Airborne
After graduation from the Military Police Academy, I moved on to Airborne School at Ft. Benning, Georgia, just across the state. Jimmy Carter was Governor, and it was a nice change of pace for me at the time. Once there, however, I was put on zero week" with two of my buddies from MP School, Dan Nathan and Charlie Rein. We weren't going to join a training company right away. We were billeted in the "casual" barracks with other guys held there in what they called “zero week”. The company needed troops to do all of the grunt labor around the barracks such as sweeping, mopping, making dog tags, you know…real important challenging stuff.
The casual barracks was the place that they housed all of the guys who had jumped out of perfectly good airplanes and made not so perfectly good parachute landings. Their injuries weren't serious to warrant extended hospitalization but they weren't goin' dancin' either. Lots of minor breaks in legs, ankles and shoulders. Lots of torn ligaments and sprains. Oh, the stories those knuckleheads told. We heard that the injury rate was about 8% at that time. This would have been OK but after a week they decided that we should do another zero week. Then a third zero week. No explanation, just having a labor shortage. We take orders. We don't question their judgement.
Three weeks with the disabled told us all we needed to know about Airborne. The real problem seemed to be with the guys who pack the chutes. During our three zero weeks we met a few “riggers”, as they were called. With all that time on our hands we were invited to party with them and smoked a little dope with them. As an Airborne candidate you never knew who packed your chute. Now we knew who would be packing our chutes. It was time to rethink that idea about jumping from a perfectly good plane with a chute they might have packed.
Both Dan and Charlie were draftees and to them ‘Gung Ho’ was a Chinese buffet item. Dan used to call our enlisted superiors, the NCO's, “cretins”. Not to their faces, of course. Dan was a college student from Michigan and knew the meaning. I had to look it up… Cretin – a stupid, vulgar, or insensitive person. I might have been influenced a bit by this but I had my own mind and I felt the same way. Dan, Charlie and I were over it and we decided together to quit. We were completely fed up and disillusioned with the Army by this time after the experiences in basic and advanced training.
We finally got into a regular training company. On the first day we had our PT test. It was running an obstacle course followed by a one mile run. I finished number three out of about 300.
We knew we were going to quit but didn’t know how to do it. I scored well on the PT test so I thought that no one would call me a “pussy” when I quit. The company assembled in the bleachers and the Captain addressed the assembled troops. He hooted and hollered and ended with the line "does anybody wanna quit?" Everyone was silent. It was all I could do not to stand up and say “I do Sir”… but I waited until afterward, went to his office and told him I was done. Charlie and Dan followed right behind me. He couldn’t believe that we’d backed out but agreed to sign the papers. Within a couple of days we all had orders to report to our new duty station, the 288th MP Company right there at Ft. Benning.
