Installment # 50

The mental harassment in Jump School included the seemingly constant blaring from a PA system of some chilling lyrics to the tune of “Glory, Glory Halleluiah,” some of which included:   “There was blood upon the risers; there were brains upon the chute.  His intestines were a-hangin’ from his paratrooper’s boots…”  The chorus went: “Gory, gory, what a hell-of-a way to die…” etc. The harassment also included instructors screaming in our faces from a half-inch away and demanding instant obedience to any and all commands.  I saw an instructor spit in the sand and tell a trainee to pick it up, which he did along with a handful of sand.  Then he was told to put it in his pocket, which he immediately did.  No real harm done, but you lose your ego fast, which is the point.  When jumping from a real airplane, whether in training or in combat, it is critical to obey commands instantly and completely.  Those who can’t do that identify themselves and drop out of Jump School.  Of course, it is easier if you are only 18 years old and not inclined to question authority, anyway.

The purpose of jumping from the 34-foot tower on the cable was to get us accustomed to standing in the door properly, jumping on command, and assuming the proper body positioning in the air (elbows in, head tucked, etc.) I remember the instructors amused themselves with a young man named Finnegan, who had red hair, a baby face, and lots of freckles.  He looked about ten years old!  In his first jump he did something incorrectly, so was sent right back up ahead of the others in the queue.  The instructor up in the tower evidently told him that when asked to shout his name he was to yell “Master Blaster Finnegan, Sir!”  A master blaster is a grizzled veteran who has more than 125 jumps – way more than any person gets in three years during peace time.  Well, we all laughed in spite of ourselves, and the instructor on the ground pretended to have an angry fit, and when Private Finnegan got down to the ground he was subjected to additional ridicule.  As I recall, he took it in stride and graduated from Jump School with the rest of us who stuck it out.

Medical science was still in the Dark Ages in 1962, at least in the Army.  They would keep us out in the hot sun for four hours or so between meals, and the only water available was from a “lister bag” that hung down vertically and was loaded with salt at the bottom where the spout was.  It tasted like salt water, which it was, and really discouraged consumption.  Then we went through the chow line and were required to take two salt tablets before we could get any food.  Modern science established at least by the late 1960’s and the first running boom in America that the working body supplies its own salt; what it needs is water.  No one in the long distance running community takes salt supplements; they take water and maybe some electrolytes.

One other indictment of Army Medicine is that they almost disqualified me on the basis of low blood pressure.  My blood pressure has registered on the low side for my age ever since.  But at the time, I didn’t know I had this tendency, and of course did not know what the ramifications might be, if any.  Fortunately a higher-level medical professional made the determination that I was physically qualified to be a paratrooper.  Years later I asked my civilian doctor if there was any significance to having low blood pressure.  He just shrugged and said, “It means you have less chance of ever having high blood pressure.”  My blood pressure has crept up over time, but is still on the low side for my age.  This just in…November 15, 2013: at a routine Kaiser visit my blood pressure was 102 over 57, and my resting heart rate was 54!  Wow!

Many of the guys in Jump School could say that the first time they were ever in an airplane, they jumped out of it!  I could almost say that.  My first flight was from Fort Dix to Fort Benning.  We jump three times during jump week.  A lot of the guys worried about breaking a leg or something on landing.  I just worried about the chute opening.  I had a lot of confidence in my athleticism and ability to apply the techniques we were taught about landing properly and safely.  Besides, broken bones were not fatal, but malfunctioning chutes could very well be.  I was fond of saying that when that chute opened, it was the most beautiful skirt I ever looked up!

They issued us chutes at the airfield, never the same one twice.  In Jump School I didn’t have the common sense to wonder: Where do these chutes come from?  Who packed them?  What was the quality control procedure?  During my tour of duty in Germany I learned to wonder:  What if there was a disgruntled soldier or a crazy person who deliberately “rigged” some chutes not to open, and I got one of them?  We heard rumors and stories about that sort of thing – probably untrue.  I noticed that the beer hall was very quiet the night before a scheduled jump, but very boisterous the night after a jump. 

We were taught how to use our small emergency chutes, but it was all theory; there was no practical way to practice.  Also, we understood that if we landed using only the reserve chute, we would be coming down too fast, and there were going to be some broken bones.  The reserve chutes could not be designed big enough to provide the slower descent that would help keep us from being hurt.  A complication was that a malfunctioning chute seldom completely failed to open.  Rather, it opened incorrectly, causing us to drop too fast for safety but not fast enough to permit complete reliance on the reserve chute.  In fact, if you were not careful in deploying the reserve chute, it would get tangled up with the partially opened main chute and possibly do more harm than good.

Malfunctioning main chutes usually took one of two forms: The “cigarette roll” or the “Mae West.”  The latter is easier to visualize: a shroud line accidently loops over the canopy as it deploys, forming what looks like a giant bra and causing you to drop too fast.  The cigarette roll is long and narrow.  For some reason, the canopy never inflates and you drop way too fast.  In either case, the paratrooper needs to keep his wits about him, open the reserve chute carefully and feed out small portions of the canopy material until it catches the air and starts to billow properly.  If he panics and just pulls the handle the reserve chute probably will get tangled up with the malfunctioning main chute and possibly speed up the descent, rather than slow it down.  Common sense or not, I mentally rehearsed many times, but never knew if I would be patient and careful enough, if I found myself plunging toward the earth and only had a matter of seconds to do it right.  Guess I’ll never know!

One other thing to worry about is dropping a bit faster than someone right below you, and ending up standing on their canopy hundreds of feet off the ground.  It slows you down and your chute starts to collapse.  That only happened to me once.  It was a helpless feeling as I tried to push off from his canopy and get away from him.  But we drifted apart as magically as we had drifted together and all ended well.  All together I had about 21 jumps, including the three in Jump School.  When I was assigned to an infantry company within our brigade, I jumped at least once per month.  But after I was transferred to Headquarters Company, I only jumped once every three months, the minimum required to remain eligible for jump pay.  I found, by the way, that it was a lot scarier to jump once every three months than more routinely.  As with many things, the more frequently you do it, the less traumatic.

I lost several teeth in the Army.  They died of natural causes, I think.  I was cursed with lousy teeth.  My mother said it was because she had scarlet fever and had to take sulfur drugs during her pregnancy with me.  I don’t know if that was it, or not.  A hygienist commented recently that “It’s as if your teeth are made of butter,” because small cavities become big cavities so quickly for me.  I suspect that the Army dentists were inclined to take the easy way out and pull teeth, rather than save them.  As with other aspects of Army life as a teenager, I never wondered about the review and quality control process, if any.  One would think that decisions of dentists would be reviewed by an oversight panel or something.  Anyway, several of my teeth were pulled, whether they were “goners” or not.  My first Army root canal, which was my first ever root canal, was rather unique.  The dentist left the opening exposed so it could drain, and he gave me no pain medicine, because he felt there was too much foreign matter in the area as it was.  I had to keep my mouth closed for about a week, as cold air and cold liquids created incredible pain.  No civilian root canal has been like that.

I’m sure it was pain that drove me to the Army dentists, rather than any sense on my part.  The dentists, in turn, were probably the reason I made an appointment for cleaning.  Similar to my approach to the lack of clean underwear, when I went for my first cleaning I didn’t bother to brush my teeth first.  The dental hygienist scolded me soundly in her broken English.  I tried to explain my reasoning: Why bother cleaning my teeth myself, since she was going to do it that day and would no doubt do a better job, anyway? The hygienist said that pieces of food were splattering all over and could even get into her eyes.  Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.

That reminds me of the time we were relocating our group from one building to another on base.  We were given instructions on assembling our foot lockers, bedding and duffle bags, and were told to carry our own bunk beds down the stairs and across the grounds to the new building.  They were single bunks, made of metal but not too heavy for us healthy young men.  I don’t recall whether I hadn’t seen how the other guys were doing it, or what, but I did not think to collapse the legs to make the bunk narrower and easier to navigate down the stairs and out the door.  What I have never forgotten is the sergeant’s colorful yelling as I fumbled and staggered out the door, “expletives deleted, Zades, use your head for something besides a hat rack!”

The beer in Germany was much stronger than what I was accustomed to, and it took me a few months to adjust.  I remember waking up with a mean hangover one morning, and borrowing someone’s electric razor, rather than risk slicing myself up with a regular razor.  After a few seconds I said, “Wow, I am so drunk I’m numb.   I can’t even feel the razor on my skin.  He came over and found that I had not removed the plastic cover on the razor.  How should I know?  I never used an electric razor before. When Tom Harris and I were staying at Mom’s place in Inwood before leaving for California, we found that we could drink seemingly unlimited quantities of American beer and not get much of a buzz at all.  It took a few weeks to make that transition back to weaker beer.  

In the meantime, we also discovered something about those new aluminum cans with the ring tops that you pop open with your thumb.  After a week in the U.S. Tom and I both had mysteriously lacerated thumbs.  We were initially perplexed.  When we had left the U.S. in 1961, beer was still sold in cans that required the old fashioned can opener known to this day as a “church key,” for some reason.  Evidently, our thumbs needed to adjust to American beer just as our systems did.  In Germany, by the way, beer was sold in large bottles with a stopper-type close operated by popping a hinge with both thumbs at the same time.  We called them “pop tops.”

We were encouraged but not required to stay on the base on the weekends.  To encourage us to stay on base we were given ample access to great, strong German beer for 15 cents per bottle.  And many weekends they had 2 for 1 night, and even nickel night, where we could drink ourselves silly for less than a dollar.  They didn’t want us taking the bottles to our rooms, but we found that if you removed the liner from your helmet, it would hold 5 to 6 bottles of beer, which you could then carefully carry to the room where the guys were gathering.  I think we would dip our canteen cups into the helmet to scoop out a mug of beer.  Each of us had a helmet, so we maintained a steady supply of beer by taking turns going back to the beer hall and filling another one up and bring it back to the room.

Some Saturdays or Sundays we would sit around with copious amounts of beer and amuse ourselves by listening to our own voices and the funny things that were said.  Tape recorders were a fairly new novelty for us in the early 1960s.  One time we had two tape recorders, and we would record ourselves on one as we played back and laughed at the other one.  One of the guys set up a gag where, when he turned on the recorder, he had one of the other guys say, “(Expletive deleted), lady, you’re big enough to play with the Green Bay Packers!”  Whereupon he said, in a Scandinavian woman’s accent, “Ooh, no…I only play with Ollie’s pecker!”  None of us were expecting that, and the room just erupted with our laughter.  Then he played that one back to us and the other guy taped us as we laughed even more hysterically…laughing at ourselves laughing at the joke.  Well, the first guy recorded us laughing at ourselves laughing…you can see where this is going.  We sat there drinking that strong German beer, playing those tapes back and forth, rolling on the floor with laughter, tears streaming down our cheeks.  That may have been the highlight of my 2 ½ years in Germany, come to think of it.