Free 365 Days by Ronald J. Glasser

four and five hours a night and then got up and ran everywhere. FT in the morning, afternoon, and evening; in groups or singly there was constant exercise. Everything—home, letters, concerns, friends—everything faded under the weight of exhaustion. “Come on, come on, come on....” With the few other officers he struggled along with the crazies, the tough, role-playing enlisted kids right off the streets of Chicago, Gary, and the back roads of Georgia who had gone airborne because of all the John Wayne movies they’d seen. Jump school was full of them, white and black, and among them some who were almost psychotics. There was talk at night about murders in the enlisted barracks; knifing out in the middle of nowhere; adolescent blood oaths and gang attacks. Another officer told him about a barracks race riot in the class before theirs; it had been so bloody that afterwards the MP’s had to hose down the inside of the building.
    “Before I got here I used to think I knew what was what,” Macabe said one day as he sat using his bayonet to peel the mud off his boots. “I’ll tell you something. I’ve talked to ’em, and they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. It’s their way of life, I guess. I’ve never lived in a ghetto.”
    “Well,” his fellow officer said, “something ought to be done. Ghettos or no, they’re in the United States Army now.”
    “I don’t know,” Macabe said. “Maybe you have to pay a price if you want people to jump out of airplanes.”
    The next day they began jump training: the 34-foot tower; the 250-foot tower; water landings; tree landings; high-tension wire evasion. And for each there was that one last moment when alone he had to take that one last step. For Macabe, each last step was a struggle with fear. Each survival brought with it an increased sense of well-being, a sense of power restrained only by what had yet to be done.
    There was comfort, too, in helping others and sharing and being helped himself.
    Enlisted men and officers—they watched each other suit up, checked each other’s gear, made sure there was nothing too sharp, nothing packed wrong. A comradeship that a few months ago Macabe would have sneered at helped to sustain him right up to the doorway of his first jump. Everyone, even the loudest and most obnoxious of the crazies, felt it. For days the tension grew. Like a wind out of the future it blew into everything they did, everything they thought. There had been injuries off the towers. Now, though, it was not simply a matter of a pulled muscle or a sprained ankle; it was a matter of dying—of falling forever.
    The morning of the first jump no one ate, no one even talked. Macabe tried to shake off his fear. Like a child mumbling a lesson he repeated to himself over and over: “I’m trained, I’m ready, I’m fit. They wouldn’t send me up if they didn’t think I was ready. I’m trained, I’m ready, I’m fit.” He didn’t care who heard him, nor did anyone care what he said. He was fighting to keep from backing out. It made everything else that had ever bothered him—exams, girls, people—seem stupid and unimportant.
    Tight-lipped, their fear out in the open, they helped each other put on their gear, silently, with a solemnity that was almost suffocating. For the first time in weeks no one joked. Everyone just stood there in the barracks strapping in his doubt, grimly getting ready. Full gear: one hundred and twenty pounds of added weight. Two chutes, front and back. Equipment packs slung between their legs, weapons, webb gear, entrenching hooks, jump helmets—they strapped in their terror until hardly able to move they shuffled out of the barracks to the flight line. It was a hot, dazzling day, and soon every one of them was soaked with sweat. Waiting near the transports, they sat along the runway back to back, resting against each other, their hands folded nervously across the tops of their front packs. Macabe found himself trying to