That was something that always annoyed me from the first day of ROTC until finishing Ranger School a few years later. Nothing but poorly crafted evaluations and non-expert evaluators (most of them in ROTC were upperclassmen or LTs - what did they know?). IOBC tried to mimic Ranger School so as to "prepare us" for it, since having a tab was apparently so important; and then there was Ranger School (nuff said). If you looked at my evals from ROTC (barely passed), IOBC (center mass), and Ranger School (barely passed) - or sat in on my unit AARs at NTC (first as a PL, then as an XO) you would see a whole lot of evaluators whom I never saw eye to eye with. An RI in the Florida phase of Ranger School tried to convince the Bn Cdr to not let me graduate because I had 5 major minuses for mouthing off to RI's (I think 6 was the limit). The one exception was as a PL at JRTC where the OCs apparently couldn't say enough good things about me - coincidentally, I thought that JRTC did a far superior job of letting the scenario play out and avoiding canned scenarios.
Once I was deployed on real world missions, everything made sense to me. Most of what I did in Iraq probably would have earned me a no-go in Ranger School and a "stop training" at NTC because it didn't fit the linear-thinking preconceptions that most evaluators seemed to hold. But I would defy anyone to explain why any of it was tactically unsound or not in accordance with doctrine. After OIF I, I was explaining to one of my former PSGs from another unit how we executed an ambush a few months earlier. It looked nothing like anything in 7-8, but it violated none of the doctrine and it was tactically sound. I still remember his reaction: "Damn, that's pretty good. Good thing you did that in real life and not in Ranger School." That says it all, imo.
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