My First Jump From an Airplane
I recall that it was just after
December 6, 1969 in Bad Tolz, Germany that I took my first jump from an
aircraft. I remember that date because
on our way from the Black Forest to the
training site at Bad Tolz in Bavaria, we saw St. Nicholas walking the streets
in the evening and stopping at each house with a light on indicating children
were present. It was the custom in
Bavaria that some ogre dressed in a Middle Ages monk’s outfit would interrogate
families to see if children had been good or bad. If good they got a sweet from the lout, and
if bad the guy went into Gestapo mode and gave the kids a hiding they would not
soon forget.
Five of us
in a military van arrived at the old Wehrmacht military base at the foot of the
Alps . That base had an interesting history
before and during WWII. In researching this article I learned that in
1934 the first commandant of the
training school in Bad Tolz called the Junker Schule was Paul Von Lettow
Vorbeck, the German officer who had been in command of German forces in East
Africa in WWI. That hit home as I had
been stationed in the Peace Corps in those African lands just before entering the
military as a draftee. The Junker Schule was part of the SS but not the horrific Waffen SS.
We
had come to Bad Tolz to be trained in
the art of falling or being pushed out of a plane with a parachute attached to
our backs and a reserve chute to our chests. I never
thought things might go wrong at first, but when the instructors explained what
could go wrong, I began to think, “Oh Mama Mia why did I volunteer for
this?” “For the $55 extra each month”
came the voice in the wilderness. So in two weeks, a group of the 7th US Special Forces taught us
what back home would have taken three
weeks, divided into ‘ground week, tower
week and jump week. We skipped ‘tower
week’. In that second week we trainees would do our
five mandatory jumps from a real aircraft in the air rather than a tower. Remember this was December, it was in the
Alps, it was cold, and it was snowing. One week less was a blessing.
We learned
the basic Parachute Landing Fall, PLF, by jumping off a bench onto a
concrete floor and rolling to one side or the other landing first on two toes, knees
bent , rolling over and letting the calf muscle take the next hit and work our
way up the thigh, rib cage, and shoulder.
The fun name for this type of landing was ‘two toes and a nose’. If we
banged the ground with our helmet we immediately got ten push ups to do. I can assure you that a PLF will give you a
very tired neck which after about ten jumps from a bench will not keep that helmet from banging
the concrete. A thousand push ups
later we moved on to the swing landing trainer which was a set up about ten
feet high. You stepped off a platform
and being suspended by ropes and pulleys
were gradually lowered while swinging and allowed to hit the ground
fairly hard. The rate of descent was
controlled by the instructor. Eventually
they just let go of the rope and let you fall onto the frozen ground that in
summer had been sawdust but was now hard as concrete and terribly rutted as
well, so the landings were really bruising to the legs.
During
that week we did not get the usual harassment associated with parachute
training, I think because the instructors just didn’t care. They had families, it was Christmas, all the
wrong reasons for going light but I consider myself very lucky to have been
trained that way. Needless to say I also
didn’t mind that it was only one week and then we jumped five times in the
second week.
One other
little tidbit, the commanding officer,
an American, had the incredibly Germanic name
Lt. Colonel Ludwig Feistenhaimer.
Affectionately known as Mad Ludwig.
Anyway
first jump time came. We received our briefing,
selected a chute and strapped it on. The
guys who packed the parachutes were called ‘riggers’ and theirs was a very
special profession. One of their
privileges was they got to wear red caps instead of the time worn olive
drab. They also did not get harassed by
anyone associated with jumping, because they were they guys who packed your
chute. When officers came by before a
jump to get their chute, they always chose their own. They would never take a chute a rigger handed
them. Never know if that rigger had it
in for you and gave you a badly packed chute, eh Sir? I wasn’t worried, because I was a lowly
Specialist Fifth Class, trained by the Army as a translator of Goethe’s tongue
though I wasn’t trained well enough to read Goethe’s works. Still haven’t.
Our planes
that we would jump from were WWII vintage, the old Gooney Birds or C-47’s. Twin engine, piston driven, as reliable as
any aircraft in the world. Our briefing
before our jump went over what happens in case of emergency. The main emergency that they could think of
telling us was what to do if the static line that is attached to the plane and
pulls your chute out of the pack as you fall away from the aircraft fails to
break and release you and you find you are being towed at ninety miles an hour (top
speed) behind the aircraft. You actually
have a choice if you recall the briefing.
If you wish to be cut loose and try out your reserve chute, you need to
put your hands on your head to signal to the Jump Master to cut your line. You
fall and then deploy your reserve by pulling on the D ring or handle on the
reserve. There is no back up to your reserve if it does
not deploy. At that point you are FUBAR
(Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition). Is
there a Plan B? Yes, there is. The Army always has a plan B.
Plan
B. The jump master then told us the
details of plan B. Initially Plan B
sounds reasonable. You do nothing, you
land with the plane. But…..you will be
outside the plane being towed behind it.
No coffee, tea, or milk will be served.
The jump master says he will pull your static line in toward the plane
with you attached to the end of it, but he won’t be able to get you into the
plane. On this snowy, icy day he did
mention that the runway where the C-47 will be landing will have a lot of ice
on it and you will probably slide very
easily behind the aircraft. Gee, sort of
like water skiing in the winter at maybe 70 mph behind an aircraft on the
ground. If it happens I think I will
choose the first option.
Any other
instructions Mr. Jump Master? Just a
few, remember if you are coming down in the forests around here, keep your feet
together. You do not want a tree going
up your rectum. Yes, Mr. Jump
Master. At that point you could not have
gotten a darning needle up my rectum with jar of axle grease to aide the
attempt.
So “Off we went into the wild blue yonder” as the old
song contrives to make this all seem like fun.
Really that’s an old Air Force pilots’ song. The paratrooper’s song it “We Have a Rendezvous
with Destiny”. You are never sure what is your destiny until you land safely. It was incredibly noisy
in the plane, we hardly had time to
think before, during or after take off. Everything in those first jumps is done by
rote action that you learned during ground training. Only after five or six jumps do you start
thinking about what is going on before and during a jump. The
aircraft wound it’s way up to 1200 feet on that dark grey day over the
Bavarian countryside. I hardly had time
to look out a window to see the mountains before the Jump Master signaled with
his hands that we should “Stand Up” ,
second signal “Hook Up”. This meant
that we should connect our static line with the clip on the end onto the cable
going through the plane. By this time
fifteen or so jumpers are on their feet, trying to keep their balance, trying
not to piss their pants, and looking at the open door near the tail of the
plane. The Jump Master now signals us to
move toward the door. All this time a
red light has been shining until we are on the approach to the drop zone. As we get over the drop zone, the light
turns green and we are going out the door one at a time. We have been taught to put our hands on the
sides of the door and project ourselves outward. If you don’t project yourself you will be too
close to the plane and get a thumping on the fuselage as you go away. No
problem today. I’m out that door like a
bird out of cage. It’s windy and cold, I
count to three or four by thousands and look up and see a beautiful site. My parachute is open, and I am drifting
slowly toward the snow covered ground.
The silence is peaceful. The next
jumpers are too far away to talk to or yell at.
I look down, no trees to contend with, just float down to that snow
covered pasture. Wait, is there something out of synch here? There
are three feet of snow on the ground, I know, but that snow looks very
discolored. It looks rather yellowish brown.
WTF? I am about to learn that
the Bavarian farmers are practicing an age old tradition of spraying their
fields with a mixture of cow dung and urine that is collected in the
barns. The smell wafts up as I descend
closer and closer to my first landing, and suddenly I’m down on the ground with
no injury hitting into those three feet of snow. But I am covered in the spray of those German
cattle droppings and kidney effluent mess on the surface of that snow. Yuk.
But as trained, I keep my mouth shut, I don’t eat yellow brown snow, and
I gather up my parachute and put it in the bag we carried with us and start
hiking back to a truck waiting at the edge of the field to take us back to our
barracks. We all are smelling like the
proverbial Rose of Sharon.
The stench in our barracks is strong and there is no place to take our outerwear to be washed. We go through the week with those ripe uniforms. The Special Force barracks have not smelled like this ever. We complete our five jumps and are deemed to now be paratroopers in good standing and our paychecks will reflect such. Over the next year and a half I will have twenty-two more jumps, sometimes from helicopters, sometimes from German planes, and or one or two occasions from a KC 130 jet powered craft. The brotherhood of paratroopers lasts for life. Everyone else in the military is known to us as a ‘Leg’. We know two things. Jumping from an aircraft is the greatest thrill you can have with your pants on. And what comes out of the sky besides bird shit is paratroopers.
The guy standing above me Captain Scheer (origin Switzerland) had jumped at night into North Viet Nam and did reconnaissance and walked out to South Viet Nam.
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