The way I ended up in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot was by looking for a way out of Vietnam. I was a smartass kid a little brighter and a little more cunning than the average turkey off the turnip wagon. At least that was how I figured it. My old granny always said when you weighed 125 pounds soaking wet with a squirrel in your pocket and stood all of five-three and three-quarters, it wasn’t brawn that put you on top of the ant hill. Brains was the only thing that kept you from going around armpit high to the rest of the world.
Actually, I might not have been that bright after all. It was my idea to join the U.S. Army in the first place.
“Tell you what,” I said to my high school buddy, Randy Huntzberry.
“What?” Randy said, biting.
“Let’s join the army.”
“I thought you were brighter than that, Ronnie Alexander.”
Randy and I had graduated from South Hagerstown High, Hagerstown, Maryland, in the spring of 1963 and started at a local junior college that fall. After the first semester, we were both eager to get out of Maryland and see how the other parts of the world lived. We might not have been so anxious if we had listened to the low and steady storm rumble of Vietnam over the horizon. But when you were eighteen years old, you never listened anyhow. The dark clouds had not yet appeared. Besides, I couldn’t have picked Vietnam out on the map if it were the only country on the map. For all I knew, Vietnam was a town in Texas or New Mexico.
“Hey,” I said to Randy, sensing his hesitation, “joining the army is better than hanging around this one-horse burg and watching them roll up the street every night.”
It took him a few days to make up his mind. “Let’s do it,” he finally agreed.
We trotted down to the local induction center and enlisted on the buddy plan as ground-pounding infantry soldiers. E-1 grunts—first pay grade enlisted, earning about seventy-something dollars a month. By the time we were halfway through boot camp, I had already decided double-timing in the rain and sun, digging foxholes, and getting smelly in the woods was for suckers. I looked around for a way out.
“Randy, let’s volunteer for the airborne,” I suggested.
“What?”
“At least we fly to wherever we’re going instead of having to walk,” I argued.
“But we have to parachute!”
We both volunteered for airborne training after basic training. Turned out Randy was colorblind. Couldn’t tell his reds from his greens. Airborne rejected him. I ended up alone in front of the gate at Fort Benning, Georgia. THROUGH THESE PORTALS PASS THE FINEST AIRBORNE SOLDIERS IN THE WORLD. A column of sweating troops jogged by chanting a Jodie call.
“Two old ladies lying in bed;
One looks over to the other and said:
‘I wanna be an Airborne Ranger,
I wanna live a life of danger . . .
Airborne! Airborne! All the way!”
It began to seem the more I tried to get out of things, the deeper I got in.
Soldiers called summertime Fort Benning “The Frying Pan.” Appropriately. Damn, it was hot. Black Hats—parachute instructors—ran us through outdoor sprinklers six or seven times a day, clothes and all, to keep us cooled off. In between showers, it was balls to the wall starting at five A.M. every day. Double time! Hut! Don’t let a Black Hat catch you walking anywhere, anytime.
“What are you doing, Leg?” Leg, spoken contemptuously, meant non–airborne personnel. “Get down, Leg! Drop! Drop! Give me fifty!”
“Yes, Sergeant!” Bellowing it out.
“Are you stupid? Don’t you know my first name? It’s Airborne! Got that, Leg?”
“Airborne Sergeant! All the way!”
Assholes and elbows in the front leaning rest position. My company’s Black Hats were “Smoky” Jackson, so dubbed because he brought down smoke on everybody, indiscriminately, and “Drop-Drop” Estelle. It was obvious where he got his name.
“Drop, Leg! Drop! Drop! Give me fifty push-ups.”
Drop-Drop was one of the original Rangers and a Korean combat vet. He wore the scrolled Ranger patch on his left shoulder rather than the new Ranger tab. We held the guy in total awe. He had been there, done that, collected the medals. In Korea, the bones in his left forearm had been shattered by a bullet and replaced with steel. When he scowled down at me in formation, I felt like a Shetland pony confronted by a Budweiser Clydesdale.
“This ain’t kindergarten. How old are you, Leg?”
“Nineteen, Airborne Sergeant.”
“Huh! Jesus, they get younger and smaller every year. We’ll have to strap a ton of lead to your ass to get you to fall out of the sky.”
“Airborne Sergeant! All the way!”
When it came time for our first parachute jump, we were more scared of Drop-Drop than we were of the jump. Better to bail out and crash on the drop zone than to turn chickenshit and face the man mountain’s contempt. Because everything was done according to the alphabetical order of our last names, Alexander was one of the first jumpers in the stick. Adrenaline pumped through my veins like water through a fire hose.
We shuffled belly button to asshole out the open door of the C-119 Flying Boxcar, stamping our boots and shouting to build up courage. Out that terrible door into nothingness. The roar of slipstream in my ears. The “positive opening” of the T-10 parachute that turned baritones into tenors if the harness wasn’t tight enough.
As expected, I was the last man out of the air although I had been one of the first into the air. I hung suspended in a thermal and watched in exasperation as heavier jumpers passed me and landed on the DZ, their ‘chutes collapsing. They formed in ranks and looked up at me with amusement. Drop-Drop stomped back and forth. He pointed his finger up at me and shouted in make-believe rage.
“Get down here, Alexander! Do you hear me, trooper? Get your bantam-ass down here right now!”
That was the first time he called me trooper instead of Leg. He grinned when I finally did my PLF on the ground and trotted up. I was now a member of the elite airborne forces. I had leaped—-fell—out of a perfectly good airplane and lived to bullshit about it.
We graduated after making four more jumps that same weekend. Drop-Drop and Smoky pounded blood-wings into our puffed-out chests.
“I’ve been dropping you guys for three weeks,” Drop-Drop said. “It’s your turn to drop me.”
“Awright!” somebody shouted. “Drop! Drop! Give me fifty!”
“Which hand?”
“Your left.” The arm with the steel in it.
He did fifty push-ups so fast he was a blur. Then he bounced and switched hands and did another fifty with his right hand.