Keep Your Feet and Knees Together Airborne! "TEN MINUTES!" cried the jumpmaster over the thunderous drone of the four Allison T56-A-15 turboprop engines. "Ten minutes, ten minutes, ten minutes!" the ninety aspiring jumpers called back wanly, looks of trepidation on their faces. Of those ninety, the ten minute warning was only relevant to the thirty clustered closest to the rear of the Air Force C-130 cargo aircraft. The others would have to wait for the next pass over Friar Drop Zone in Fort Benning, Georgia. I was one of those thirty, roster number 306, and had already watched with a mixture of amazement and horror as the thirty before us had been fed, one at a time, out both jump doors into the waiting maw of the unknown. We had prepared for this moment, to be sure, for all of the previous two weeks. The United States Army would never ask one of its soldiers to perform any task, however mundane, without first providing a detailed block of instruction. During those first two weeks of Airborne school, we had been introduced to the T-10 parachute and the MIRPS (Modified Improved Reserve Parachute System), been taught how properly to land ("Hit, shift and rotate. Kick your legs up and over. Activate your canopy release assembly."), been told what to do in case of a mid-air entanglement or a water, power line, or tree landing, and been thoroughly indoctrinated into the history of the Airborne, from the first test platoon in 1940, to the Rangers' jump into a hailstorm of bullets over Panama in 1989. Prepared, yes, but ready? Absolutely not, we would have said. No one, we thought, could possibly become inured to plummeting one thousand two hundred fifty feet out of a moving aircraft, suspended only by a few square yards of thin nylon fabric. "What have we gotten ourselves into?" we all asked ourselves. Only the engines would answer us with their continuing mind-numbing roar. "GET READY!" came the next command from the jumpmaster. This was the moment of truth....