The Jump Blog

There are a rash of really good jump stories floating around ye olde blogosphere these days. Matt was even kind enough to link mine.
Update: Jack at Texas Music is one of my favorite bloggers (he’s one hell of a good writer) has written a great jump story that, well… I’ll let him tell it.

While reading SF AlphaGeek’s interlude, I was struck by the following comment:

On my one (and please, my only) jump with the 82nd Airborne, they started at the ten minute mark.

This struck me as funny because jumping with Division (that’s how it’s referrenced by paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne: capital “D” –as if it were the only one. NCO’s at 82nd Replacement Detachment –The Cherry Farm– will sometimes add a “The” to it, so that incoming soldiers get the point quickly. They are now in “The Division”.) is not remotely like jumping in Special Forces or Jump School. I know exactly how SFAG feels because I was lucky enough to benefit from this difference in procedures and standards.

I was a newly minted paratrooper with one jump in Division the first time I became a “pay hurt”. In order to continue receiving the princely sum of $110 bucks a month known as jump pay, a paratrooper needed to exit a high performance aircraft in flight at least once every ninety days. In Division this is not normally a problem as a person can jump several times a week if they want to (known as “jump chasing”). But sometimes events conspire against you: aircraft break, winds blow, jumps get canceled (”scratched”), and you are in a position where you must jump or lose pay. This is a condition known as “pay hurt”. Once you pass the ninety day mark you become a “pay loss”. It is considered a poor reflection on platoon sergeants to allow their soldiers to become regular “pay hurts”, and is a black eye for a platoon sergeant to have a soldier become a “pay loss”.

Events had conspired to put myself and three others from my platoon in the “pay hurt” about to be “pay loss” category when my platoon sergeant sprang into action. As I have said before all but one of the platoon sergeant’s I had while assigned to the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment were former Ranger Training Battalion instructors, so they invariably had lots of contacts up the street in Special Operations Command. It was through one of these contacts that my platoon sergeant (we called him Stubby –but not to his face) was able to finagle a CH-47 (Chinook) jump for myself and the three other pay hurts. The icing on the cake was that this jump wasn’t run by Division. It was a 3rd Special Forces Group jump that was going to be run at Camp Mackall.

A Chinook jump is the nearly the “Holy Grail of Jumps” in Division, surpassed only by a tailgate jump from a fixed wing aircraft. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the rest of the platoon at the fact that ,of the four jumpers getting this sweet jump, three were cherries and one was a short-timer. Two of my buddies in particular –Johnny (bottom) and Brownie (top)– were particularly put out and lobbied unsuccessfully to be included.

I went to my wall locker to get my rucksack, H-harness and other assorted gear needed to perform a jump with combat equipment. I asked stubby when I should go draw weapons and he replied that there was no need, that we wouldn’t be jumping combat equipment. This type of jump is called a “Hollywood” and is so rare in the 82nd that it is almost mythical. The only way to get one is to jump with XVIII Airborne Corps or jump on a Saturday “fun jump” (a blatant misnomer if ever there was one). Unit jumps are never Hollywood. I was ecstatic. A Hollywood jump at Camp Mackall seemed the best possible way to remove my pay hurt status.

After the 45 minute ride out to Mackall in Stubby’s Humvee (which “crabbed” down the road from being dropped from aircraft a few too many times) we arrived at the Mackall dining facility and linked up with our other jumpers. I had assumed that we would be jumping with SF trainees but no. There was an ODA that was going to be doing a HALO from a Chinook, Stubby knew one of the Team guys and had been able to convince him to let us ride along. The pilot would stop the aircraft at 3500 Ft AGL and Stubby would kick us out.

Oh, that’s sweet, I thought. I had no idea how sweet things were yet.

A jump in Division consists of spending half an hour to forty-five minutes rigging a rucksack, folding a lowering line, tying off equipment, painting up your face, and letting another paratrooper check your work. Then you do pre-pre-manifest inspection. This means your platoon sergeant will check that you have all of your equipment and are ready to jump. You will then move out to pre-manifest. At pre-manifest you will draw your weapon, NVG’s and any other special equipment and check in with other jumpers from your company. The senior NCO for the company will check your stuff, verify that you have your ID card and dog tags, check that your ruck is heavy enough (minimum 35 lbs.) and then march the formation to manifest. At manifest you are assigned your jump order and aircraft and checked off as being present for manifest. Missing manifest is tantamount to being a jump refusal and is considered missing a movement.

After manifest comes pre-jump. There is a briefing that consists of telling you what the winds are, direction of flight, DZ conditions, and height of the jump. Then you practice parachute landing falls, every jumper does 4 PLF’s from a 3-4ft high platform. Then all stand in a semi circle around the Jumpmaster or Safety while you review everything you learned in Airborne school. This “sustained training” is designed to reinforce safety procedures and mitigate injuries and is a huge pain in the ass. The last part of sustained training is performed at a “mock door”. This mock door is basically the skinless frame of an aircraft (in the 82nd anyway, other units use parts of aircraft) that allows the jumpers to practice exiting the aircraft. There are usually 3 run-through’s of the exit, practicing various emergency procedures.

After the mock door you will usually file to a “Pax Shed” at Pope AFB’s Green Ramp. There you will site for an hour while you wait for the chutes to arrive. Keep in mind that you have usually been at this for at least four hours at this point. Once the chutes arrive you’ll take half an hour to rig yourself and a buddy into your incredibly heavy gear. The T-10 parachute plus reserve will weigh in around fifty pounds. Add a rucksack that is at least 35 pounds and can be as much as 100-130, plus weapon and case (another 7 pounds), Kevlar (a few pounds for the ol’ head and neck) and you can push the scales for a training jump at 150 to 200 pounds of gear. For actual combat jumps the load is more. Once you have buckled, snapped, strapped, and squeezed yourself into this load you may or may not be able to sit down. Because of the ratio of Jumpmasters to jumpers, many will have you remain standing until you receive your JumpMaster Pre-Inspection (JMPI). This way it is easier to identify who has been JMPI’d and who hasn’t.

Once JMPI’d you will wait for several hours to load your aircraft. Once the time comes, you will waddle/crawl up to a kilometer (the farthest I ever had to walk anyway) wearing your 150 pounds of gear. Keep in mind that the largest percentage of that weight is strapped to a harness that allows it to dangle just under your crotch. This makes walking nearly impossible so you wind up doing a sort of hunch-back, straddler-legged, gunslinger strut to the tailgate of your waiting aircraft.

Once aboard you are packed onto the aircraft so tight that you literally cannot move. You are so close together that you must interlock your knees together with the jumper across from you and rest one rucksack on top of the other. The Jumpmasters will then, helpfully, use this 300 pound weight on your knees as a catwalk to move up and down the aisle. After half an hour your plane will take off and you will jump. You will descend at 22-24 feet per second and hit like a bag of wet cement.

Once on the DZ you will put your weapon into action, police up your parachute by placing it into an aviator kit bag (after “neatly” rolling it with outstretched arms in a figure eight motion that makes you look like a kid playing “airplane”) and run to the nearest turn in point that is hundreds of meters away. After this you will run, again, to your assembly area (known as an “AA” or “Alpha-Alpha”) check in with the senior person and assume a good defensive position in the prone. After several hours of this you will load transportation back to your unit where you will spend an hour or two cleaning weapons –regardless of the time. This entire process can take 8, 10, or even 12 hours. Longer if something goes wrong.

This is why I was surprised to be standing on a drop zone, looking at a messy stack of -1B’s (those have toggles and are much easier to steer than normal T-10’s, they are also given only to Battalion commanders and up in the 82nd) not 15 minutes after making the link-up with the 3rd Group Team. Five minutes later and I was in the harness. Stubby gave me a quick JMPI and I waited to manifest. One of the Team guys asked my name and wrote it on a piece of paper, he did the same with the other three guys and handed the paper to Stubby.

That was manifest.

Pre-Jump consisted of “I think you guys know what to do” and a walk through of how to exit the tailgate of a Chinook. Fifteen minutes, tops. We had left our company area less than two hours ago. Ten minutes later I heard the deep bass “thwuck-thwuck-thwuck” of the Chinook coming in for a landing. I walked the fifty meters and climbed aboard. Me and the other Division guys couldn’t stop grinning. I don’t know if the Group guys thought we were weird. The Chinook circled up to 3,500 feet (the 82nd jumps from 1,100 feet) and we stopped like a rock. Stubby laid down on the tailgate, gave us the word and out we went.

I thought I was going to die.

When jumping from a C-130/C-141/C-17 you count to four and if there is no opening shock you know you are in trouble. A helo jump the count is six, and I had been told that before I boarded. What I didn’t expect was no opening shock. None. I counted to six and heard nothing but fluttering above me. I looked up, shocked to see a full canopy. At this point I was usually shoving a testicle or two back down my nose.

My buddy Ramos –the short timer– came zooming by me (too close actually) enjoying the hell out of his -1B. He was singing a song that was popular at the time: “I don’t wanna come back down from this cloud..” Singing. No one ever sings on Division jumps. I enjoyed what felt like hours in the harness as I floated to earth. It would have been a standing landing except for the fact that every Division paratrooper knows the mantra “there are no standing landings in Division, if you get lucky and land soft, then fall down!” which I did.

The Chinook had went on up to 10,000 feet and kicked out the Team guys who impressed the hell out of all of us with the “snap” of their RamAir canopy’s popping open at 1000 feet. By this time we had all linked up and were moving out to a 5-ton on the DZ. We were euphoric. We couldn’t stop telling each other how great it was.

Most of the team had maneuvered in such a way as to land right next to the truck, so they arrived there before we did. Upon our arrival we learned that there was a price to be paid for our adventure: we had to shake out the chutes. We groaned, picturing a long ride back to the chute shakeout tower and the hours spent taking rigger commands. We started loading the -1B’s and RamAir’s onto the back of the 5-Ton. The senior team guy said:
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Loading this up to go to chute shakeout.” Ramos answered.
“No, no, man. Just shake ‘em out here. Hook the loop onto the side of the truck and get the big crap out, then stuff ‘em back in the bag.”

It was at that exact instant that I fell in love with him.

So, if I get a little friendly with the Oakley-wearing, hands-in-pockets, shaggy haired, Girl Scout hat wearing boys from down the street, it’s only the afterglow.

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