Blum by Blum the news began to spread, catching us in kitchens, dorm rooms, offices, and libraries around the country, interrupting dinners and homework and toothbrushing, sending us all scrambling to the nearest computer to Google the crime.
Alex’s arrest did not yet stand as the pivot it would come to seem, the beginning of a broad downturn in family fortune. Many of the recurrences that would soon be obvious patterns were already taking hold—Oma forgetting a name here and there, Kurt no longer returning calls, Dad disappearing for weeks on silent meditation retreats, Norm evading questions about the days he had spent in the hospital for what he claimed was just the flu—but in most respects the family appeared to be on the ascent, crackling with centrifugal energy, cousins launching off to college and careers around the country. The disaster of Alex’s imprisonment exerted a tremendous tribal gravity. Despite years of doing everything I could to distance myself from the family, even I experienced the sudden pull of Blumhood. The feeling was, there had to be some mistake here. We would clear up the misunderstanding, fight the injustice, win.
They call it retroactive consolidation, the way every trivial detail around a great shock is seared into your memory. We all have it around Alex. The stories amuse us now with the way they reflect the petty family grievances his imprisonment blasted into irrelevance. My own is of seeing my dad’s name come up on my phone and steeling myself for another of his efforts to share a fact that had lately amazed him and that he seemed to think we might bond over: two millennia ago, Tibetan monks had discovered that what we experience as fixed reality was actually no more than an ever-shifting dream—the very essence of quantum mechanics. As he elaborated with the enthusiasm he used to reserve for describing a great football play, I had paced through the big, dark, wood-floored bedroom I had rented for the summer in Seattle, nodding with an exaggerated smile, biting my fingernails down to the quick.
Tonight was different. I still remember the pause on the line after I said my usual, “Hey, Dad, how’s it going?”
“Not too good, actually,” Dad said, in a voice I had never heard before, high and strangely soft.
A week later Norm and Dad flew into Seattle and met my sister Beth and me for dinner at one of those downtown grills he and his brothers always ate at when traveling, rich with mahogany and brass, branded for men like them. For twenty minutes, as we studied our menus and talked about everything but Alex, I tried not to steal glances at Norm. Throughout my childhood he had never had more than an uncle’s existence to me, a looming grin machine whose primary functions were shoulder clapping, Frisbee throwing, and barbecue chicken flipping. Now he looked gray and unwell, his grin teetering under eyes that went in and out of startled focus. A smug, overcoiffed waiter about Alex’s age came over in his vest and bow tie to detail the specials for us at elaborate length. Norm looked on with desperate fascination.
“Wasn’t that kid great?” Norm said after he was gone. “Boy. That kid is going places.”
“Well,” said Dad, “should we tell them about the depressing day we’ve had?”
All morning they had met with defense attorneys. All morning they had heard the same story. The driver was just as liable as the guys who ran in screaming and waving guns around and shoveling cash into sacks. Via 18 U.S. Code §2, “Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal,” Alex would even be indicted for “Brandishing a Machinegun During and in Relation to a Crime of Violence”—minimum sentence, thirty years in a U.S. penitentiary. Best case with a plea bargain was five to seven years. More likely was eight to ten. For the first time in our lives, my sister and I saw Uncle Norm grope for a silver lining and miss.
“There’s just no positive side to it,” he said incredulously, having evidently given this some thought. “If your kid gets his arm cut off, at least you can say, ‘Okay, we’ll just get you a new arm.’ ”
It was a long time before Norm was able to see Alex. After dozens of unanswered voicemail messages over the following days, he finally found someone at Englewood Federal Correctional Institution who would explain the necessary procedures: “Well, you’ve got to fill out the paperwork, then it’s about a week delay.”
“A week!” Norm recalled to me at our lunch, still outraged four years later. “A fucking week! That’s a fucking lifetime right now. Who knows what he’s going through? My son is in fucking prison!”
But when Norm and Laura, who had recently separated, finally got approval to visit their son at Englewood FCI, they did not find the hopeless, traumatized teenager they expected. They found Private First Class Alex Blum of the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment.
“The first visit,” Norm said, “he comes out in jumpsuit and shackles. Laura starts crying. He goes, ‘Mom, don’t cry. This isn’t that big a deal.’ His biggest concern was Corporal Sager. It must be six times he says, ‘Dad, you need to get hold of Corporal Sager.’ He goes, ‘We deploy in two days. I have to get back there. He might not even know I’m here.’ ”
From Englewood, Alex was transferred to San Bernardino Central Detention Center, the West Coast hub where federal prisoners are gathered from all around the country, warehoused for a week or two under twenty-four-hour-a-day fluorescent lights, and redistributed to more permanent berths in the jurisdictions where they will be tried. In Alex’s case, that was SeaTac Federal Detention Center, a pretrial facility jutting off the side of a wooded ridge just south of the airport like some kind of rebel fortress from Return of the Jedi.
Norm visited him there every single weekend for the next year and a half. Laura never once went along.
By the time of our lunch, it had become apparent just how much Norm’s devotion to Alex had cost his health, his business, and the rest of his family. It drove a further wedge between him and Laura. Sam and Carly were in high school and very much in need of their dad. But for Norm, as long as he was able to afford plane tickets, there was not really much choice. Alex’s imprisonment was a sickness in his heart that never for a minute released its grip.
In the first weeks he wasn’t even able to swallow solid food. He lost so much weight his old clothes hung off him. The lifelong train of hockey games, bike trips, barbecues, and other adventures that he had always organized for friends and business colleagues came to a dead halt. What little spare time he had, he spent riding the stationary bike at the gym and watching movies with Sam and Carly before passing out at the one-bedroom apartment he was renting near the Denver Tech Center. Whenever yet another business contact turned out to have heard about Alex’s arrest, Norm brushed it aside as best he could. It’s a tough break, he’d admit. Now about that cap rate…It was almost a relief to get on the plane every Friday at 10 a.m., rent a car at Sea-Tac International Airport, and drive to the one place where his abjection could unfurl in all its enormity.
Since inmates at SeaTac never saw the light of day from the moment of their arrival, there was no need for a concertina-wire perimeter fence, no need for guard towers, no need for a gate into the parking lot. Like a giant concrete dragon, the central tower spread its seven-story wings to either side of a trapezoidal waiting room that was one part futuristic airlock and one part dingy post office branch. Inside, the angled concrete walls funneled toward a pair of one-way mirrors with circles cut out for the faces of the prison receptionists, whose attitude toward the tide of visitors who flooded in every weekend was one of wary disdain.
The wait was often four hours long. There were never enough seats. Overhead roared a procession of planes taking off from the runway just half a mile north. At any moment a face might appear in one of the mirrors to announce without explanation that further visits for the day had been canceled, prompting a muttering exodus to the parking lot and a chorus of slammed car doors. There was no solidarity among visitors. Turnover was fast. Inmates were here because their families could not afford bail or because their crimes were so severe they hadn’t been granted it. Most were brought to trial within a month or two. Alex’s case was different. Sommer had been captured in a Canadian supermarket but then released on bail to his mother’s house in the mountains of British Columbia, from which he seemed likely to stage a prolonged extradition battle. Since Alex might have to testify against him, the U.S. government was keeping him in custody until they managed to bring Sommer to trial. As summer gave way to a long, wet autumn and then a record-breaking snowstorm that turned the access road from the top of the ridge into an icy chute, Norm saw wave after wave pass through: tattooed gangster types, teenage mothers with five screaming children in tow, a few sad old geezers like himself. Most were black or Hispanic, with a sprinkling of Southeast Asians and whites. Norm outlasted them all.
It got to be second nature to deposit his belongings in the lockers, to file shoeless through the metal detector, to submit to the pat-down for drugs. In the visiting room, some long-ago work detail had painted a wobbly outline of Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market on the white cinder blocks, complete with a stall selling fresh salmon. Four long rows of chairs were laid out down the center of the room, two back-to-back for the prisoners and two others facing them at a safe remove. After all the visitors had been seated, a stream of truly alarming men filed through a far door, most in khaki jumpsuits and laceless white sneakers, a few sex offenders in neon orange.
It never stopped being a shock to see Alex come out with them. He crossed the room with a satiric air, as if the jumpsuit were a joke between him and his father.
“Hey, handsome,” Norm would say.
“Hey, Dad,” Alex would reply, taking a seat.
For Norm, the heart of the matter was this: Alex didn’t belong here. It appalled him to imagine that day after day Alex was breathing the same air as these scumbags. Norm had never had much patience for criminals. Like all his business buddies, he had been a Reaganite in the eighties, a firm believer that the best way to deal with a violent felon or dope dealer was to lock him up and throw away the key. After a few months, though, Alex started to change his mind.
“Some of the stories that he was telling!” Norm told me, “I mean, people are going across the border with a little bit of pot and they get ten years. Are you shitting me? I have a whole different view on the system now. There’s a lot of people in prison that shouldn’t be in prison.”
Norm could tell how well liked Alex was by the way everyone nodded to him as he made his way down the aisle, not just the white guys but the black and Hispanic guys too. That was unusual. Even in the visiting room, races stuck to their own. One time a black man whom Alex had previously pointed out to Norm as one of his cellmates, nicknamed “Clips” because he was known for cutting other inmates’ hair, walked by and exchanged a quick head tilt with Alex.
“Hi, Clips!” said Norm, giving him a big wave.
“Dad!” Alex hissed. “Don’t do that!”
Alex’s lawyers had arranged for him to cooperate with the government in his case. That usually brought an indelible stigma in prison culture, but being known as a trained commando earned him leeway that no one else got, as did his jokey personality and air of unconcern, which floated him above all the grievances and rivalries of longtime convicts whose fates depended on their reputations. Strength training and military exercises were forbidden at SeaTac, so inmates quickly went to flab, but Alex was doing secret workouts in his cell to keep in shape—the real story behind the nickname “Skinny.” His entire focus was on getting back to battalion.
This presented Norm with a quandary. He wanted nothing more than to share his rage with Alex at how the army had used and abused him, but this delusional fantasy of still being a Ranger was all Alex had to cling to. Norm did not tell him that the estimable Specialist Sommer was now fighting extradition by claiming to have staged the bank robbery to gain a platform to publicize war crimes he had witnessed in Afghanistan and Iraq. He did not tell him that his beloved Ranger brothers at Fort Lewis had all dropped him like a bad date, nor that Charlie Company’s commanding officer, Captain Fuller, had already submitted requests for Sommer, Palmer, and Blum to be separated from the army with other-than-honorable discharges. Instead Norm chatted about the latest hockey games, about how Sam and Carly were doing at school, about a new ice rink under construction on the decommissioned Lowry Air Force Base. When the hour was up, he would drive to a nearby Marriott, where everyone knew his name by now, work out, walk around for a while racking his brain for new ways to help his son, and watch hotel TV all night for material to fall back on during the next day’s visitation hour. Saturday evening he would fly back to Denver. Next Friday he would come back and do it all again.
Winter gave way to the long pissy drizzle of a Pacific Northwest spring. Norm began feeling markedly more sympathetic toward his fellow visitors in the waiting room, especially the young mothers. He would watch them applying makeup from cheap plastic cases while their kids ran around screaming and think to himself, God, I’m barely surviving this. How do they manage?
Whenever he asked Alex how he was holding up—if anyone was pressuring him to do things he didn’t want to do, if he felt endangered in any way—Alex would brush off his concern. “Compared to the army, this is like a vacation,” he’d say. “I’m just bored.”
All Alex’s frustration was reserved for his attorneys. Why was he even dealing with these civilian bozos? They didn’t know anything about the Rangers. Why hadn’t they gotten in touch with Corporal Sager yet?
His attorneys were equally frustrated with him. He answered their questions with that dead-faced politeness he reserved for civilians who had nothing to offer him, declining to elaborate beyond the basic facts. The lead attorney, Jeff Robinson, told Norm that the first proffer meeting with the government had been a near disaster. How did you get a client to help you defend him when he didn’t believe there was anything to defend?
In Norm’s eyes, the reality of Alex’s situation was simply beyond his ability to grasp. Alex saw his time in prison as a test he had to pass to get back to the Rangers. For eight months, the only thing keeping his spirits up was this illusion.
“Those were the easiest eight months in prison,” Norm recalled to me at our lunch, “because he thought he was passing this test with flying colors.”
I was glad to hear Norm address the hardest part of Alex’s story for me to understand. By this point I knew that Alex was more fragile than he looked. After his arrest, the leader he respected most in the world had abandoned him, his Ranger brothers and high school friends had united in shunning him, the woman he hoped to marry had started dating other guys at her parents’ insistence, and his mother had declined to visit him a single time in prison. Now he worked every day among people who, if they ever found out about his past, would consider him a threat to their children. He had some understandable issues with trust. It was painfully obvious that he was in need of a friend who would value him unquestioningly, and a big part of the him that needed valuing was his story. I had been careful to respond with outrage when required and astonishment when required, tendering my reservations in private.
“This is the stuff that’s hardest for me to get a handle on when talking to Alex,” I told Norm tentatively, “because his brain is so…”
“Mush.” Norm chuckled.
“…locked into things that, um…”
“Totally mush. Over and over, it was, ‘Corporal Sager can explain it. Can you just ask Jeff and Amanda’—his attorneys—‘to call Corporal Sager?’ And I already knew, obviously, that that was a fruitless endeavor. But I didn’t tell him that.”
“On the other hand, Corporal Sager might have been useful to the defense in explaining the amount of influence Sommer had over Alex.”
Norm shook his head in exasperation. “No. That wasn’t it.”
“That wasn’t why Alex was asking for him?”
“Absolutely was not it. No. Alex was asking because he wanted someone to explain that he wasn’t really in all this trouble. ‘This was set up. This was approved way above Sommer. This was approved above Sager. I know so because Sommer told me. Look, Sager’s an ally, he was grooming me, he picked me for all the best assignments. He understood the value I brought. If you just talk to him, he can explain what’s going on here.’ I was sort of torn. How far do I try to relate the fact that you were just involved in what the prosecutor is calling one of the worst crimes in the history of Tacoma? My whole goal was to help him survive prison and not melt him down mentally and emotionally in every way. I remember when he finally realized this was not a training mission—it took him that long, Ben, to figure out. He starts crying and he finally realizes that he just got worked as bad as anyone in history by this guy Sommer.”
Norm told me then that the instrument of Alex’s enlightenment was Kathleen Taylor’s book Brainwashing. With the shocking new perspective this book gave him on the crime, Alex was able to help his lawyers construct a daring legal argument that resulted in his release on bail after sixteen months and subsequent sentence of time served, the first steps on the long, hard road to recovering the person he used to be.
Or so the story went.
To explain to me how he could have talked himself into believing this was all still part of his training even after his arrest, Alex himself had referred me to the memoir of former Delta Force operator Eric L. Haney, Inside Delta Force. Alex read it dozens of times in high school. Haney describes how in the final stage of training, new operators had to make it to a meeting with a contact in Washington, DC, without being apprehended by local FBI agents, who had been given their identifying information and told they were dangerous criminals. But how could Alex’s attorneys have failed to notice that their client was in the grip of a severe delusion? How could they have failed to devote all possible resources to restoring his hold on reality before setting him in front of a prosecutor? How could Norm himself have failed to do so, even if it was making Alex happier to believe the lie?
At our lunch, it seemed obvious that Norm believed everything he was telling me.
“So I imagine when you first saw Alex,” I tried again, “you assumed that he, like any other ordinary human being, knew exactly what was going on. How did you come to understand that that wasn’t the case?”
“Well, he was still defiant. He’d do sit-ups and push-ups for a long time each day because he thought, ‘I gotta be in shape when I get the fuck out of here and get back to battalion. I just want to get back to battalion. I don’t know how long this is going to last.’ I started to see the picture here that he really was that deluded. That he really thought this was a mission that was approved way above Sommer. And then he told me about how Sommer made him point the gun at his head and pull the trigger, the ‘suicide checks.’ Just all of Sommer’s mindfucks. The Rangers don’t have any idea what’s over that next cliff they’re going to jump over each day. Whatever it is, they’re going to have to do it. You don’t ask questions, you just know they’ve got your back because you’re part of this elite group. Who the fuck robs a bank when you’re a Ranger? It. Never. Happens! There are no bank robbers in the Rangers!” Norm was picking up steam, increasingly agitated.
“So obviously this wasn’t a bank robbery. ‘They’re throwing me in here, this is my test. I wonder what Palmer’s doing. I wonder what the other ten guys from Ranger Batt are doing that had to go on some other mission.’ He couldn’t get his head around it that this was totally outside the army and he was fucked. Couldn’t understand it. And again, for me, my sense was, the longer that he believed that this was a military mission, the easier his time in prison was going to be, so I didn’t go out of my way to try to explain it to him. And he was defiant to his attorneys, because they were outsiders and he didn’t believe that they had his back. He wasn’t allowed to talk about the mission or anything else with them. The military had his back. So when he met with these FBI interrogators who were ex-military—there’s some inconsistencies there that I don’t really know how to explain, but I just know for the first eight to nine months when Alex was in prison, he didn’t think he was in prison for a bank robbery.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“I’m absolutely convinced of that. And then there were two or three visits in a row after I got him the book on brainwashing when the lights started to go on. It was incredible. All of a sudden he started to see through all this mind control he’d been under and get his brain back a little bit. I remember the tears just started welling up in his eyes and dripping off his cheeks. He realized he was now officially all alone. But the most heartbreaking thing was, he wasn’t a Ranger. All he cares about is disgracing the Rangers. And I kept lying to him, telling him, ‘Alex, we have no idea what’s in front of us right now. Don’t sit here and torture yourself, telling yourself it’s over, because we don’t know how this thing’s going to end.’ Of course, I know it’s over.”
Norm promised to send me all the documents he had from the case. Thirty forwarded emails arrived a few hours later. I worked through them one by one. Many were correspondence between Norm and Alex’s attorneys: forwarded news articles, ideas Norm had for the defense, letters of support from old friends, bits of research he had done on his own, countless examples of his tough-love brand of cheerleading. “Great work, guys,” many of the emails concluded. “Don’t fuck it up.” I’d had no idea he was so actively involved in the case. He took it on himself to ask Kathleen Taylor to submit expert testimony on Alex’s behalf. When she replied that she wished she could help but did not have enough experience with the U.S. legal system, he refused to take no for an answer: “If I was a normal person I would drop it and move on…but I am not a normal person. I have an innocent kid in prison and am trying everything to free him.”
The reports I had hoped to see of the FBI interrogations were not here, but as I neared the end of the batch, increasingly fatigued by all the frustration, heartbreak, and administrative complexity, I came across something surprising: an email to Norm from Luke Elliott Sommer himself. It was dated February 5, 2007, six months after the robbery, when Sommer was still fighting extradition from Canada.
!!Warning!! The following is a harsh reality check:
You honestly believe that your son, who you have known for his entire life, never dreamed of being involved in this? He helped me plan it Norm. Your [sic] are so naive because you want to believe in your heart the best about your son. The truth is I never intended to get your son compromised, but when I shot it out in the dark, he didn’t slap it down, he helped me recruit. Your son is not the stupid naive kid that you make him out to be. He is [a] charismatic, intelligent Ranger.
I shrank back involuntarily from my laptop. My mind groped for all the reasons this had to be a manipulative attempt by Sommer to dodge responsibility for involving Alex, but for a long, disorienting moment, the mysterious inconsistencies in Norm’s and Alex’s stories that had been puzzling me for months snapped together with a brutal neatness that almost felt like truth.