Quote Originally Posted by Rrumbler View Post
"Bless them all, bless them all, the long and the short and the tall, "

I have always held "para-troops", jumpers, if you will, in awe; I see jump wings on a guys chest, and my opinion of him goes up several notches. I have done a lot of things in my life that others think "crazy" or daring, but in my mind, they were just things that were necessary in getting my job done; jumpers are a whole different breed of cat, to my way of thinking.

One of the squadrons I was in in the Navy, my cubicle mate was our squadron Rigger, and as often happens, we became pretty good buds. He was also a "skydiver", a fairly rare type in the early sixties, and he convinced me that I should learn to jump out of an airplane. Well, I had gone through a basic form of jump training as part of basic aviation training; the thing was that if you were qualified to be Aircrew, you had to be familiar with the necessary skills to get out of a plane if you had to, but we didn't actually jump out of an airplane, we just jumped off of a tower, and from the top rafters of a blimp hanger 100 feet into a pool. So, I went through the skydive training, got rigged out, and went up for my first jump. I chickened out, didn't jump, stood in the door, looked down, and just sat back down. Somehow, the idea of getting out of that airplane before it was safely on the ground just didn't seem so exciting from several thousand feet up in the air. My friend never said anything derogatory, though, he said it took balls to not jump in that situation. It's a puzzle to me.
You climbed up 100 feet!! Enough Said!! Pete