You Think You're Tough?

From Mens Health Magazine. As I have a son who is a Ranger, I know that what this guy did is exceptional and, yes, that makes him, tough!

Peter Springer lost an eye to an Iraqi suicide bomber -- and then joined the Army Rangers

By: Peter Moore, Photographs by: Lynda Churilla
Posted on 10/06/2005

On the morning of December 9, 2003, Peter Sprenger was 2 weeks from the end of an eventful tour in Iraq. He'd been at the "tip of the spear," in army parlance, spending the preceding 10 months roaring through the invasion of Iraq, occupying Baghdad, securing other restive towns. As a member of the 101st Airborne Division, he had a clear mission: to probe for trouble and take care of it. But on that particular morning, the trouble found him.

Corporal Sprenger drew radio duty that day in company headquarters in Tal Afar, 60 miles southwest of Mosul. He felt relatively safe in the shadow of a two-story guard tower, behind barbed wire and barricades, sheltered by a 12-foot-high cinder-block wall. The front doors of the building were open to the morning air. Sprenger wore no flak jacket, no helmet.

At 4:40 a.m., he heard gunfire and suspected that it issued from neighboring buildings. But, no, it had come from the guard tower, and the bullets and barricades had failed to halt a suicidal insurgent bent on delivering 1,000 pounds of TNT to the 101st's doorstep. The bomb detonated 10 to 15 yards from where Sprenger was standing.

Knocked down and blinded by the explosion, he crawled back to his position and patted himself down for missing parts. He felt warm blood, punctured flesh, and a confused tangle of facial features. He peeled back a tattered eyelid and saw a spiderweb of lines radiating out from a bloodred center. He remembers thinking, Yes, well, we'd better let a professional deal with that one.

The eye that Corporal Sprenger sacrificed that morning, the seven units of blood he left on the walls and floor, are real costs. "Going through all that changes you," he notes, with typical understatement. For a lot of men, it would embitter or destroy them. But in Sprenger's case, it focused his vision of who he is and what he hopes to gain from his life. "People don't look far enough into the future," he says, "and gauge what's realistic for them to accomplish."

But he has. And that vision drove him to rehab his many wounds, turn down the desk job the army offered, and gear up for the most rigorous training any infantryman can endure: Ranger School.

Sprenger not only passed it, but was also singled out as the epitome of the Ranger creed--"Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to . . . complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor"--and asked to recite that creed at his graduation ceremony last July.

Since the army began keeping records a quarter century ago, he is the first man with his kind of physical disability to earn the Ranger patch. And by the time you read this, he will have returned to Iraq. As he puts it, he needs to finish what he started.

Article.