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Captain Pierre-Alexandre Dufour: You get to go experience that line in the U.S. that when you cross things turn from squirrel to snakes and all of that big thing that could bite you, and then you get to go there and walk with them at night.

Captain Adam Orton: Hi, I'm Captain Adam Orton for the Canadian Army Podcast.

U.S. Army Ranger School is one of the toughest courses that a soldier can endure. In Canada, there might only be a couple dozen people that are qualified. But I have one of those people here to talk to me about their time on this legendary course. Captain Pierre-Alexandre Dufour is from the 3rd Battalion, Royal 22e Régiment, and he's going to tell us what it was all about. Welcome to the podcast.

Capt Dufour: Thank you for having me.

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Capt Orton: So what's a U.S. Army Ranger?

Capt Dufour: Well, the US Army Rangers are a special operation unit that does direct action. They're the primary raid unit for the U.S. Army. The U.S. Army Ranger School is a combat leadership training school that is open to any and all from the Infantry of the U.S. Army. It's really interesting in the sense that it's the same course whether you've done it in 2022, or you've done it in the 1970s. The course stays the same. It's been extensively researched, it's very standardized. So everybody gets kind of the same experience. And it's a very valuable course, in my opinion, especially for young soldiers of all young NCOs or young officers. From a training institution point of view, it's a great experience, because you get to go through a course with young officers that just graduated West Point. So NCOs from the regular conventional infantry unit from the U.S. Army, you get to see, all of the would be NCOs of the Ranger battalions from the U.S. Army Ranger unit, and a bunch of Green Berets also are on the course. So you get a very wide range of experience. You get to meet different people, and you get to learn from a whole range of experience on that course.

Capt Orton: And suffer together.

Capt Dufour: And suffer together.

Capt Orton: So when you described what a Ranger is, I like the fact that you use the word raid. And you know, we haven't talked a lot about infantry stuff specifically on this podcast. But how would you tell everybody what a raid is?

Capt Dufour: So a raid is the destruction of an enemy position that is known. And you have a unit or an organization that's tasked with the destruction of the enemy on that position. Essentially, what a raid is, is you go somewhere where you know there's an adversary, enemy, and your whole point of going there is destroying them.

Capt Orton: So when I think of that in an infantry context is your average Canadian infantry soldier is trained in roll call combat operations, and definitely a raid is a part of that. And you're saying that U.S. Army Rangers, it's the school that specializes in the execution of that specific task.

Capt Dufour: No, the unit U.S. Army Rangers are the primary raid unit of the U.S. Army. The U.S. Army Ranger School is a combat leadership course. So it teaches all of the students that go through there to lead squads and platoons and raids and ambushes.

Capt Orton: That's really cool. So what was the training like?

Capt Dufour: So the training is broken down into three phases. In the User Model, crawl, walk, run, first phase is held in Fort Benning, all the phases last 20 days and 20 nights. And at the end of every phase, there's a peer assessment where the bottom two in your platoon get to get recourse and redo the whole phase all over again, because they get to be a better team player next time. Or you can also get recourse based on your…

Capt Orton: Performance.

Capt Dufour: Yeah, performance go no go for the task that you were assigned. So the first phase in Fort Benning, you're going to get that Ranger assessment week where you get to do a physical fitness test. So 49 pushups, 59 sit ups, five miles under 40 minutes and 12 mile foot march with rucksack and combat of attire under three hours and 30 minutes. And then you gotta do a combat water survival test. In the Darby mile run event, which is an obstacle course in pair with a mile run in kit, and a Malvesti obstacle course, which is another obstacle course, that's in that first phase. And you get night and day land navigation tests as well. The rest of the phases focused on squad tactics and leading the squad into small unit missions. And into this phase, there is also one airborne jump.

Capt Orton: That's a lot.

Capt Dufour: That's a lot for 20 days. They're busy, not a whole lot of sleep. And each phase starts with a garrison time where you get a bed and three really quick meals a day. And when you go into the field, one of the meals is cut. So you get to work on about 18 to 1500 calories a day, depending on what lucky pick you had in the meal you get.

Capt Orton: The ration draw.

Capt Dufour: Yeah.

Capt Orton: Okay, so what happens after that phase.

Capt Dufour: So once you're successful in Fort Benning, either you take a bus if you're a non airborne soldier, or you get the jump, and you go to Atlanta, Georgia, where you will do the mountain phase for another 20 days and 20 nights. So that phase again, focus on squad and platoon tactics. You're going to do raids and ambushes mainly, but you're going to do them in a mountain context. So you're gonna get to learn a lot of techniques of rappelling, knots, and use a pulley system to bring up and down casualties or equipment. And so all of your scenarios will be done on a steep incline. So you can imagine having to do a react to contact and fight through a position on an incline. It requires a lot more endurance than on flat terrain. And then it also tests your navigation skills, because all of that terrain and elevations makes your route planning a lot different, because straightline might be good on flat ground. But sometimes, you're gonna save a lot more time going around a peak than going over and down. So it gives you the opportunity to have to plan routes more in accordance with terrain than you would normally on a flat training area.

Capt Orton: I do have a question about how do you resupply in the mountains?

Capt Dufour: The way it's done on the course is a little bit artificial due to the time constraint because the training never stops. So you get to a patrol base, you establish your patrol base. And once all your procedure is done, and you get about an hour to maximum to like sleep, change your socks and then get ready for the next day. So they bring food and water to you. But in a mountain environment normally you have to rely on either what you packed when you left, what you can get dropped or airlifted there and all the water sources that are available. So a lot of water purification systems would be useful because you don't want to carry all the water that you need for a week because yeah, it's gonna take a lot of room and water is heavy. Yeah, it's about a kilo per litre.

Capt Orton: Yeah, exactly. It was like when you were taking 10 liters in a day. That's 10 kilograms.

Capt Dufour: Yeah.

Capt Orton: And I feel that when you're going up, I was just thinking especially because it's like when you're in the mountains, you can't just drive a truck up there. You know what I mean? Like, necessarily.

Capt Dufour: Yeah, and that comes back to having run that course the same for decades. Their walking lanes for every mission are usually really well made; it brings you over a peak and then down into a valley where they can easily resupply you. It's like, experience pays.

Capt Orton: Yeah, that's right. That's right. If you keep going the same way every time, eventually we'll figure out the good spots to do the stuff.

Capt Dufour: Yeah.

Capt Orton: Okay, so after going through the mountains, what happens next?

Capt Dufour: For Canadians like us, that is really nice wildlife. You get to go experience that line in the U.S. that when you cross, things turn from squirrels to snakes and from raccoons to crocodiles. So you go into the Florida phase, which brings you to the swamp phase. So you'll go and again, it's just refining those squad tactics, platoon tactics for another 20 days and 20 nights. Again, another jump in or an air assault depending if you're an airborne soldier or not. And you get to do a lot of assault boat downriver, so you'll get the feel for navigating with map and compass on a river, and you get across a lot of swamp at night. So walking, when it's really dark, is quite an experience. You get to see before you get there, they'll do a reptile class where they'll show you all of those nice venomous snake and all of the big thing that could bite you that lives in the swamp that you're gonna go into and then you get to go there and walk with them at night so you get taught when you're going through combat arm training, even in Canada usually won't come from or live where and come from where the enemy doesn't expect you can like that you can traverse easily and that's what they show you there is that you go from a beach where you get on a boat, go down a river and walk for a whole night and then you get to your raid or ambush area and you conduct your raid after having crossed that impassable obstacle that is that big swamp.

Capt Orton: And it's like probably not an infantry soldier in the CAF hasn't been in a swamp. But there's swamps and then there's swamps.

Capt Dufour: Yes. I remember going down like the river in Florida. You could see the alligators, you could see the wildlife that you were going to encounter at night and when you were going to walk through. So it's a pretty unreal experience.

Capt Orton: If you're talking about alligators and snakes and stuff like that people have in their head, like: “Oh my God, how do people not die?” But I think for anybody who spent any period of time outside, I'm assuming the wildlife is just not as aggressive as maybe people have in their heads like, nobody died, right?

Capt Dufour: No. And I think that's just a factor of numbers. I wouldn't personally swim in those rivers alone. But when you were 12, to 14 soldiers on an assault boat, and you look like a gigantic whale, so you're maybe twice as big and twice as heavy as that would be predator. So they kind of tend to leave you alone. So I think that's what humans have figured out for a long time. The more you are, the better you are against wildlife. So it applies in that situation, too. But still things like snakes are just something you don't have to contend with when you train in Canada. It was just something you had to keep your eyes open and not leave your boots just open at night when you sleep just so you don't get a nice present in the morning and have a snake curled up in your toe box.

Capt Orton: Yeah, that's right.

Capt Dufour: It's just something that you have to think about. But it doesn't detract from training, it's just more interesting. That's what I found.

Capt Orton: So what comes next?

Capt Dufour: After that, you're done. If you made it through that 60 days, or however time you needed to redo one phase. So we say 60 days, I've met guys that were there for almost six months. So depends on how long and how hard you're willing to commit for that time, the fact that you might start over any part of it is a good motivation, give it all you got the first time, but then you get a little bit of time to eat to get a little bit of fat on your bone. Because you look a little bit depleted by the end, and then it's graduation time. And I was lucky enough to have some members of my family come down to Fort Benning. They make it a big thing. They bring out people from the training brigade and from the Ranger unit. It's a pretty cheerful moment where everybody gets their tab and I got a chance to have my wife and my tab. So it was a pretty unreal experience.

Capt Orton: That's awesome. Obviously, this is all pretty challenging, I'm gonna guess.

Capt Dufour: Yeah, it is challenging. So the infantry training in Canada is already challenging. We get a good deal of endurance tests and sleep deprivation and all that so but the food component or working on calorie deficit for extended periods of time, is something that I had never had to contend with. You don't know how your body is going to react to it until you're actually doing it. But that's to me what's the most challenging part was really not eating enough knowing you're not eating enough, being hungry all the time, having to manage your expenditure of energy because you know your next meal is at seven in the morning. And that's gonna be it until the next day. So you know that what you have eaten that morning is the only thing you get until the next morning. It takes some getting used to it. But it's a valuable lesson to have. And also shows the limit of your body and what do you take for granted when you do other things?

Capt Orton: Yeah, how did your body react?

Capt Dufour: I wouldn't say bad, I wouldn't say good, I lost about 25 pounds. Being at the time when I was younger. So I was maybe 170 pounds. So that brought me down to close to 145 ish. So really, really thin. And the more you go through that the heavier your equipment feels, the harder it is to walk long distances, the more prone you are to getting sick so it's all those feelings that you get to contend with and to feel your body experience. So it's really about pushing your limit and being in a position where you want to keep going because you represent Canada in a course that is sought after by so many in the U.S.

That course runs 11 times a year with classes that range about 250 to 400 candidates every class for 11 classes. So there are thousands of infantry soldiers and officers in the U.S. Army that are going after that qualification. And so being there as one of the few Canadians representing Canada and the royal infantry Corp and your unit, that pride helps you.

Capt Orton: What about the mental aspect?

Capt Dufour: The rules that are imposed on you were different than the one I have experienced in the training system in Canada. So, for example, so for the 60 days it's or the whole time we were on a course or however many days you stay there, it's no access to cell phones. So you get one phone call per phase. And it's like 8 phone booths with quarters with like 100 soldiers waiting behind you. Everybody wants to make their one phone call but you know you got to talk for like two minutes because there's hundreds of soldiers that want to make their phone call too. So no phone call. You can get mail which will bring you back to something that I, being almost 30, never used in my life.

Capt Orton: That's right.

Capt Dufour: My grandparents sent me a postcard for Christmas. And that's about all the mail I ever got in my life. And so then there, my wife and my family and my friends would send me mail and I would write mail too that I would post. And that's how I kept a little connection to the outside world. So that's something that helped. But also just getting immersed in the environment you're in, and by the nature of how diverse the people that are on that course, so you get very interesting stories, and you get to talk with very interesting people.

Capt Orton: What other countries were a part of that?

Capt Dufour: The course is open to a lot of countries that are allied with the United States. So U.S. has a more extensive relationship with militaries across the world. So while I was there, I met people from Singapore, Pakistan, Lebanon, there were French, Brits. So it's also very valuable interpersonal experience to get to talk with those NCOs and officers from other countries and to learn about how things are conducted by home, what kind of operations they're in their realities, where every member in the profession of Arms, whether Canadian, American, or any other countries all have a little bit in common like regardless of the country you come from. So there's a relationship to be built on that pretty easily. So that makes it a lot easier to spend that amount of time cut from the outside world.

Capt Orton: Why is it important for Canadians to kind of engage with U.S. military training?

Capt Dufour: Because they're the biggest military machine in the world, biggest training institution in the world. Like I said, that school pumps out about 2000 graduates a year, 11 classes every year, just seeing the system and the resources, and also getting to know people getting to know TTPs, tactics, techniques and procedures, getting to know how they plan missions, what kind of equipment they're using reports and return. So getting to know their radio procedure, I think makes you appreciate how interoperable we are with the U.S. military. And I think spending a lot of time thinking about how to prepare for war, they spend a lot of money training their people to do it. And I mean, I don't think we have to do everything starting from scratch just because we're across the border from the North. They got things to learn from us. And we got things to learn from them, and getting involved and trying their course there's things that we can bring back to Canada and that we can incorporate into how we work.

Capt Orton: After having gone through all of these things, is there anything you've learned from there that if people want to improve themselves, they can apply that today, and it will make them better?

Capt Dufour: Yeah, I think most of the time, if you think inside of a team that you're either doing enough or there's nothing more you could do, there's always something else. Get involved with your team and get to know the people that are working with you. They'll pay dividends if you're either a leader or you have to assist people in gauging strengths and weaknesses and using them to their best potential.

Capt Orton: So learn to be a better team member.

Capt Dufour: Yeah, learn about yourself and then spend time learning about the people you're working with.

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Capt Orton: Well, that's U.S. Army Rangers. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Capt Dufour: Thank you.

Capt Orton: That was Captain Pierre-Alexandre Dufour of the 3rd Battalion, Royal 22e Régiment. If you want to hear more from him, we've got a Patrol Pathfinder podcast that's on season 3, episode 10.

As usual, I'm Captain Adam Orton for the Canadian Army Podcast. Orton out.

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