One Bullet Away

One morning, I succeeded in getting my hands around a barbell holding two twenty-five-pound plates. I pushed off the bottom and slowly clawed my way toward the shimmering light above. Bubbles raced past as I kicked and grunted, each little exertion bleeding irreplaceable air through my nose and lips. My vision was gray when my head broke the surface. I opened my mouth to gulp and was knocked back under by a jet of water. The staff trained a fire hose on the heads of the surfacing Marines, pushing us back beneath the water. Drop your weight and you fail. I struggled to hold the barbell and kicked back to the surface. Vision shrinking to little gray spots at the end of black tunnels. Fear rising. Again the water knocked me under. No way to get back to the surface now. Sinking. Just as I went limp, a hand pulled me to the side of the pool. I still held the barbell in the crook of my elbows.

More laps followed, and then the legalized hazing called “water aerobics.” The class lined up along the pool’s edge while instructors commanded from the tower. On a whistle blast, we crossed the pool using whatever mutated stroke they ordered — underwater, no arms, wearing boots, carrying a barbell, wrists tied to ankles. When the last man clutched at the far wall, we recrossed the pool. Whistle. Swim. Whistle. Suffer. Whistle. Hyperventilate. Whistle. Black out. Water aerobics kept me awake at night. I didn’t want to fall asleep because I knew I’d wake up only a few hours from the next session.

Twenty Marines started the class; eleven graduated. In its own way, those two weeks were as transformational for me as OCS had been. I faced a fear and beat it. Grabbing my diploma, I was buoyant, ready to return to recon and meet my platoon. But the battalion had other plans. Despite Captain Whitmer’s assurance that First Recon wanted to avoid “high-speed, low-drag” training, I was handed an airline ticket and orders to Fort Benning, Georgia, where I would become a paratrooper.

* * *

Recon had done exactly three real-world parachute missions in its entire history, and none since Vietnam. My three weeks at the Army Airborne school was time I could have spent working with my new platoon. I was noticing a trend in my career: train to lead a rifle platoon, but get a weapons platoon; train to raid the coastline in rubber boats, but go to war in a landlocked country; train to jump into patrols via parachute, but use boots or Humvees in the real world. It could be maddening, but I chose to see it as a tribute to flexibility. “Improvise, adapt, and overcome” was a Marine Corps mantra for good reason.

Airborne reminded me of OCS. We left our rank at the door. Aspiring SEALs, Special Forces troopers, Army buck privates, ROTC cadets, and recon Marines stood in formation each morning, doing pushups and being berated by Army instructors in black hats. Their only name was “Sergeant Airborne.”

“Give me thirty pushups! Fifty from you jarheads!”

For two weeks, they drilled us in muscle memory. Jumping from wooden boxes into a sandpit. Jumping from something called the “swing landing trainer,” hanging five feet above the ground in a mock parachute harness before being dumped unceremoniously into a gravel pile. Jumping from a thirty-four-foot tower and sliding down a zip line to simulate the airplane’s slipstream. We were told that the height was carefully chosen for maximum psychological effect: any lower and the jumper thinks he can fall unhurt; any higher and the fall becomes abstract. My knees ached, and my hips were purple with bruises from all the practice landings. Evenings I spent making trips to the hotel ice machine and popping Motrin by the handful.

Skydiving was supposed to be fun. Another trend in my training had been taking a pleasant pastime and turning it into hardship. Hiking, swimming, boating, shooting — all were corruptible. The reason was that we had to perform these commonplace activities under uncommonplace conditions. Airborne’s hundreds of practice jumps prepared us to do just that — keep our heads, deploy the chute, and land safely at night, carrying a heavy load, from low altitude, at high speed. During the last week, we did it for real.

Beyond the tips of my boots, a neighborhood slid past twelve hundred feet below, complete with kids waving from backyard swimming pools. When the red light to my left turned green, I would step from the C- 130’s door and make my first jump. We were “slick” — no packs — and starting in daylight. Behind me, standing in a line with one hand over their reserve chute handles and the other grasping their static lines, was my thirty-man stick. “Mine” because, as a first lieutenant, I was the senior guy in the group. The first one out the door. We couldn’t speak above the roar of the four engines, so we smiled reassuringly at one another and pretended to know what we were doing.