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The Army has a way of deciding what you’re good at before you ever get a vote. One Thanksgiving, our command sergeant major decided he wanted a Ranger scroll carved out of ice for the battalion dinner. Nobody knew why, and nobody wanted the job. I was the newest private, which made me the perfect candidate.
Two days later, I was on a plane to Fresno, California, to attend something called the Academy of Ice Carving and Design. I thought it was a prank. It wasn’t. The place was real: a full workshop stocked with chainsaws, chisels, and instructors who treated frozen water like marble.
For 48 hours, I lived in a blur of cold air, loud tools, and bad decisions. I learned just enough to be dangerous: how to trace a pattern, how to keep the surface from fogging, how to move a 300-pound block without losing a foot. My hands were nicked, my ego slightly deflated, but all my limbs were intact. I had two days to become the Michelangelo of ice carving.
On my last night in town, I went to a bar with a few locals. Fresno nightlife wasn’t exactly Times Square, but after two days in a freezer, neon lights and jukebox country felt like Vegas. I met a girl who said she’d never met a soldier who could sculpt. She laughed when I told her the Army had made me an artist. We talked, drank too much, and I remember her saying she was that kind of girl. Later, she texted that she was outside my hotel door.
I saw the messages the next morning. Whatever version of me she hoped to meet was already sleeping soundly in the arms of Jim Beam. My head felt like a crew-served live-fire range, and I still had to produce a perfect Ranger scroll out of ice by noon.
I stumbled into the shop, hands shaking, eyes half shut, and started hacking away at the block. My breath fogged the air; my hangover fogged everything else. Somehow, muscle memory and stubborn pride took over. When I finally stepped back, the scroll gleamed under the fluorescent lights — clean lines, perfect curve, a little blood frozen near the edge for authenticity.
The instructors clapped. I tried not to vomit.
Back at the battalion, I thought the nightmare was over. Then they told me to make another one for the real event. And there was a time crunch: eight hours, no fancy tools, no rig to move 300-pound blocks of ice. Just a chainsaw, a chisel, and a sarcastic “good luck.” My reward? A case of beer.
So I did what Rangers do: adapt, improvise, swear under my breath … got drunk again, sliced my hand open on a chainsaw, and still finished in under six hours. It didn’t look as good as the one I made while drunk at the ice carving academy. But at the battalion dinner, everyone else was so drunk, it looked like magic to them anyway.
The Ranger Battalion dinner at Hunter Army Airfield was a contradiction in dress blues: part opera, part bar fight. The air reeked of starch, bourbon, and Grizzly wintergreen. Chandeliers flickered like interrogation lamps over men who’d learned to survive on adrenaline, rage, and instant coffee but were here pretending to be civilized. Prime rib bled across white linen while laughter cracked like gunfire down the tables. Every toast felt like a dare — raise it too slow and you were soft, too fast and you were already gone.
At dinner, the command sergeant major stood behind his gleaming ice scroll like it was the Ark of the Covenant. He nodded once and said, “Outstanding.” That was it. Hours of frostbite, blood, and bourbon distilled into three syllables.
By midnight, the speeches had dissolved into laughter, and the laughter into something harder to name. My ice sculpture wept onto a marble floor. The candles guttered out, leaving the room lit by the glow of half-emptied glasses and the strange warmth of shared ruin.
Yet when the final toast was raised — to those who never made it home — the noise died like the power had been cut. Every head bowed, every jaw clenched. In the silence, you could almost hear the ghosts moving through the room like wind through tall grass. For a moment, amid the spilled bourbon and melted ice, the whole place felt holy.
Looking back, it’s still one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever been asked to do, and I used to jump out of planes in the dark with winds so high we’d end up miles from the drop zone. But that’s the Army for you. One minute you’re training to destroy the enemy, the next, you’re attending art school in Fresno because some sergeant major wants to impress his in-laws at Thanksgiving.
The logic doesn’t matter, only the order. And there’s a school for everything.
A buddy of mine got sent to a course that taught you how to hotwire cars in case you had to make a getaway behind enemy lines. They never sent me to that class, probably for everyone’s safety. I did ask though.
Back then, I thought those detours were pointless. But now I think they were the point: to see if you could adapt to absurdity with the same seriousness you brought to combat. To wake up hungover, get handed a task you didn’t choose or understand, and still make it work. That’s the real test.
This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
Matt Stone, a cook who earned his Ranger tab, served in the 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment from 2008 to 2012. After leaving the Army, he earned an associate degree in criminal justice, a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and a master’s degree in international relations from American University. He is the author of The Spelling Bee Champ and the subscription newsletter Grounded. Most importantly, he learned how to turn struggle into meaning, chaos into lessons, bedlam into cosmic order.
