He walked up with a beer in his hand and growled in a deep voice, “If there are any of you assholes here who don’t know how to free-fall, you’re gonna learn to pack and jump by morning.”
And he meant it. Those of us who already knew how to free-fall helped the guys who didn’t.
We trained in HALO and HAHO, jumping at night in full stacks. Our team would do a mass exit at 17,999 feet, and each jumper would count somewhere between four and eight seconds before pulling.
Much more tactical than the jumping we did at ST-1!
We planned our jumps so we hit the ground at nautical twilight. That way no one on the ground could spot us coming.
Sometimes, we’d be under canopy for forty-five minutes or more. Passing through thick cloud cover was dangerous, because if another jumper happened to drift off his compass bearing and came at you in the whiteout, the two of you could hit each other at a combined force of over two hundred miles an hour.
So we kept track of one another. Each of us always knew how many jumpers were supposed to be in front and how many were behind. We’d spot the low man, ensure no one else was coming in for approach, flare our canopies, and try to land within twenty-five meters of one another.
Once you landed, you buried your parachute in the dirt. Then you’d get your op gear in order, form a 360-degree security perimeter, receive any last-minute communications, get in patrol formation, and start moving toward the target or the objective. This all took place in less than ten minutes.
■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■ most of our over-18,000-foot jumps in either Australia or Germany because the allowable ceiling for skydivers was much higher there.
In Germany we jumped at 22,000, 24,000, and 26,000 feet, and we worked our way up to do a 30,000-foot team jump, which would have set a world record as the highest mass-exit full-military-team HAHO.
At the higher altitudes, the jumper would typically pass through three levels of clouds. He’d exit the aircraft, do his four- to eight-second count while staying on bearing, deploy his main canopy, and watch everyone disappear in a haze that would quickly turn completely white. After that he’d enter a patch of clear sky before sinking into clouds again. Once he fell through the third level of clouds, he’d finally see land.
The jumper and the rest of the stack would do their best to stay in formation and on bearing through the clouds and land within thirty seconds of one another.
The higher the jump, the further away from the target we would exit the aircraft, depending on the direction and velocity of the wind. The advantage of jumping at such high altitude is that the enemy doesn’t hear or see the aircraft.
But jumping that high changed the game.
Once airborne in the plane but before we jumped, each of us would do a half hour of breathing from an oxygen tank to flush the nitrogen out of the body. Then we’d disconnect our oxygen lines from the large aircraft O2 tanks and connect them to the smaller tanks on our gear.
We received a thirty-minute warning, which was followed by a six-minute warning, a three-minute warning, a one-minute warning, a thirty-second warning, and then standby. Then each of us jumped a split second apart, staying flat and stable, each jumper keeping his eyes on the jumper below. If the guy below pulled early, the jumper above didn’t want to free-fall into his canopy, because that would kill them both. Because of the two-hundred-mile-an-hour speeds, our oxygen masks would sometimes blow off our faces. So we had to duct-tape the masks to our helmets minutes before exiting the aircraft.
We were falling much faster than on the typical twelve-thousand-foot jumps. And because of the added speed and air pressure, guys were hurting their necks and straining their backs when they deployed their chutes. We joked that there were boot prints on the backs of our helmets, because the shock of opening at those altitudes and exit speeds was so violent that the jumper’s back arched to the point where his boots kicked the back of his head.