When a staff writer at a left-wing commentary website accused Sen. Tom Cotton of lying about his time in the armed forces, the Republican’s fellow Rangers had his back.
The effort to insinuate that the Arkansas lawmaker has been stealing valor for nearly a decade rests on the premise that, starting in 2012, during his first congressional campaign, Cotton spoke about his time as “a U.S. Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan,” and highlighted his service in television ads throughout his home state.
Roger Sollenberger of Salon, aided by an outside researcher, argued that Cotton never belonged to the 75th Ranger Regiment, an “elite unit that plans and conducts joint special military operations as part of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.”
Instead, Sollenberger wrote, Cotton merely “attended the Ranger School, a two-month-long, small unit tactical infantry course that literally anyone in the military is eligible to attend.”
Despite the fact that the course is open to all current military personnel, the U.S. Army states that “Ranger School is one of the toughest training courses for which a Soldier can volunteer. For more than two months, Ranger students train to exhaustion, pushing the limits of their minds and bodies,” with a small minority of service members ever enrolling.
Sollenberger did concede that “Soldiers who complete the course earn the right to wear the Ranger tab — a small arch that reads ‘Ranger,'” but then asserted that “in the eyes of the military, that does not make them an actual Army Ranger.”
The U.S. Ranger Hall of Fame disagrees and lists criteria as including service “in a Ranger unit in combat or be a successful graduate of the U.S. Army Ranger School.” Similarly, the U.S. Army Ranger Association, which works to “preserve the heritage and spirit of the U.S. Army Rangers by strengthening the relationship among all U.S. Army Rangers,” features members of its executive committee who completed Ranger training but were never members of the 75th Ranger Regiment.
A Monday column by former U.S. Army Infantry Airborne Ranger Colonel Bill Wenger called the attacks on “Cotton’s Ranger status … exactly backwards.”
“The unwarranted, unjustified and ignorant attacks on Senator Tom Cotton, a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger, are inaccurate and unwarranted on the status of a dedicated patriot,” Wenger wrote. “Cotton volunteered for some of the Army’s most demanding training, served honorably as a combat leader, and provides to Arkansas and our nation a superlative example of what it means to put your life on the line to serve our country. That cannot be said of those who have erroneously maligned his Ranger status.”
Cotton served as a captain in the military from 2005 to 2013, where he earned a Bronze Star during his multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prior to his service, he graduated from Harvard University and Harvard Law School.
“To be clear, as he’s stated many times, Senator Cotton graduated from Ranger School, earned the Ranger tab, and served a combat tour with the 101st Airborne, not the 75th Ranger Regiment,” a spokesman for Cotton told the Washington Examiner and highlighted the fact that Cotton has never claimed to serve in the Ranger Regiment.
Sollenberger maintained in his piece that he wasn’t making “a minor or insignificant distinction” and noted a dispute adjudicated by Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post‘s fact-checker, between two Republican Senate candidates in New Hampshire last summer.
In that primary, Bryant Messner spoke about his time as a Ranger while his opponent retired Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc said, “Unless you served in a Ranger battalion, I think you’re overstretching your claim.”
Kessler, a graduate of the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and lifelong journalist, awarded Messner two “Pinocchios.” Messner went on to defeat Bolduc in the primary but ultimately lost to Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in the November general election.
In a subsequent article released a few days later, Sollenberger seemingly contradicted his previous reporting. Writing that “it is unclear why Cotton, who is thought to be laying the brickwork for a 2024 presidential bid, has so routinely linked his military service to his Ranger school graduation,” he admitted in the same piece that “the question of whether any Ranger School graduate is a Ranger by definition is a matter of semantic debate in the military, and far from settled.”
This kind of scrutiny by Salon over the term Ranger is seemingly a brand new policy as one of its contributing writers, Eric Edstrom, puts in his bio on the site that he “was an infantry officer, Army Ranger, and Bronze Star Medal recipient,” despite never serving with the 75th Ranger Regiment. On Edstrom’s personal website, he wrote that “he is a graduate of the U.S. Army Ranger School.”
Moreover, Sollenberger’s reporting appeared to cause his editors to scour through previous articles published when the publication had no problem referring to those who complete Ranger training as Rangers.
“A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to Army Ranger School graduates as Rangers,” one correction reads on top of a 2015 article about female Rangers. “A graduate of the U.S. Army Ranger Course is merely qualified for the 75th Ranger Regiment, an elite special operations unit.”
