“Oh—I don’t invite death to come see me,” Tony said. “But, as I was sayin’, I thought the parachute troops would be wonderful. And important, too. Droppin’ behind enemy lines, messin’ up their communications, blowin’ up a few bridges, takin’ an airfield—and all this with the enemy all around you! It’s good tough stuff, and that’s what I like. But what happened?”
“Well, what did happen?” Dick smiled.
“I get into the parachute troops after my basic,” Tony said. “And then, first, they teach me how to fall down. As if I haven’t fallen down plenty of times when I was a kid. And from places just as high as they made me jump off of, too. When you’re a kid duckin’ away from the gang from the next block, you know how to climb and dodge—and fall. Then the practice jumps from the tower! What do they need a tower for? Why not just get us up in a plane and toss us out? We’ll learn how to use a ’chute fast enough that way, don’t you worry.”
“But, Tony, you’ve got to remember,” Dick said, “that not everybody is as agile as you are. And they don’t have the same attitude as you. They feel a little funny at first, jumping out of an airplane. And they’re likely to get mixed up and forget which side the ripcord is on. Some people tighten up and get panicky. They’ve got to learn things slowly, get used to them.”
“What’s so hard about it?” Tony demanded. “You jump, and you don’t even have to worry about the ripcord. It’s hooked inside the plane.”
“Well, they’ve got to teach you how to land right,” Dick countered. “Otherwise you might break a leg or get dragged half a mile by your ’chute.”
“Anybody knows he ought to roll when he falls,” Tony said. “And you can see you have to spill the air out of your ’chute and slip out of the harness. It’s easy.”
“For you, yes,” Dick said. “You could scramble up the side of a sheer wall twenty feet high, like a cat. You’d have made a wonderful bantam halfback if you’d ever played football, Tony, the way you can duck and dodge and twist and go underneath or over anything that’s between you and where you want to go. Anyway—so paratroops training was easy for you. Then what?”
“One thing I did like,” the young corporal said, “and that was the conditioning. They decided paratroopers had to be tough and they put us through everything to make us tough. I like that. I like to be hard as nails and in perfect condition all the time. It makes me feel swell. And I liked the chance to learn radio. I’d fooled around a lot with it as a kid. The Army really taught me things about it.”
“And you learned what they taught, too,” the sergeant said. “That’s why you’re a corporal so early in the game, and so young.”