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AIRBORNE

Picture yourself standing in the side door of a C-141 cargo aircraft traveling at 120 knots. The windblast is deafening. Your stomach is churning, as you contemplate leaping out the door into the sky 1500 feet above the ground. Many things could go wrong - you could trip and hit your head on the door, your static line could break, or, heaven forbid, your parachute could malfunction. Jump, two, three, four, five - check canpoy, look for other jumpers, uh oh, got a tear the size of the grand canyon and you are coming down fast. Through 1,000 feet, seconds tick away as the terror of the moment grips you. Finally, the three weeks of airborne training kick in and you remember instinctively your points of performance in this situation. Reserve deployment. Look, reach, grab and pull the reserve handles. Watch as it cuts away your main chute and deploys your reserve -1B parachute. 500 feet, not much room to spare as you drift to the ground preparing to do a PLF (Parachute Landing Fall) or land on your fifth point of performance (your butt). Grab your chute and report into the Army instructor - Congratulations! You have completed your first Airborne jump at Basic Airborne training in Fort Benning, Ga. Four more to go and you can pin on the lead wings and report in to your SEAL Team for STT.

Airborne school is meant to teach SEALs how to jump out of a perfectly good airplane at night with a full combat load. In the old days, the teams spent three days to teach this same skill. But as safety concerns overrode the Team's old ways, the Army was assigned basic jump training and they work hard to pack three days of training into three weeks! So prepare to be repetitious - because, as they say, repetition is the mother of perfection. At the end of three weeks of ground school, tower training, and jumping from or bouncing in every type of contraption you could imagine, the students finally get to jump out of a REAL Airplane. Most claim it to be a hairy experience - so you might expect a few butterflies on your first jump. The standing joke is that your first jump will be a night water jump - because your eyes will be closed and you will pee your pants! However, most SEAL Airborne students learn to enjoy jumping and are eager to get to Free Fall school when in the Teams. Accruing over 1,000 free fall jumps and 50 - 100 static line jumps is not uncommon during a career in the Teams.

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