Band of Brothers_ E Company, 506th Regim - Stephen E. Ambrose [9]
The following week, in C stage, the men made free and controlled jumps from the 250-foot towers. One tower had seats, shock absorbers, and chute guide wires; the others had four chutes that released when they reached the suspension arm. From these, each man made several daylight jumps and one at night.
C stage also featured a wind machine, which blew a gale along the ground, moving both chute and jumper to teach the men how to control and collapse their canopies after landing.
After a week at the towers, the enlisted men were ready for D stage, the real thing, the five jumps from a C-47 that would earn those who completed the process their parachutists' wings. The men packed their chutes the night before, checked them, then packed them again, checked them again, until past 2300. Reveille was at 0530. They marched to the hangers at Lawson Field, singing and shouting in anticipation. They put on their chutes, then sat on rows of benches waiting to be summoned to the C-47s. There was joshing, joke telling, lots of smoking, nervous laughter, frequent trips to the latrine, and repeated checking of the chute and the reserve chute worn on the chest.
They loaded up, twenty-four to a plane. With only one or two exceptions, it was the first plane ride for the men. When the C-47 reached 1,500 feet, it circled. The red light went on; the jumpmaster, a sergeant instructor, called out, "Stand up and hook up." Each man hooked the line attached to the backpack cover of his main chute to the anchor line running down the middle of the top of the fuselage.
"Sound off for equipment check!" shouted the jumpmaster.
"Number twelve O.K.!" "Number eleven O.K!" and so on down the line.
"Close up and stand in the door!"
The first man stepped up to the open door. All the men had been ordered to look out at the horizon, not straight down, for obvious psychological reasons. They had also been taught to place their hands on the outer edge of the door, never on the inside. With the hands on the outside, there was nothing to hold a man in the plane, and the slightest nudge, even just the sense of the next man pressing forward, would be enough to get him out of the plane. If he tried to steady himself by putting his hands on the inside, as Gordon said, "twelve men behind couldn't push that fellow out of there if he didn't want to go. That's the power of fear." When a jumpmaster saw a man put his hands on the inside, he would pull him back and let the others go out.
Most of the men, according to Gordon, "were so psyched up and in the swim of this thing that we would almost have gone out without a parachute. It was almost that bad." Overall, 94 percent of the men of the 506th qualified, which set a record that still stands.
On the first jump, the men went one at a time. As soon as he was in the door, the jumpmaster tapped him on the leg. Out he went.
"I shuffled up to the door and leaped into a vast, breathtaking void," Webster remembered. "My heart popped into my mouth, my mind went blank." The static line attached to the hook on the anchor line in the plane pulled the back cover off his main chute; a break cord, tied to the apex of the chute, pulled the canopy out of the pack and then parted. The prop blast inflated the chute, and he felt the terrific opening shock.
"From then on the jump was fun. I drifted down, oscillating, or, as civilians would say, swinging to and fro, and joyously looking around. The sky was filled with high-spirited troopers shouting back and forth."
Standing in that open door was an obvious moment of truth. Men who had been outstanding in training, men who later won medals for bravery in combat as ordinary infantry, would freeze. Sometimes they were given a second chance, either on that flight after the others had jumped, or the next day. Usually, however, if a man froze once,