Heist

Even as a kid Luke Elliott Sommer showed a talent for leadership. And by the time he finished U.S. Army Ranger School his mind had become a precision weapon capable of planning strategic attacks on buildings in enemy territory. Then he came home.

By James Ross Gardner

Luke Elliott Sommer’s arsenal.

It wasn’t the last war crime he says he witnessed. He claims that a year later, while on guard duty at the Tactical Operations Center at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, he overheard commanders communicating via radio with Navy Seal operators in the Hindu Kush mountains on a mission gone wrong.

“Guy comes in the door on an operation and a 16-, 17-year-old kid’s defending his house, whips out an AK and blasts him,” Sommer explained. “Guy dies. [The Seals] bind everybody up with these zip ties, these little plastic restraints. Then, one of the Seals takes out his handgun and just starts fucking icing people. Because this guy is obviously a close friend of his.” Sommer claims he later saw video of Rangers dragging victims from the location bound in the zip ties, which he took as confirmation that defenseless people had been murdered.

Sommer would hand his fellow Rangers a gun and tell them to hold the muzzle to their temple and pull the trigger.

In September 2005, when Sommer returned to Fort Lewis from Afghanistan, he called his mother. His tone worried her. She told a Canadian officer that she was concerned about her son’s emotional and mental state. The officer phoned Sommer’s sergeant. Sommer called home the next day, angry. His sergeant had given him a dressing down after his “mommy” called.

But Sommer pressed on. He enrolled in Ranger School, designed to augment a Ranger’s training and pave the way for a leadership role. The grueling 61-day program pushes candidates to the brink. Marching 20 to 30 miles a day through Georgia woods, carrying 200 pounds of gear, Sommer lost 43 pounds. He ate one meal a day, if at all, but his mind was being fed the secrets of modern warfare, namely devising an operations order—a plan of attack, which, in the era of urban conflicts such as the war in Iraq, means overtaking buildings. “Take 40 grown men that are already alpha males,” Sommer explained, “take away their sleep and their food, and then put one person in charge of all of them…by the end, dude, you would not want to fuck with that platoon, because that platoon at the end of Ranger School could kill anyone and do anything.”


Fort Lewis, the sprawling military post south of Tacoma—one of the largest in the U.S.—is home base to more than 30,000 soldiers, many on heavy rotation in and out of deployments in the Middle East. The base has been the focus of dozens of criminal cases since conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan began. The past two years alone have seen more than 20 soldier-related felonies splashed in the headlines. The two soldiers who robbed University of Washington students at gunpoint. The Iraq war vet who waged a meth-fueled burglary spree. The vet convicted of cracking the skull of his two-month-old daughter. The staff sergeant charged with kidnapping, raping, and torturing a Tacoma prostitute. Most of these perpetrators have seen combat, and at least one—the burglar—has cited post-traumatic stress disorder as a factor leading to his crime.

While the horrors of war may take a toll on soldiers, the training they get may have greater consequences for the public. Says the FBI’s Monte Shaide: “A lot of these young kids are getting trained in close-quarter battle…to dominate a house, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan or any type of facility that they’re entering, where in Vietnam it was all jungle warfare, so the tactics are different.” That is especially true, says Shaide, of soldiers with Special Forces training.


NEXT: Sommer acquires an arsenal.

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Published: September 2009