Free 365 Days by Ronald J. Glasser Page A

look at the planes through the shifting spectrum of his own sweat. He closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing.
    “How you feel, man?”
    “Scared.”
    “Me too.”
    “Phew!”
    “Long way down—huh, man.”
    They had to be lifted into the planes. Sitting down, pushed together, they waited for the jump master to pull himself into the plane.
    Feet braced in the doorway, the jump master was suddenly there. “Scared!” he yelled at them. There was a moment of stunned silence and then, “Airborne!” they screamed back. Macabe screamed as loud as he could. The very effort was comforting.
    The jump doors slammed shut, and locked in they began rolling jerkily down the runway. Macabe pressed his back up against the bulkhead, listening past his nervousness to the sound of the engines. The plane picked up speed, and the jerkiness increased, pitching them from side to side, like dolls on a rack. Then they were airborne. The plane lifted sharply. Even while they were climbing, the jump master unexpectedly opened the doors. Dazzled by the sudden light they stared terrified out the open back of the plane, numbly watching the bits of cloud swirling past the open doorway. The jump master kept the door open. Macabe, despite the terror in his guts, was drawn again and again to look at the sky. He had never seen it so close, so huge.
    Thirty minutes later the jump master, hanging on to the pitching plane, yelled over the noise: “Stand up!”
    No one moved.
    “What are you?” he yelled, his face contorted with the effort. “WHAT ARE YOU?”
    “AIRBORNE!” they yelled back.
    “Stand up! Hook up!”
    Hooking their clips into the overhead line, they pressed close together, shuffling their feet, stomping harder and harder until the whole plane was vibrating under them as they edged forward, until they were packed so tight it was difficult to breathe. Macabe rested his cheek against the pack of the trooper in front of him. As they pushed closer to the doorway he could hear the engines and the wind whistling past the opening. The jump master grabbed on to the door jambs and stuck his head out into the 120-knot wind. It tore at his face, but he remained there until he was satisfied, then turned back to the rows of stomping troopers and shouted something, but his words were lost in the wind. The plane slowed a bit as the pilot cut the inboards.
    “Equipment check,” he yelled over the noise.
    “30-OK; 29-OK; 28-OK...” They were packed in so tight that when the light switched from red to green there was no place to go but out.
    “Go, go, go. Go—go, go, go, go...” Macabe felt he was not so much moving toward the hatchway as being propelled there. The plane was bouncing now, making it tough to keep his balance. Ahead of him, they were leaping, twirling out of the doorway. “Go, go, go, go, go...”
    Terrified, Macabe suddenly found himself even with the screaming sergeant. A great shove, and he was gone—hurtling out into the sky—a tiny brown stick twisting through all that brilliance.
    Afterwards he heard that the fifth time was a bit easier.
    Somewhere before the end of jump school, between the third and the last jump, he decided to go on to Ranger training. There was a poster in the barracks: a tough, good-looking soldier, framed against a yellow-red background of exploding shells, grim, sleeves rolled up, an M-16 held high in one hand, a Ranger tab on his left shoulder. Across the whole thing in big block letters were the words: RANGER TRAINING MAKES A GOOD SOLDIER BETTER. Macabe saw it every day. Maybe, he thought, maybe, just to do it right, he’d go, and finally two weeks before the end of jump school his decision was made. A fifth of the class went with him.
    They weren’t given much time between Jump School and Ranger training at Fort Benning, but there wasn’t much time to give. The Tet offensive had finally been stopped, and while the Army called the American defense a success of sorts, it was, even to