GERONIMO!

"Can I have your boots?"

Believe it or not, that was what my superior officer, the company executive officer, 1st Lt Hal Tentlar, asked me as we waited to board the airplane for my first jump with my new unit, D Company, 1st Airborne Battle Group fo the 325th Infantry.

Tentlar, whose job included training me, spent most of his time tormenting me and teaching me nothing. He had been an enlisted man for eleven years before going through OCS. Unfortunately he had never made the transition to officer and remained an enlisted man at heart.

The one thing Tentlar did teach me was right before that jump. He told tell me that the troops would go out of the airplane in one continuous stream, each one pushing forward against the back of the man in front of him. "Forget all that stuff they taught you in jump school," he said, "if you stop at the door like you were taught, they'll just push you out."

It turned out he was right. Forget for a moment that our job as officers was to insist that the troops do it right. Tentlar had spent a lot more time as an enlisted man jumping just this way. It was the only way he knew how to do it.

The problem was that two things are wrong with that way of exitting an aircraft and nothing is right. To understand why it works the way it does I guess you have to understand the psychology of airborne units when they parachute. I don't pretend that I do understand, but having been there and having done that many times, I can guess.

It appears that the troops go into a self-induced mass trance. No, I'm serious. You have to see it to believe it. The jumpmaster's commands are always the same and everyone is always supposed to follow this routine. He screams, "Stand up", and everyone stands up. He commands "Hook up" and everyone takes his static line and hooks the clip onto the cable running from front to aft through the airplane. He commands, "Check static lines," and everyone makes sure that he has hooked up properly and put the safety wire through the hook, ensuring that there is no way it can come off accidently. He then commands "check your equipment," then "Stand in the door," and finally, "Go!" Then each paratrooper moves to the door in turn, takes up the proper position, and jumps up and out of the plane. Well, that's the way it's supposed to work.

With a plane full of troops, the way it actually works, is that as soon as the troops hook up they start chanting, "Go, go, go, go....", all the time tugging at their static lines and pushing forward toward the door, and they keep it up until they leave the plane -- in one continuous stream, exactly as Tentlar described it. The jumpmaster loses almost all control, which is dangerous. He ultimately only controls the first man out, then he just gets out of the way. If he had to stop the jump for some reason he would have to be Superman. The troops are in a trance from the beginning of the chanting. For that reason we always put an extra NCO aboard every plane to check the static lines and equipment since the troops are already incoherent.

The second big problem is that the troops are too close together. Several things go wrong when they go out too close together. First, each one is right on top of the guy in front and, as his chute deploys, it does so right in the face of the guy behind. Several soldiers get burns or cuts to their faces on every mass jump. Then they are too close together in the air and tend to get entangled. This is really dangerous since one of the chutes is likely to collapse. That could easily kill one of them.

With all of this, the accident rate in airborne units is, amazingly, usually very low.

I was really annoyed at Tentlar's juvenile teasing right before my "cherry jump." I wanted him to show some maturity and responsibility. Not only was I expecting too much, but he behaved exactly like the troops during the jump. He was right behind me and he just shoved me out the door, preventing me from making a proper exit and disrupting the deployment of my chute.

Not that juvenile behavior was unknown to me or even undesirable. In jump school at Fort Benning, where the class was mostly my West Point classmates, after our first jump we got pretty casual and started goofing around. One of our classmates was named Tom Looney. At this time a popular folk song was "Tom Dooley." On either our second or third jump those of us on the plane with Tom sang all the way to the DZ,

Hang down your head, Tom Looney,

Hang down your head and cry.

Hang down your head Tom Looney,

Poor boy you're bound to die.

No one would have blamed Tom if he refused to jump. He jumped with a big smile on his face, enjoying all the attention.

The thing about parachuting is that if you don't go into a trance and jump with your eyes shut, the way the troops do, it's a lot of fun. You know the chute's going to open and you are going to have a nice ride to the ground. The plane is very noisy, then you jump out going forward at 120 mph, so you move through the air that fast until your chute opens. The "wind" is loud in your ears. Then your chute opens and everything gets quiet. It's almost eerie how quiet it is as the planes fly away. There you are hanging about a thousand feet above the ground, not perceptibly moving, looking out at the countryside. It's magical.

Of course, the troops go out with their eyes shut and some keep them that way until they hit the ground. That's a good way to break something. Once I was floating peacefully down and I felt something hit my chute. I looked up and saw that there was someone on my parachute. Danger!! The biggest danger was to him, since his chute was now above mine and getting little air. It would soon collapse, he would slip off my chute and hurtle toward the ground. There was no telling whether his chute would reinflate in time to save him.. I had to save him and fast.

I yelled, "Hey, soldier, you're on my chute. Open your eyes and get off, now!!!"

The response I got was about what I expected. He had no idea who I was, his face was full of parachute "silk". He suggested a difficult sexual act.

"You're going to die unless you do as I say. Run off my chute as fast as you can," I commanded. Fortunately he did. I don't know who he was and I don't care. We both lived through it.

Actually, that's about the only exciting jump story I have. Once I came down on the edge of a cliff on Okinawa, with my chute blowing over the cliff and dangling down into the ocean.

Once I was "airborne commander" on a jump in Korea. We had no place to jump on Okinawa at that time and we regularly flew all the way to Korea to jump. By some fluke I was the senior paratrooper out of three airplanes full, probably 190 jumpers. When we got to Seoul it was completely hidden under the clouds.

My instructions were that we were not to jump unless I saw the Initial Point (IP) which was a set of twin bridges over the Han River. As jumpmaster, I couldn't allow the jump unless I saw green smoke on the Drop Zone. We flew down the Han for about 10 minutes and saw nothing but clouds. Suddenly, through a tiny hole in the clouds I saw the twin bridges AND the smoke on the DZ. Then we were over the clouds again. I told the pilot to turn on the green light and we all jumped.

Fortunately, almost everyone hit the DZ, which was right along the river. A couple of guys, no doubt with their eyes closed, drifted out into the river but we had boats out there to grab them. Afterward, the other jumpmasters asked me how I had allowed the jump. They hadn't seen the DZ. I had to admit I was pretty surprised to see both the IP and the DZ at the same time and the only time I could see through the clouds.

My worst jump occured over the Philippines. The air over the Philippines is always turbulent as far as I could tell, at least it always was when we went there. For someone as prone to air sickness as I, that makes formation flying at low altitude a real problem. I got so sick that I could barely do my job as jumpmaster and I couldn't put my chute on. I got everyone else out of the plane on the pass over the DZ and then told the crew chief that we had to go around again so I could jump. There was a lot of arguing about that while I had my static line NCO put my chute on me and tried not to throw up.

Finally the pilot agreed to go back and I had a chute on. I jumped all by myself over the rest of the Battle Group, some 2000 officers and men, who must have wondered what on earth was going on. When I got to the ground I lost my breakfast, but I was on the ground in the Philippines, where I was supposed to be.

In airborne units we always made a big deal out of being a paratrooper. The objective is to make the troops feel special and elite.

When soldiers (or Marines) think they are special, you can ask and get a lot more from them. Actually, jumping out of an airplane is not such a big deal. The ultimate psychological experience has to be jump school. By the end of the first day you are desperate to jump out of an airplane. After two or three weeks the worst thing anyone could do to you is stop you from jumping. Then you actually jump and it's easy and fun. Don't tell any of this to anyone you know who's a paratrooper. He thinks what he does is very special, and it is.