In the spring of my internship year I played on the hospital team in a Base softball league. Lackland was the basic training center for all enlisted airmen. Our team manager, Sergeant Rodriguez, was one of the hard-nosed training instructors (TI’s) who was also organizing a skydiving club on base and somehow managed to recruit me.  

I had a medical school classmate who had earned jump wings in the Army Airborne before college. When he talked about his experiences I found myself intrigued with parachuting. Not so much for the thrill but more for the question of whether I had enough courage to jump myself. 

The club conducted a series of instructional lectures and ground training exercises prior to our first jump. Juan Brown, my roommate at the time remembers how I practiced parachute landing falls, jumping from my bed in our apartment and shaking the neighbors down below.  

The skydiving club had permission to jump in an 80 acre farm field ten miles west of San Antonio. Laid out on the diagonal, our improvised runway was just shy of three thousand feet in length. There were trees at one end of the field and power lines at the other. 

We jumped from a Cessna 172 fitted with a 2” by 6” board that extended from the underside of the plane on the passenger side.To position ourselves, we would step out onto the board while holding on to the diagonal wing strut. When the jump master gave us the signal, we would kick our legs back and simultaneously push off. After falling 20 feet the static line would stretch taut and automatically deploy the parachute.

Our target was a ten foot canvas cross in the middle of the landing area. Parachutes were maneuverable so on a wind-free day we could routinely come within 25 feet of it. 

On my initial jump, I felt little anxiety until just before we arrived over the target at an elevation of 3,500 feet. With winds buffeting the plane and contorting my face I inched out under the wing. When the thumbs-up signal came, I let go, felt the jerk of the static line and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the parachute fully deployed above me. Surprised by the sudden stillness, I descended tranquilly to earth hearing only the soft ripple of air wafting through the canopy.  

For a moment I was concerned for where I might land. There were patches of prickly cactus below and I had almost stepped on a six foot snake as I crawled through the fence to enter the field that morning.

Sergeant Rodriguez was fond of saying that anyone could jump once. The real test would come the next time up. He was right. From the moment we left the ground for the second jump I was fearful wondering why I had ever decided to jump in the first place.The terror I experienced in the final seconds before that first jump was still fresh in my mind. 

Not every one was comfortable going out the way we did. An Army Airborne paratrooper, with over 25 military jumps, joined the club with an interest in learning to free fall. He went up twice, crawled out under the wings, and then climbed right back into the cabin. Both times he took the long way down. He found it easier to go straight out the side of a C-130 with a team of jumpers than to drop while looking down from under the wing of a bouncing Cessna. 

We had to pack our own parachutes. Danny, a civilian who occasionally helped me, was a daredevil with ice water in his veins. He once stood on the top wing of a bi-plane at an air show and jumped as they flew past the grandstand. What worried me was the sociopathic gleam in his eyes when he talked about the jumping fatalities he had witnessed. For the same reason that some people go to stock car races, he seemed to get perverse pleasure telling about people he had seen “flare in”. 

He had watched one jumper fall to his death in the brush when his chute failed to open. Danny was first on the scene. As he was walking away, the man’s friends came running up in a panic asking if he was okay. Danny replied sarcastically, “Yeah, he wants a beer.” 

On another occasion Danny was standing next to two young girls when their mother made her first free fall. He heard one say, “Look, here comes Mommy,” as her mother left the plane. The woman froze and failed to pull the rip cord.

Unlike today’s sport parachutes, we jumped with with WWII Army T-10’s. They had a 25 foot inflated diameter canopy and a load capacity of 360 pounds which could safely land a soldier in full combat gear. There were two rear facing vents in the chute.If you closed one by pulling on a toggle line, the chute would rotate to that side. With both vents open you were propelled forward at 7 to 10 mph. We were taught to land into the wind to neutralize that velocity. 

After the fifth static line jump we could make our first free fall. Both jumps had to be accomplished on the same day. I completed the first half of the requirement on a Saturday morning, then had a long wait for my “jump and pull”.

By late afternoon huge Texas thunderclouds were starting to build up in the distance. To avoid having to repeat my earlier static line effort on another day, Sergeant Rodriguez hurriedly got me back in the air. As we approached the drop zone, the wind picked up. I could see lightening flashes in the distance and feel the roll of thunder. The plane was tossing violently from the turbulence making it almost impossible to climb out under the wing in preparation for the jump.  Down on the ground the wind meter measured gusts in excess of 45 knots. They were rolling up the target as a signal to abort the jump, but it was too late. Rodriguez had already given me the signal to go. I kicked back, released my grip, then counted to 10 before pulling the rip cord. The chute opened and immediately it became apparent that I would miss the target by a long way. To make sure I cleared the power lines at the west end of the field, I turned to run with the wind. With the vents open, my ground speed was close to 50 mph. I quickly sailed over the power poles with 1,500 feet to spare. Then, in an attempt to slow my progress, I turned to face back into the wind. It didn’t help much. The people below were rapidly fading into the distance.

As I neared the ground I had to turn and sail with the wind once again because of a rapidly approaching roadside fence which I barely cleared by raising my legs at the last second. I landed hard, spraining both ankles and was temporarily stunned as my helmet hit the ground. When the canopy re-inflated and started dragging me across the field, my first thought was “Good, I’m still alive.” Reflexly I was able to deflate the chute by releasing one riser as we had been taught. I was just getting to my knees as the worried members of the team pulled up in their car. Realizing I was okay, they told me I had overshot the target by a mile. I have heard that most military jumping fatalities occur as a result of unexpected gusty winds. 

By the time I finished my internship a month later, I had recuperated and continued to sky dive while attending the School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base. Before the course ended I had made ten more free falls, all uneventful.  Kellan Walker, one of my flight school  classmates, also joined the sky diving club and jumped with me. We would eventually end up stationed together as Flight Surgeons in Nha Trang.