Don,

I made all 5 of my jumps at Jump School from the C-141A jet transport. When they opened the doors (we jumped from the side doors, not the tail gate), they deployed these big air deflectors and a dinky little step. As we exited the plane, it definitely felt like it was sucking us out of the plane. By our 4th jump, several of the guys were trying to hit that step. I don't any of them ever did.

I don't remember the exact number of jumpers you could carry in the -141A model but it was somewhere around 120, give or take a dozen. That later stretched B model could carry many more. At Jump School, they'd drop about 1/4th of us on each pass so you'd have roughly 30 paratroopers in the air in fairly close proximity.

For 4 of our 5 jumps, we used the old T-10 parachute. It was a simple, round parachute. To steer it, you had to pull on the risers. The plane dropped us at about 150 MPH so you had to have your body position right or you'd tumble. If you were tumbling when the chute deployed, you ran the risk of having one or more of the lines wrap over the canopy. This is called a partial inversion but more widely known as a "Mae West" because it looks like an enormous bra. A jumper with a Mae West is going to be dropping about twice as fast as normal so we were taught to deploy our reserve chute. Unlike civilian jumpers, we didn't have quick releases and we were too low to do a cut-away from the main chute, so we had to get the reserve deployed and hope it didn't foul the main.

At Jump School (at least when I did it in 1975), the Black Hat instructors had a powerful PA system with speakers aimed at the sky. Just about every time a C-141 would make a pass and drop a stick, someone would have a Mae West. The Black Hats would call up, "Jumper with the malfunction, activate your reserve."

Invariable, at least 3 guys would pull their reserves. That would immediately be followed by a stream of profanity from the instructors. There was no way to hide the fact that you'd pulled a reserve. Packing a reserve chute is like trying to stuff 10 pounds of excrement into a 5 pound bag. The guys who pulled their reserve when they didn't need to caught a lot of grief.

Once we landed, we gathered up our chutes and put them into a bag. We'd clip the reserve to the bag handles, throw it over our shoulders, and run off of the DZ (a mile or so). This was a form of injury diagnostics. Some people would get injured on a jump but not want to report it to avoid getting set back. The Army figured that if you could run a mile with about 40 pounds of chutes on your back, you probably weren't injured too severely. If you stopped or walked, an ambulance would be there very quickly to take you to the hospital. You'd better be injured.

On my 4th jump, we had simulated combat equipment. When jumping from the side doors, the Jumpmasters try to stagger the jumpers so that no two go out of the plane at the same time. Somehow, I went out of the left door at almost exactly the same time as another guy went out of the right. The slipstream caught us and slammed us into one another - hard. I must have been a couple feet lower than him because my shoulder hit him square in the back. I was dazed as my chute opened. I looked up to check my canopy and saw two of them. All I could think at the moment was, "That ain't right."

Our chutes separated (thank goodness!) and I looked over at the other guy. He was hanging upside down. I'd hit him so hard that his feet were tangled in his chute lines. If he landed like that, he'd break his back and perhaps his neck. I yelled over to him to pull his reserve. He told me where I could stick that suggestion. Fortunately, he got his feet free when we were still several hundred feet above the ground.

Some funny things I remember from Jump School:

In addition to the C-141A, the Air Force provided two old C-123 transports to carry my class for our jumps. The C-123 was powered by two big radial engines. Once characteristic of radial engines is that oil leaks into the bottom cylinders, so when you start them, they blow a lot of smoke. In fact, if they aren't smoking, they're probably out of oil so you'd better shut them down quick. As a student pilot, I knew that but few of the other students did. The first time they fired up those engines and it looked like a PT boat laying a smoke screen, several guys thought the plane was on fire. They were scared and almost refused to get on board. The plane was fine - most of the time. On our second day, one plane took off with a load of jumpers only to return for an emergency landing on one engine. They made the jumpers get off of that C-123 and get immediately into the other one. There were a lot of pale faces on that walk between the two planes.

My first jump was a strange experience. I happened to be on the last of the 4 sticks to jump, so I had a long time to watch the others go first. I remember the sense of disbelief when the first stick jumped. I was amazed that they really did it. When it finally was my turn to jump, we piled out of the plane on the Go command. It was as if everything was going in slow motion until the opening shock. I then had that amazing sensation of being 1000 feet above the ground. If I didn't look up, it was as if I were flying like Peter Pan, only vertically. There was little sign of motion until I got to about 150 feet high when the ground suddenly appeared to rush up at me. Landing was rude.

We had some Navy SEALs with us at Jump School. They'd already gone through BUDS so Jump School was a joke to them. I didn't see it happen but was told it was true - after lunch one day when we fell out in formation to run back to training, a SEAL reportedly jumped out of a 3rd story window, did a parachute landing fall, and walked into formation saying "This [excrement] bores me."

In the Army, we used to say that SEALs aren't crazy. You have to have a brain to be crazy. Only, we never said it to their faces.