The prayer of a paratrooper
The confidence gained from months of training and successful parachute jumps with the Army’s 82nd Airborne flew away the day the two guys in front of our son, Randy, “squeezed through the jump door together like the Three Stooges.”
“Their chutes tangled up. As they jumped, one chute opened – and stole the air from the guy just above. The guy on top quickly fell below and his chute opened while the other closed. They call it ‘leap frogging.’ I saw them go out the door and every time the top chute closed, we heard another blood curdling scream. They hit pretty hard.”
“I landed near them. I tried to get out of my parachute harness to go help them, but the release buttons had crimped shut. I couldn’t get out to run over to help.”
The jump master came to help and said, “I have never seen anything like that. You don’t need to be over there with them. You need to be right here praying.”
“They both survived,” Randy recalled, “but one guy had a broken pelvis; the other had a big bruise on his hip and had a solid bruise from his knee and up his side. The first guy spent two months in the hospital before he came back and jumped again.”
“At that point I was not sure I wanted to jump anymore. I began praying, asking the Lord to cancel my jumps one way or another.”
And, his jumps were canceled.
Flying on a C-130 from North Carolina via Iceland for a jump into England, three of the plane’s four engines quit. With only one working engine, “we thought we would have to make an emergency jump. We were standing in chutes ready to go,” he recalled. The plane leaned to the side and a guy ran from the cockpit to the back, opened the hatch, pulled out a crank, hooked it on a shaft in the hole and started cranking as hard as he could this way and that eight, nine times.
He later learned that the plane had also lost rudder control and had to be controlled manually as the guy cranked the rudder into position listening to the pilot over his headset. The plane landed with the paratroopers still on board.
After the training, the soldiers prepared to fly back across the Atlantic and jump when they reached Fort Bragg. Snow started to fall on the parachutes stacked on a nearby palette. Randy and others covered them with a tarp to keep them dry.
Near the states, “We put on our chutes. The Safety came around checking chutes. He looked at my parachute and said, ‘Your chute is soaking wet. You can’t jump with this.’ He went to get another chute, but there were not any, so I didn’t have to jump,” Randy said.
The platoon sergeant’s chute also was too wet, but he insisted he was going to jump anyway.
The Safety told him to not jump, but the jump master (the sergeant) ignored the guidance of the trained Safety personnel and jumped anyway.
“I did not jump,” Randy said.
On the ground, the platoon sergeant came over and told Randy he had made a “good choice” to stay on the plane. The sergeant’s chute took at least an eight count, instead of the usual three count, to open. He came down faster with the late opening wet parachute and landed pretty hard.
Randy continued to have his jumps canceled. He confidently told another soldier he could sign-up to take an educational test scheduled at the time of a scheduled jump, “The jump will be canceled. Go ahead and pay the money. You will make that test.”
The day of the jump the other man kept looking at him as the troop put on their chutes, did all the safety checks and waited an hour-and-a-half for the plane. “We were just miserable sitting there, wearing 60-80 pounds of equipment: Radio equipment, chute, rifle, backup parachute and a backpack until the jump master came in and said ‘Jump canceled.’ The guy yanked everything off and went to take his test,” Randy said.
Then, Randy felt God impress him to “trust Me to make the jump. Do not to trust Me to get you out of the jumps anymore.” I had missed so many I had to go back and go through a miniature jump school all over again. The next jump was a night jump.”
“I will trust you, God, to make the night jump,” Randy prayed.
He came down in a grove of trees. The tree branches caught his chute in a tangle with the branches. “I was hanging in the tree and just shouting, “Praise God.” That’s where the ground supervisor found and released him safely to the earth. Again, confident enough to perform his role as a paratrooper.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org)