I passed all of my classes, even Russian, but that semester was hardly a tour de force of academic excellence. I pulled out a B- in Russian and C+ is Statistics, earning a grade point average of exactly 3.0, even with an A+ in “German History from 1848 to 1945.” With that, I squeaked onto the Dean’s List. I was still on track to become a second lieutenant.
That was good enough.
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| This is my favorite picture of my father and me. |
I walked into my academic advisor’s office towards the end of the second semester for pre-summer counseling. Unusually, he was an historian branched infantry rather than armor, but he’d been a good mentor to me, and he’d also been with the 7th Infantry Division during the Invasion of Panama. He was one of the History Department’s rising stars, having studied with the renowned historian Paul Kennedy32 at Yale before coming back to teach at the Academy.
“So Dan,” he said, “what do you want to do with yourself?”
“Sir?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
His question caught me so completely off-guard that I had no idea how to answer.
“Your class rank is made up fifty-five percent by your academic grades, thirty-percent by your military grades, and fifteen percent by your physical grades. With you academic GPA, your APFT scores, and the physical participation grades you’ve earned by being a Corps Squad swimmer, well, you’re high enough to do pretty much whatever you want. So… what do you want to do?”
“Wow, sir. No one’s ever asked me what I want.”
He smiled. “The Army tries to let you do the things you want to do, so long as you also do the things that it needs you to do. It’s a balance. But in this case, you’ve got some choices.”
“Yes sir,” I said. “Thank you, sir.”
I thought back over the preceding months, to all the upperclass cadets that I’d met, to the ones that I respected and the ones that I didn’t. Many had made an impression, but the man who stood out in that moment was Stephen Reich, my squad leader from the first half of Beast Barracks. Like me, he was a Corps’ Squad athlete with legitimate talent. He was also a successful cadet with a ton of friends, both on the baseball team and in our company, E-4. I remembered how much larger-than-life he’d seemed as a Beast Squad leader, and I remembered being impressed by his jump wings. He was more than just a cadet, and more than just an athlete, too.
I wanted that. I’d always wanted that.
“Sir,” I said at last, “I’d like to go to Airborne School if I can, and I want to be a Beast squad leader.”
“Which detail?”
“Second detail, sir. I’d like to take my new cadets out to Lake Frederick.”
“Done.” He paused. “You know, you can go to Airborne School pretty easily as an officer. Air Assault School is much harder to get later in your career, and they’ll be teaching it right here at the Academy this summer.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, sir, but that’s even more reason to go to Airborne School. I’d like to get the Hell out of here and see the Real Army for a change. That’s what I want.”
“Fair enough. I don’t know that Airborne School counts as the Real Army, but I can certainly understand wanting to get the Hell out of this place for a few weeks. West Point is beautiful, but it’s hard to see that while you’re still a cadet. You’ll appreciate it more after you graduate.”
“Honestly, sir, I can’t even imagine that.”
“It’s true,” he said. “Just give it time.”
* * *
I found myself running five miles in combat boots just a few short weeks later, from our barracks at Fort Benning, Georgia, to the giant wooden shed in which my Airborne class would don parachute harnesses before we made our first jump. We were running the standard “airborne shuffle,” the steady nine-minute per mile pace that is the Airborne standard, but though our non-commissioned officer instructors were calling cadence as loudly as ever, our class itself seemed subdued. We’d done infinite numbers of parachute landing falls in preparation for this day, first on the ground, then from the tops of tables, and then from ropes as we swung through the air like flying monkeys. Now, though, our first real jump loomed in our immediate future. The reality of the moment seemed to have taken some of the spirit from our formation.
“Airborne!” one of my instructors finally yelled in frustration, “Y’all about to jump from a perfectly good airplane. Do you hear what I’m sayin’ to you, Airborne? ‘Cause y’all ain’t callin’ out this morning. I can’t hear you worth a damn. And Airborne, if God don’t hear y’all callin’ out this fine morning, He ain’t goin’ like it. Not none! And then, Airborne, y’all goin’ die.
“Do you wanna die, Airborne?!”
As one, the formation called out, “No, Sergeant Airborne!”
“If Y’all don’t wanna die this mornin’, then y’all better start popin’ off!”
He resumed cadence, and though I called back as loudly as I could, a part of me wanted to laugh. Another part wanted to run screaming into the woods. We got to the shed a few minutes later, spent an hour or so donning our parachutes, and then sat around in hurry-up-and-wait mode checking equipment for another two hours at the very least. But then we were on the plane, and the next thing I knew, the door was open, and I was headed out, holding the static line that would pull the cover off my parachute with one hand while my other held firmly to the railing that led to the door. My friend and classmate Koo stood immediately in front of me. He would one day become my personal savior in Computer Science 402 (Database Design)33. In that moment, though, Koo was headed out the door of our perfectly good airplane. He jumped, and then I saw the trees and the ground, looking very much like decorations on a model train table. It was all amazingly large and close and brilliantly green.
They looked much closer looking than I’d expected.
Holy fuck, I thought. I really am about to die.
I jumped.
One thousand, two thousand, three thousand…
If my parachute didn’t open by the count of four, I would have to pull the handle on my reserve and pray that my riser lines didn’t get tangled with my reserve. No sooner did this thought go through my head than the ‘chute jerked open and caught on an updraft, arresting my fall with stunning violence. I grabbed the risers and looked out. Parachutists were sinking all around me. But an updraft had actually pulled me higher, along with Koo, whose parachute I could see some two hundred yards to my front. Neither of us weighed more than a hundred fifty pounds, and unfortunately, whatever weird air convection had caught us, it was holding us up firmly and dragging us off course. We weren’t falling! We were just kind of drifting there, buffeted by the winds. I looked out and saw a long line of trees heading quickly our direction. We’d drifted a quarter-mile already, and if something didn’t change, I was going to have to land my very first parachute jump deep in those trees.
“Oh shit!”
A standard “dash-one bravo” parachute was not steerable. It was a big, round piece of green nylon whose job was to put infantrymen on the ground where the Army wanted them. One could steer a “dash-one bravo” in only the crudest way possible, by gripping the risers on one side and pulling. This slipped air from the canvas on the side away from the pull. The slipped air then pushed the parachutist in the opposite direction. The danger, of course, was that one might pull too hard and slip all of the air from the ‘chute, in which case one would plummet to Earth like a “dirt dart.” Our instructors had delighted in calling us “dirt darts.”
I had no idea what the odds of slipping too much air were, but it was clear that I was going to have to “slip” some, or else I was definitely going to wind up in the trees. That could lead to a broken leg or worse. There was nothing for it. I grabbed the risers and pulled, and for a long, horrifying moment, I heard the parachute above me rippling with the sound of air spilling from my canopy. My momentum checked, but then I started swinging wildly beneath my ‘chute. A loud crashing sound arrested my terror, and when I looked out, I saw that Koo had gone straight into the trees. His parachute hung up on some limbs, which snapped loudly under his weight.
“Fuck me!”
By then, though, the ground was coming up fast. I pulled my feet and knees together, but before I could so much as pray, I smacked into the turf, landing like a sack of potatoes. A beat passed, but then I breathed.
I was alive and unhurt. I’d survived my first parachute jump.
I loosed a riser from my shoulder harness and got up, then quickly gathered my parachute into its bag. I’d drifted at least three-quarters of a mile off course. It was going to be along hump back to the buses.
Koo was waiting for me by the time I got back. He was covered in mud, his face filthy, but he was smiling like a madman. “Dude,” he said cheerfully, “I landed in the trees!”
“I know, man. I saw the whole thing. You alright?”
He shrugged and then smiled again. “I’m fine. But man, that was scary as fuck.”
We made our next three jumps without incident, and then my parents came down for our fifth and final jump. Dad announced that he was jumping with our class and then used his status as a full colonel in the Marine Corps to pull rank and get us moved up to the front of the first stick. He did it casually, like, Oh, of course they’re gonna move me and my son up to the front of this class, but I wasn’t used to that kind of treatment and found it unnerving. I kept waiting for one of the instructors to pull me aside and remind me in no uncertain terms that I was no one special. Instead, they were exceedingly gracious and polite at every turn. These kinds of family jumps turned out to be something of an Airborne tradition, and indeed, I wasn’t even the only one of my classmates whose father came down to make that final jump.
I was as terrified as ever when we suited up for our last jump, but my father stood there in the full power of his Marine Corps glory. He shone like an angel descended to Earth for a quick inspection tour, taking the waiting and the pre-jump checks in stride despite having broken his leg in exactly this kind of situation only a few years prior. We jumped together and hit the ground together, and then we trotted off the drop zone together, dumping our parachutes into a pile before heading straight back to our class’s awards ceremony.
“That was shit hot!” Dad yelled.
I could only shake my head in wonder.
He pinned my wings on a few minutes later by smashing them into my chest, using the full weight and power of his rather considerable frame to nearly blast me from my feet34. I staggered, but then I was Airborne! My dad smiled and threw his arm around me, and that’s when my mom took my favorite picture of the two of us.
32. Best known for his 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kennedy.
33. Koo did almost all of the work on our capstone database design project, earning the four cadets in our project group an A+. For that, I will be eternally grateful. Truth is, I love that son of a bitch. Unfortunately, Koo was badly wounded in Afghanistan as an Army major. He retired shortly after our class’s twenty-year reunion.
34. In the tradition of “blood wings,” though thankfully, my father put the backs on the pins before he hit me. Otherwise, he might’ve stuck the pins all the way into my rib bones!
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