Jump-school Christmas

Johnny's last Christmas was anything but festive. Crammed bunk-to-bunk with 90 would-be paratroopers in a careworn World War II barracks, Johnny and the rest of us teenage G.I.s were homesick. Each was lonely, but none was alone. Life was a beehive.

Dozens of these identical barracks stood in formation on barren Georgia sand, row-by-row, dress-right-dressed and covered down. In step with such ordered layout, our egos faded into uniform green, shorn-head anonymity within the ranks and files of Class 22, 46th Company, U.S. Army Parachute Jump School, Fort Benning. Our callow confidence and commitment, like our quarters, were to become vestiges of a world bygone.

Christmas 1965 marked a watershed in our lives and for America. In the coming year the lucky among us would lose only their youth. Others would give everything. America would shed a fragile masquerade of innocence and an era of hope and vision - a simpler time shattered in an Asian jungle and in America's heart.

When our army bus entered Fort Benning two weeks earlier, sky-high 250-foot parachute training jump towers captured my eye. Johnny sat beside me as the Byrds' song 'Turn, Turn, Turn” blared through a transistor radio: There is a season turn, turn, turn, a time to be born, a time to die; a time to kill, a time to heal; a time to love, a time to hate ... A time for peace, I swear it's not too late. The lyrics were ominous. We were destined for that time to die and to kill. Faraway tentacles of war reached to embrace us.

Johnny Sanchez came to America from El Salvador as a child. We became close buddies at Fort Gordon, Georgia during eight weeks of Airborne Infantry training. A cadenced run and calisthenics opened each dawn. Flinty drill instructors packed days and many nights with weapons training, small-unit tactics and survival craft. They taught us to burnish the gas piston in the M-60 machine gun and to seal a sucking chest wound with a poncho and cinching pistol belt. Saturday nights meant pitchers of lukewarm PX beer and an Elvis Presley movie among a mob of hooting, horny GIs at the post theatre.

Deep down we sought a test of courage, a self-imposed rite of passage. With mute pride we met the challenges at hand and anticipated the great test we knew would come. The 1st Air Cav had recently slugged it out with the North Vietnamese in the Ia Drang Valley. My buddies and I knew that Airborne Infantry status guaranteed combat. War's shadow heightened our boyish capacity for horseplay. Nothing was sacred. Everything was fair game for quip, ribald humor and deviltry. Brazen youth blinded us to the cold eye of Fate taking our measure.

To a man, the training company had volunteered for the paratroopers. 'Only bird shit and paratroopers fall from the sky,” non-jumpers scoffed. Johnny and I were assigned to the same jump school squad, or 'stick,” at Fort Benning. We remained inseparable. Jump school included a ground training week, a tower week and a jump week. The tough training cadre, NCOs called 'Blackhats,” harried us relentlessly. Scorn and wrath exploding from their throats shot vital know-how into alert minds and agile muscles.

During ground week we practiced parachute landing falls, or 'PLFs,” proper plane exit and other airborne techniques. The swing-landing trainer, dubbed the 'nutcracker,” suspended its victim from a mock parachute harness.

An implacable blackhat swung the device like a circus trapeze, then - without warning - manually released the trooper. The tyrant demanded a proper parachute landing fall - a rolling body crash - toes, heel, calf, thigh, butt and back. Punishment pushups sharpened our skill.

A hand-fired coal boiler heated the rickety barracks. Though we banked the fire at night, it winked out before the pre-dawn wake-up routine. Screaming cadre sergeants threw on the lights, hurled empty garbage cans clanging down the isle, and shoved groggy troopers from their racks. We scrambled for dibs to use one of the dozen sinks or open toilets lining opposite walls of the latrine. Haranguing blackhats pounded pride and an eagerness to excel into young soldiers. During the daybreak five-mile runs and physical training, our breaths smoking in the cold air, we gasped an ozone of 'Airborne Spirit” into our souls. Breakfast drill was gulp it now, taste it later.

Tower week brought suspended harness jumps from 35-and 250-foot towers. A large metal hoop suspended from a cable overhung each of the four sides of the 250-foot Eiffel Tower-like structure. An open parachute was hooked to each downwind hoop. The cable slowly hoisted three white parachutes with suspended troopers 250 feet to a spectacular view then dropped them. Our turn came. Three buddies - Johnny Sanchez, Otis Saddleblanket, and I - ascended in silence. Backlit by blue sky, we dangled beneath our parachute canopies like tree tinsel. When the rig topped off, a trip mechanism clicked and released our chutes. Whoops and jeers pierced the wintry air as we fell like Christmas snow then thumped the sandy earth with a reflexive PLF.

All day and often at night, training cadre harassed us physically and mentally. Their barbed profanity would redline today's 'touchy freely” correctness gauge. The torment double dared us to quit. Few did.

Instead, Johnny and I thrived; the hardship made us tougher and stronger. Paratroopers were more than parachutists. The training honed our survival skills and shaped an outlook. Discipline and drill revealed that notions of pain, effort and danger were relative.

Your state of mind set the base. Us eclipsed me. Method drove the madness. It seared the skills necessary for safe mass military parachuting into mind and muscle. It built spine. PLFs and other airborne skills allow no time for thought. They require immediate instinctive reaction. Judgment under the law of gravity is merciless. Those gallant blackhats instilled their knowledge more effectively than my professors ever did.

Still today, the nine jump commands frequently drop in gear when my mental clutch is in neutral: Get Ready, Outboard Personnel Stand Up, Inboard Personnel Stand Up, Hook Up, Check Static Lines, Check Equipment, Sound Off For Equipment Check, Stand In The Door, Go! The attitude persists, too.

Christmas fell on Saturday after tower week. It fetched a three-day holiday with a restriction to the company area. Christmas Eve 1965 was a gift beyond price. My mind's eye unwraps it often. Bob Taylor's off-post raid had scored beer and snacks. That night Taylor, Sanchez, Rivera and I drank warm Schlitz around a footlocker bar. We shot the bull while relays of cockroaches, the permanent residents, zipped across the floor. In the wee hours, these vermin elves gobbled our leftovers like Santa's cookies.

So alive in a magical intersection of Christmas, full-blooded youth and our plight - we talked, really communicated, through the beer about home, girls, and dreams for the future. Eventful days expanded time.

I measured the future in weeks. Though our bones sensed the creeping pall of war soon to engulf us, it was still a distant aspect. Funny bones went riot. Belly laughs deadened our homesickness. There was meaning in the merriment. It commemorated comradeship. Nat King Cole crooned The Christmas Song again and again on the radio throughout the night.

I snapped a photo of those guys sprawled beerily around our bar. Each Christmas season I study it and reflect. The power of friendship pulls my emotional memory like a magnet to that time and situation long past.

This brief period of our lives was far more than its apparent reality. It gave us what young men want and need - discipline, pride, and confidence. Shared experience and hardship built brotherhood. Unaware, I was changed forever. From those times of looking the world in the eye, I stashed away a grubstake of mental posture good for a lifetime of pay dirt.

After Christmas we made five qualifying parachute jumps, Johnny and I in the same stick. We pinned silver jump wings on our chests and in our core. The army assigned us to the same rifle company in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. We remained best friends and keen competitors on guard mount inspections, each vying to out spit-shine and over starch the other.

The Saturday night beer and movie routine continued. In the spring of 1966 most of our jump school bunch were ordered to infantry units in Vietnam.

Johnny and I casually said goodbye and bid good luck. I never saw him again. He was killed in action. So were others of our band. It was never the same. The grit and sacrifice of that noble group, in the name of our country and for honor, grip me with wonder and reverence.

The Christmases of my childhood are gleaming gems in the treasure of growing up in Midwestern small-town America during the 1950s and early 1960s.

But that first Christmas away from home - my last as a boy - provides a perspective from which I draw meaning and value each holiday season.

Advancing years clarified the moment as profound and poignant. It signaled not only the passage my buddies and I sought, but also our call to arms and the sunset of a certain playful brightness of life. Mighty forces lay coiled in the dark beyond the twilight, mad to strike us. Our season would turn, turn, turn to a time to die; a time to kill ... Many were forever lost in the darkness. Many of us wander in shadows.

So often my mind slips back to Christmas 1965 and that sweet season of life. I long for those friendships forged in circumstances few understand, and mourn the radiance eclipsed in that sunset. I am never so sad as when I think of Johnny and what we were.

' Stephen Saunders, of Garnavillo, recently retired after practicing law for 37 years. He and his wife, Denise, have three daughters and seven granddaughters. In 2005 he published Breaking Squelch, A Vietnam Introspective - a memoir of his experience as a combat infantryman. Comments: saunders@alpinecom.net