Ranger Mentality | No Man Left Behind

Part of the Ranger creed is: I will never leave a fallen comrade. To follow it to the end of an enemy, that's just one part of the Ranger creed. The Ranger creed has six stanzas to it, and we would say it every morning. Every morning before we started work, whether it was back at Fort Benning, Georgia, or whenever there was a formation, and that first SART had something to do, we would always start it with the Ranger creed.

The very first stanza is recognizing: I volunteered as a Ranger, fully knowing the hazards of my chosen profession. There's a disclaimer right up front. You know it's gonna be tough, so don't be whining about it. You know, because you volunteered for this.

The point of saying something every day is that if we say something every day, we start believing it. You know, you start believing. Remember I told you when we first got there, you were told you were elite. You were told that lives are on the line. You were told that you mattered. And so you start believing it.

When you believe something, that's when you'll start living it. The fact that I will never leave a fallen comrade, and to fall in the hands of the enemy, you believe it, so you live it. It's not really a choice that you have to ponder.

Even though technically the Aviators and the occupants of Super Six One weren't Rangers, they were Special Operations guys, that creed or that saying, I think, transcends units. There was an understanding, I would think, within the Special Operations community that that's just how we operate.

So it was never a question of would we go to the crash; I the security, it was Len.