is the memoir of a man who dedicated the best of his life to everything that is great and enduring about America. At once intimate in its revelations and universal in its themes, it is a book with profound relevance to our own troubled time in history.
Born at the start of the Great Depression, Black grew up on a farm at a time of great hardship but also tremendous national determination. He was a kid who toughened up fast, who learned the hard way to rely on his strength and his wits, who saw the country go to war with Germany and Japan and wept because he was too young to serve. As soon as the army would take him, Black enlisted. And as soon as he could muscle his way in, he became a Ranger.
As a private first class in the 82d Airborne Division headquarters, Black withstood the humiliations of enlisted service in the peacetime brown-shoe army. When the Korean War began, he volunteered and trained to be an Airborne Ranger. In Korea, this young warrior, his mind and body bursting with the lusts of adolescence, grew up fast, literally in the line of fire. In clean, vivid prose, Black describes the hell of giving his all for a country that lacked the political resolve to give its all to a war against the North Koreans and the Chinese.
If Korea was frustrating, Vietnam was maddening. The heart of this book is devoted to the years of action that Black saw in Long An Province starting in 1967. Black writes of the perplexity of collaborating with South Vietnamese officers whose culture and motives he never fully understood; he conjures up the sudden shock of the Tet Offensive and the daily horror of seeing fellow soldiers and innocent civilians slaughtered—sometimes by stray bullets, often by carelessness or treachery. Vietnam challenged everything Black had come to believe in and left him totally unprepared for the hostility he would face when he returned to a war-weary America.
Written with extraordinary candor and passion, A Ranger Born is the memoir of a man who dedicated the best of his life to everything that is great and enduring about America. At once intimate in its revelations and universal in its themes, it is a book with profound relevance to our own troubled time in history.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published July 30, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 17, 2022
Colonel Robert W. Black knows whereof he speaks when the topic is war. Having fought valiantly in Korea and Vietnam, he is a seasoned soldier who combines a realistic view of wars with an unswerving fate in the human spirit.
In both conflicts, Black served as a Ranger. As many historians have observed, in the hostile jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam the Ranger units were the American equivalent of the Viet Cong suicide squads. They were dispatched on a search-and-destroy missions, which were a lethal and fruitless brainchild of General Westmoreland, and were usually ambushed by NLF cadres, who knew the jungle like the palm of their hand, or worse, succumbed to malaria. The remarkable aspect of Black's work is not his experience fighting in faraway lands, though, for they are similar to those chronicled in other memoirs. His was the eternal experience of the foot soldier – the same winter cold, the broiling sun of summer, the dust, the rain, and the mud. He treats technology as a necessary veneer, but he believes that it is that which is inside the soldier, the mix of spirit, training, will, and tradition, that brings victory on the battlefield. In his own words, "I'm a Ranger born, a Ranger bred, and, when I die, I'll be a Ranger dead."
What makes his book stand out is the array of interesting comments that it is interspersed with. For instance, he argues that it was the stupidity of the conduct of the war in Vietnam that brought Americans to national tragedy. He criticizes American commanders for sending soldiers to fight a war on the territory of their ally, South Vietnam, and granting the enemy a save haven in his homeland. But the most glaring problem, he insists, was that the American government allowed concern for the possible action by another country, such as China or the Soviet Union, to dictate what America could or could not do. The American political leadership had learned nothing from the lessons of the Korean War, where policy-makers let China be a safe haven for the North Koreans while the Chinese sent armies against into South Vietnam. Furthermore, as Black points out, if concern for Chinese entry into the war in Vietnam was preventing America from sending ground forces into North Vietnam, then it should not have entered the war. I find myself agreeing with him. The limited war that the American government and military was trying to fight did not achieve balance or dissolve the tense international situation. It trapped the American-South Vietnamese alliance in a limbo that cost too much in lives and equipment.
Black also confirms what I have long suspected – that the seeds of the Vietnam tragedy were sown during the Korean conflict. Many historians consider Harry Truman a hero because he fired General Douglas MacArthur, but the people who lived in the early 1950s knew better – not to mention that the Joint Chiefs were the ones who actually wanted MacArthur gone, and the President dared to fire him only after they expressed their approval. Truman was not popular when he left office. He tried to find a substitute for victory, but MacArthur was right – there was none. His successors did not learn the lesson. Similarly to Truman, President Lyndon B. Johnson dragged Americans into a war that did not have victory for its goal, and those who believed the government and went to fight paid a bitter price. "Whether volunteer or draftee, those who went to Vietnam went at the orders of the elected government of our nation. Whatever the faults of getting involved, it was not the men who fought the war who put us there," writes Black.
The higher the military post he assumed after he returned to America, the more concerned the author became about the wisdom of those who lead the country in peace and war. For instance, he served under a general who assembled his officers to tell them that the saddest remembrance of his life was that, growing up in a country club atmosphere, he never got to play tennis with a black man. When black was serving at CINCPAC, headquarters of the commander in chief, Pacific, in Hawaii, his senior told him, "Black, you are a historian. The admiral wants a report on the battle of Stalingrad, the one the Germans won." Black replied, "The Germans did not win the battle of Stalingrad." His response was, "They must have. The admiral said they did." Coming not from the high school classroom, these stories are a scary warning.
Although I understand why the American public was so actively involved in anti-Vietnam activism, I also agree with the author that at some point the anti-Vietnam protests became no less irrational than the Vietnam conflict. It turned into rebellion for the sake of rebellion, a self-seeking, self-serving time of anarchy – a drug-fueled journey of resisting any form of authority and openly praising those who killed American soldiers. Many students, faculty members, and members of the general public were convinced that the American soldiers were the enemy. They openly praised the Communist leaders of North Vietnam without having the slightest notion about the ideology of the totalitarian rulers of Communist states. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the infamous commander of the enemy forces, said, "Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die all over the world. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, or tens of thousands of human beings, even if they are our own compatriots, represents really very little." This Communist butcher was treated as a hero by American college students, and they flew the flag of North Vietnam on college campuses, while taking full advantage of the democratic freedoms that other Americans had fought for. This is a mockery that those who lost their lives in the jungles of a faraway country did not deserve.
I cannot complete this review with Black's thoughts on the nature of people. They are so simple yet so accurate: "The hot wars and the cold are always just one surprise away. The first law of nature is competition – it is unlikely that will change. In all our centuries of social and technological advancement, we have not developed one new emotion. We are operating with the same jealousy, love, hate, fear, and anger as those who lived five thousand years ago. We should be telling the story these emotions create and learning from that story, but we don't. We write history, and then rewrite history to make it what we want it to be to fit our present mood. We very seldom learn the lessons of history."
A RANGER BORN is not only a memoir. It is the key to the wisdom of a man who had experienced more than most of us will have a chance to. This book is the story of a person who valued honor and honesty, and it shows. His narrative touches on many controversial issues to which attention should be brought, for they remain unresolved.
In both conflicts, Black served as a Ranger. As many historians have observed, in the hostile jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam the Ranger units were the American equivalent of the Viet Cong suicide squads. They were dispatched on a search-and-destroy missions, which were a lethal and fruitless brainchild of General Westmoreland, and were usually ambushed by NLF cadres, who knew the jungle like the palm of their hand, or worse, succumbed to malaria. The remarkable aspect of Black's work is not his experience fighting in faraway lands, though, for they are similar to those chronicled in other memoirs. His was the eternal experience of the foot soldier – the same winter cold, the broiling sun of summer, the dust, the rain, and the mud. He treats technology as a necessary veneer, but he believes that it is that which is inside the soldier, the mix of spirit, training, will, and tradition, that brings victory on the battlefield. In his own words, "I'm a Ranger born, a Ranger bred, and, when I die, I'll be a Ranger dead."
What makes his book stand out is the array of interesting comments that it is interspersed with. For instance, he argues that it was the stupidity of the conduct of the war in Vietnam that brought Americans to national tragedy. He criticizes American commanders for sending soldiers to fight a war on the territory of their ally, South Vietnam, and granting the enemy a save haven in his homeland. But the most glaring problem, he insists, was that the American government allowed concern for the possible action by another country, such as China or the Soviet Union, to dictate what America could or could not do. The American political leadership had learned nothing from the lessons of the Korean War, where policy-makers let China be a safe haven for the North Koreans while the Chinese sent armies against into South Vietnam. Furthermore, as Black points out, if concern for Chinese entry into the war in Vietnam was preventing America from sending ground forces into North Vietnam, then it should not have entered the war. I find myself agreeing with him. The limited war that the American government and military was trying to fight did not achieve balance or dissolve the tense international situation. It trapped the American-South Vietnamese alliance in a limbo that cost too much in lives and equipment.
Black also confirms what I have long suspected – that the seeds of the Vietnam tragedy were sown during the Korean conflict. Many historians consider Harry Truman a hero because he fired General Douglas MacArthur, but the people who lived in the early 1950s knew better – not to mention that the Joint Chiefs were the ones who actually wanted MacArthur gone, and the President dared to fire him only after they expressed their approval. Truman was not popular when he left office. He tried to find a substitute for victory, but MacArthur was right – there was none. His successors did not learn the lesson. Similarly to Truman, President Lyndon B. Johnson dragged Americans into a war that did not have victory for its goal, and those who believed the government and went to fight paid a bitter price. "Whether volunteer or draftee, those who went to Vietnam went at the orders of the elected government of our nation. Whatever the faults of getting involved, it was not the men who fought the war who put us there," writes Black.
The higher the military post he assumed after he returned to America, the more concerned the author became about the wisdom of those who lead the country in peace and war. For instance, he served under a general who assembled his officers to tell them that the saddest remembrance of his life was that, growing up in a country club atmosphere, he never got to play tennis with a black man. When black was serving at CINCPAC, headquarters of the commander in chief, Pacific, in Hawaii, his senior told him, "Black, you are a historian. The admiral wants a report on the battle of Stalingrad, the one the Germans won." Black replied, "The Germans did not win the battle of Stalingrad." His response was, "They must have. The admiral said they did." Coming not from the high school classroom, these stories are a scary warning.
Although I understand why the American public was so actively involved in anti-Vietnam activism, I also agree with the author that at some point the anti-Vietnam protests became no less irrational than the Vietnam conflict. It turned into rebellion for the sake of rebellion, a self-seeking, self-serving time of anarchy – a drug-fueled journey of resisting any form of authority and openly praising those who killed American soldiers. Many students, faculty members, and members of the general public were convinced that the American soldiers were the enemy. They openly praised the Communist leaders of North Vietnam without having the slightest notion about the ideology of the totalitarian rulers of Communist states. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the infamous commander of the enemy forces, said, "Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die all over the world. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, or tens of thousands of human beings, even if they are our own compatriots, represents really very little." This Communist butcher was treated as a hero by American college students, and they flew the flag of North Vietnam on college campuses, while taking full advantage of the democratic freedoms that other Americans had fought for. This is a mockery that those who lost their lives in the jungles of a faraway country did not deserve.
I cannot complete this review with Black's thoughts on the nature of people. They are so simple yet so accurate: "The hot wars and the cold are always just one surprise away. The first law of nature is competition – it is unlikely that will change. In all our centuries of social and technological advancement, we have not developed one new emotion. We are operating with the same jealousy, love, hate, fear, and anger as those who lived five thousand years ago. We should be telling the story these emotions create and learning from that story, but we don't. We write history, and then rewrite history to make it what we want it to be to fit our present mood. We very seldom learn the lessons of history."
A RANGER BORN is not only a memoir. It is the key to the wisdom of a man who had experienced more than most of us will have a chance to. This book is the story of a person who valued honor and honesty, and it shows. His narrative touches on many controversial issues to which attention should be brought, for they remain unresolved.
February 27, 2020
I can't believe how much I enjoyed this book. It's the most honest, authentic and compelling memoir of any combat account I've ever read. There are at least five different great books here. There's the kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the Depression. And there's the grind of combat as an infantryman in the Korean War. And there's becoming an elite Army Ranger. And there's serving in Vietnam as an officer and being in charge of an entire village. Black's voice is always original, feisty and irreverent. I was sorry he didn't write more about what it was like being an ROTC commander in Florida at the height of the anti-war movement. This book is full of outrage, humor, tragedy, and triumph. Robert Black was truly a one of a kind author!
August 23, 2015
A well written, open account of the authors experiences, including all the mistakes, successes and emotions, from sorrow, to pride, to frustration, felt during service in two WARs that challenged not only the abilities of the service members, but their beliefs as well. An interesting perspective on leadership and the results of its absence. But also plenty of action for those who expect it in a book such as this
"Leadership is an ancient and honorable art with principles that while simple are all too often forgotten or put aside by men who may rise to high rank." -excerpt.
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"Leadership is an ancient and honorable art with principles that while simple are all too often forgotten or put aside by men who may rise to high rank." -excerpt.
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May 8, 2013
i picked up this book at Deseret Industries, because I've wanted to be a ranger since i was twelve. it would have got more stars if the author hadn't included everything he did off-duty... the last part about when he came home from Vietnam made me mad, as in what the people did, quote: "one woman noticing the tab on my chest asked 'hey ranger, kill any babies today?'" and the students waving communist flags just made me sick. the people's response to Vietnam itself just made me sick. i sincerely hope that anything like that will never happen again.
still a ranger to be.
still a ranger to be.
January 20, 2023
Life and war in an isolated corner of Vietnam
This is an extremely well written account of a ranger's life on on the line in Korea and Vietnam. The main focus is on advisor duty with indigenous people in a very remote camp.
This is an extremely well written account of a ranger's life on on the line in Korea and Vietnam. The main focus is on advisor duty with indigenous people in a very remote camp.
April 5, 2025
Interesting look through a soldiers eyes at two wars he served in. History repeats, and maybe one of these days we will learn from it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews