The other morning while driving to work, the local DJ's were discussing moments of their greatest fears. People were calling in and sharing their stories. Moments where they didn't face their fears and turned back. It's not too hard too imagine how every single person's life could be different if they had faced their fears. I easily thought of my own greatest moments of fear. Let me take you back in time to 1991. It was magical time the Simpsons were on T.V., a Clinton and a Bush were running for President, Jurassic Park is King in the theaters and we were just finishing up a war in the Middle East....wait-a-minute.......anywho.....
My initial military training was loaded with fears. I was a 17 year old kid from a small town in South Dakota. I was cliché as it gets. I was handed a ticket and a time I had to be in Atlanta, GA for basic training and advanced training. My family and a few friends saw me off at the airport in Sioux Falls SD. At the time, the furthest I had ever been was Omaha to the south, Minneapolis to the east, Aberdeen to the north and Devil's Tower to the west. I had never ridden in an airplane. The first two I would land like a normal person. The third one was an experience altogether different.
The military was a whole different world for me. I knew no one. Mostly, everybody was in the same boat. When in high pressure and tension situations like this, bonding and working together come together quite quickly. The fear of failure was always in the back of my mind. What would it be like to go back, never having completed training? It pushed you to try harder. Firing rifles all night and all day long might seem fun to some people, do it while someone is screaming over top of you alongside a few hundred others who had never had any sort of gun safety courses while growing up. Visions of Full Metal Jacket danced in our heads. The good news is nobody died during my training, there were drop outs, people who couldn't cut it physically or mentally. It happens, they aren't bad people, they just weren't made for it. Fear drove me the whole time. Fear of being singled out, fear of punishment, all of it. It would seem that a guy like me, who had spent his fair share of detention and probation officer conferences, would have somehow gotten in trouble. I didn't. We were identified by individual numbers on our lockers and helmets. Drill Sergeants called you by that number until they learned your real name. they usually learned your real name after you screwed up a lot. The last week of training the Platoon Drill Sergeant asked me my name because he hadn't learned it and asked what platoon I was in. I told him that I was in his platoon with a wide smile. Fear. I had laid low and stayed off the radar. It was my only goal the whole time I was in training to make it out of there without being brutalized mentally or become the whipping boy for the Drill Sergeants. Fear can be used to push you forward, it also can lock you up.
After my initial training I went on to Jump School. 3 weeks of training to teach soldiers how to properly exit a military airplane alongside a couple hundred other soldiers at the same time. I'm not sure who pitched this idea to the military during WWII. I assume it was Don Draper who had sold them this idea as a good one. If you had a fear of heights, you learned pretty quick. Thankfully by this time I had turned 18 during Basic and I was still young and stupid enough to buy in to this idea. Fear was still there everyday as we learned to fall and roll to minimize the damage to our knees(and heads). Every exercise was designed to build confidence. Finally the last days of training we loaded onto C-130 planes and headed up. There were about 50 soldiers in my plane. Fear. A plane full of people who had never jumped out of airplanes that were flying in a roller coaster like fashion, because the Air Force pilots think they are funny. The third plane I had ever rode in, I didn't plan on landing in. Failure to jump, as we were told could lead you to be tried by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. At least that's what they told the wide-eyed idiots that were about to fill the air over a drop zone near Ft Benning GA. This is where trust comes in. Trust your training. Trust that the Jumpmaster lets your Stick(that's the line of soldiers on one side of the plane that run out the door when told to like camouflaged lemmings)jump out over the Drop zone rather than in the trees. Trust the guy in front of you not to get hung up. Trust yourself. When the time came for us to go out the door that was now open. The wind and the sound of the planes engines roared, even through the earplugs we all had in. I followed all of the instructions, repeated them loudly in unison with the entire Stick so every soldier could hear what was going on. I could see nothing but the parachute on the back of the soldier in front of me. I stood there with my tether line in hand. We had hooked all of our tether lines to the cable running lengthwise of the airplane. The tether line would stay connected to the line and would pull the parachute out as gravity took you down. 3 bad things could happen as you fell out of the plane: You could fail to hand the line over correctly to the Jumpmaster and your arm could become entangled in the line and it would rip your bicep down to your forearm making you look like Popeye(Google him if you are under 30 years old). Hope your parachute opens after that because, I'm pretty sure you instantly go into shock as you fall. Or the line could get caught up and you could be dragged behind the plane. At this point the Jumpmaster will try to dislodge you and hopefully the chute pulls out. Failing that, they will cut you loose and you are on your own to pull your emergency chute, which has it's own inherent set of dangers. The last really bad thing that could happen is your chute fails completely and you plummet with only a low 1500 feet between you and the ground to deploy your emergency parachute. Fear at this moment in my life may have been running quite high. The green light came on and we were issued the command of "Green Light Go!". The line of soldiers shuffled forward each handing their lines carefully and quickly to the jumpmaster and then exiting the plane in short swift steps and placing their hands on the exterior of the door then jumping out. I kept my eyes forward looked the instructor in the eye and handed him the tether. Took the steps like I was trained, turned my body, placed my hands outside the edge of the door and looked out. Fear. I froze there in a haze of adrenaline. I had locked up. All the preparation all of the talking myself through it. And then I felt it. The swift kick of freedom, or at least of my Jumpmaster's boot. That son of a bitch had just kicked me! Out I fell. I'm pretty sure a choice swear word escaped my lips as I felt the jolt around my shoulders as my parachute deployed. I opened my eyes. There we all hung in the air drifting slowly to the ground, as safely as a spores blown free from a dandelion. It was amazing! Adrenaline like I had never felt in my life. When we all got our parachutes wrapped up and hauled back, our Jumpmaster walked up with his own chute. He eventually walked up to me and told me he wouldn't let me fail. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about.
The lesson to be taken is that we can focus through all of our fears and come out the other side. Sometimes when it grips us so badly we need help from other people that care about us to make it through. Last, sometimes when we see that fear has gripped people we care about so much it freezes them, a well intentioned kick in the ass can help them move forward when they least expect it. Except for spiders and clowns, it's best just to shoot them and explain your irrational fear of spiders and clowns. Most people understand that.
In all my glory prior to one of my last jumps......
(Unfortunately Spiders and Clowns were not harmed in the making of this Blog. Ranked in order of which famous clown or famous spider you should kill first if attacked: IT(Because IT is an alien space clown spider), Shelob, The Clown from Poltergeist, The arachnophobia spider, and Bozo).
