Okay, so I knew how to handle this from the last time I fucked up. I would write her a letter and commit written hari kiri. I did this just about immediately, and enclosed all the jewelry, and promised to never misbehave again and stated my undying love repeatedly to her. It had worked before. I was smart enough to know how to fix this problem.
My letter came back from her house marked Return To Sender. That was somewhat disturbing, so I wrote a really heartfelt letter, not only disemboweling myself, but also jumping off a bridge and hanging myself, and this one I mailed Return Receipt Required.
She refused to sign for it.
I tried calling her house that weekend, after waiting in line at the payphone with a roll of quarters for half an hour. I ended up talking to Harriet, who sounded a touch sympathetic, but couldn't get Marilyn to the phone and told me to wait and try again later. In a month or two. Or maybe longer.
I was going to have to do this in person, but that wasn't possible, either. At the end of training, I wasn't going back to Troy, I was going to Columbus, Georgia, to become a paratrooper. That was three weeks long, and unless a pilot got lost and dumped me in Utica, I wasn't going to see her for the better part of a month!
After graduation, a few dozen of my fellow graduates and I were loaded on buses, along with our gear, and driven to Columbus. There is no slower form of transportation than an Army bus. I wasn't sure if we would arrive before the winter came through. After that, welcome to Fort Benning!
Wow, what an incredibly stupid idea!
Think about it - I was going to let the United States Army take me up in aeroplanes and throw my ass out the back end! Ever since then I have wondered at my own mental stability at this, but at the time it seemed like a marvelous idea. Since I had already done basic, jump school was available. A limited number of slots are held open during the summer for officer candidates, and I qualified and was selected for the end of July. A lot of officers end up taking jump training, maybe even most officers, even those who don't end up in the airborne. It's considered a useful box to check off on your things-to-do list.
It isn't all that difficult to learn how to jump out of an airplane. They tie a parachute on your ass and toss you out. Gravity takes care of the rest. As they say in the airborne, 'We've never left anybody up there yet!' They have lots of sayings like that in the airborne. Another is, 'If your chute fails, bring it back after you land and we'll give you a brand new one!' They're just chock full of uplifting tales and sayings in the airborne. They even have their own song, 'Blood Upon The Risers.', which starts out:
"He was just a rookie trooper and he surely shook with fright,
He checked off his equipment and made sure his pack was tight;
He had to sit and listen to those awful engines roar,
and he ain't gonna jump no more!
(CHORUS)
Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,
Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,
Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,
he ain't gonna jump no more!"
all sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
The song continues through an endless series of verses with what happens to this hapless young trooper. It isn't pretty. His static line fails, his chute fails, his reserve chute fails, the risers (the ropes he's hanging from) strangle him, he breaks every bone in his body, blood gushes everywhere - "And he ain't gonna jump no more!" You learn this song very early in jump training. It is a harbinger of things to come.
Jump school is deceptively easy, but before you can earn the coveted jump wings and get to die for God and country, you have to make it through. It's only three weeks long, and for all the students who figure they just made it through eight weeks of basic and another eleven of advanced training, so what the hell is the problem with another three, they have another think coming. Jumping out of an airplane is a brutally Darwinian process. Jump school is very, very tough.
Your first week is all about physical fitness. You run and work out and do pushups and pull ups and take all sorts of physical tests. If you don't pass by the end of the week, you are history. They don't hold you back until you get it right. They send you home, and you have to apply a second time.
The second week they teach you how to actually jump out of an airplane and how to put on a parachute. It's Tower Week and there are all sorts of interesting ways to bust your ass while wearing a rig to simulate jumping. They actually have a bunch of jump towers they bought from the '39 World's Fair and transported to the ass end of Georgia to train guys before World War II.
The third week is when you actually jump out of airplanes. The requirement is to do four daylight jumps and one nighttime jump. The first two jumps are what they call 'Hollywood' jumps, where you jump with nothing but your two chutes. The next two jumps are combat jumps, loaded with everything the well armed killing machine needs to inflict mayhem and destruction on others. The final jump we do in the middle of the night, and it's a combat jump as well.
You flunk any single part of this and you are history. You break an ankle on the fourth jump, they send you home and you have to do it all over again someday, from the start. There are stories of guys who do their final jumps with sprained joints and broken bones, just to get through. I guess that's a good idea. If I had to do this for real, with real bad guys at the other end of the jump, maybe I'd want to be surrounded by guys that crazy!
This was why I had been working out so hard all year. I had to pass the various tests. It takes a phenomenal amount of strength, both upper body and leg, to do this. You're wearing a set of chutes that weighs maybe 50 pounds, and you've probably got a combat load of another 75 pounds, or more. It is not unheard of for troopers to jump carrying their own weight in gear. Doing this and not killing yourself in the process takes strength!
Going through as an officer candidate gets you no special treatment. Real officers have their own quarters; officer candidates bunk with the enlisted guys in the barracks. It was just like being back in basic, with drill instructors telling you to "DROP AND GIVE ME TWENTY!" at the drop of a hat. I understand that officers are 'counseled' ahead of time to keep their mouths shut when a sergeant starts giving them orders. The sergeants know who the officers are, of course, and they make their orders polite - "IS THE CAPTAIN AWARE THAT HE MOVES LIKE A RUPTURED DUCK? PERHAPS HE WOULD UNDERSTAND BETTER IF HE WOULD DROP AND GIVE ME TWENTY!"
Looking like a ruptured duck, whatever the fuck that is, is a cardinal sin, and damn near got my ass kicked out. It would seem that I am singularly graceless in my movements out of the airplane, floating to earth, and landing safely. I was allowed to pass because I didn't actually break anything or die. My night combat drop I sprained my right knee, but one of the guys in the barracks wrapped it tight and I just gritted my teeth and moved through it. There were a lot of us looking battered and bruised by the end of the class. We all smelled like we worked at a Bengay factory.
We had a final parade on the last day, and you could get pictures of yourself looking heroic with your new jump wings. You actually get your jump wings the night before, during the 'Punch' ceremony. The wings are held to your uniform by a pair of pins. During the punch ceremony, they take the caps off the pins and 'punch' them into your chest. Ouch! I ordered two sets of pictures, one for my mother and one for me. Now I simply had to go visit Marilyn and get my life back.