Colonel Harold Dorsett sent Captain Black Jack Murphy and me to the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia to meet the School Commandant and arrange an invitation for the cadets of VMI to travel to Fort Lee, Virginia to witness an airborne demonstration.
Jack and I jumped into an Army Otter and took off for VMI. I noticed that Jack had brought two maneuverable parachutes along and I asked him why. He simply smiled.
Jack was a great army companion, a West Point graduate; he had a major accident when during a training incident an artillery round exploded near him and gouged out his eye.
The accident didn’t stop Jack—he was full of life and full of fun. He would go to parties with a set of glass eyeballs in his pocket that included question marks, written messages, the 8 ball, the ace of spades, king of hearts and a variety of other images embossed on the fake eye. He would install the crazy eyes after everyone had a few drinks and it always elicited a lot of laughs.
Jack was a man’s man and a wonderful soldier warrior and a good friend.
So we headed to VMI and when we reached the campus we flew over the grass landing strip and spotted our contact guy on the ground---Captain Bob “Machine Gun” Drudik who was waving at us as we flew past.
However, there was a problem and the problem was a strong wind that was blowing across the grass runway. The plane could not land due to the wind and if we flew to the municipal airport we would be delayed well over two hours.
Jack hollered to me saying “Lets Jump”
I said, “What do you mean let’s jump---the wind is so bad that the plane cannot land and yet you want to jump?”
“Of course,” he responded.
I said, “Jack we have no medical coverage, no permission to jump from the local authorities and we don’t have Dorsett’s permission to use his parachutes.”
Jack said, “Yes, I know now throw out the wind streamer on our next pass over the runway and let’ see where it goes. The wind streamer took off and disappeared in the strong gusty wind.
Without a word Murphy put on his parachute and leaped out and I had no choice but to follow. The wind was very strong and Murphy was well off in the distance during his descent.
I tried to maneuver my chute but I didn’t get what I wanted in steer-ability. As I am looking around to locate Machine Gun and Black Jack I suddenly see a large barn with an aluminum roof and I am heading right for it. I try to maneuver to miss the barn but seem to be on a course to hit the barbed wire fence running off the end of the barn. As I get closer it is clear that I am going to hit the fence and as an added feature there is an unhappy, mature, full grown, snorting and stamping bull in the barnyard.
I slam into the fence, back first, and the parachute drapes over the fence and is billowing in the wind making the bull very unhappy. He is snorting and carrying on and the wind is blowing and pinning me to the barbed wire leaving me with an uncomfortable barbed wire feeling.
After a long hard run my two buddies reach the barnyard and unhook the chute and the bull calms down. The three of us spend the next fifteen minutes laughing uncontrollably.
We arranged the invitation for the visit by the cadets and had to be driven to town where the Army Otter was located so we could fly back to Fort Lee. We arrived in Colonel Dorsett’s office at about 1700 hours.
We had to tell him that we had taken two parachutes (“accountable” items) and had made an unauthorized parachute jump at VMI.
We reported to the Colonel and Black Jack began to paint the story of the day----and as he laid out the events of the day the Colonel’s face was getting redder and redder.
Suddenly he jumped to his feet and hugged us and shook our hands screamed out,
“You boys are heroes. You have saved the day because we have gone for 630 days with at least one parachute jump on each of those days. Our string was about to be broken today due to high winds---but you two nut cases saved the day and kept our record alive. Let’s go get a beer!!!”
And that was the end of our illegal parachute jump and just another day in the Army.
