by Orr Kelly
You had about eight minutes of oxygen. I think we made twenty-four jumps and the lowest one was about twenty-four thousand feet, when we went to HALO school. An A-3D is a twin-engine, swept-wing navy carrier plane. It was configured to train bombardiers so it had about twelve seats in it, with the crew forward and up a flight.
In an emergency, they would blow the hatch off and you’d slide down this chute. In our training, it was locked open. And you would run up the aisle and throw yourself on this polished aluminum chute and you would slide out of the plane backwards, like going out of a sort of a bomb bay.
At that altitude, of course, you had to be on oxygen. Because one breath, and you were out.
It was about fifty below zero. Your adrenaline is pumping so hard you forget about the cold. But one thing that happens, when you go out, the humidity in your goggles freezes instantaneously. You can’t see a thing. So, many days we would jump without goggles and our eyeballs would freeze.
The other thing is, the air is thin up there. It’s quite a sensation. Normally in a free fall, you’re falling about 120 miles an hour. At those altitudes, you’re falling over 300 miles an hour. There’s no air, no resistance. You have no sensation of falling. But as you get down into lower altitudes, you can actually feel the air getting thicker. You can feel yourself piling up on air.
And then you begin to get in control. At those altitudes, it was not unusual to be out of control. There was no resistance from the air so you could go into a tumble, like tumbling in a vacuum. There was nothing to reach for. I went completely out of control one day. It’s an experience I’d never had and most fellows never experience. I went completely out of control. I was spinning and rapidly increasing in the whipping of it. They had told us to just snap to attention in the air. And boy, I did. I went head down and stabilized immediately and then I could get control again.
Another danger was a profound “target hypnosis syndrome.” You were falling from such an altitude that you had a long, long time to get fixed on your target and that slow growing of the target is almost hypnotic. I feel that it killed some people. This target hypnosis thing, I’ve experienced it. You see an object on the ground and it slowly gets larger. It’s very hypnotic.
In high-altitude jumps, we’d jump twelve or thirteen at a time. That’s all the room we had. We jumped six or eight in the first pass and then the others, for safety reasons, so we could control it. Anyway, I had made the first pass and was on the ground packing my chute. At those altitudes, you couldn’t even see the airplane, much less the jumpers. But you could hear them. You could hear them falling, rushing through the air. You can’t hear the airplane but you can hear the jumpers as they start to get down to opening altitude at twenty-four hundred feet.
I heard the jumpers whooshing through the air and I looked up and saw the chutes opening and then I looked way up in the heavens and saw this little tiny thing up there. The first thing I thought of was that the hatch came off the airplane. So I ran to the marshaling area and I told them, “Heads up! The hatch may have come off.”
I got a set of binoculars. I looked up and it was a goddamn guy in a parachute. It was twenty below zero and three hundred knots and we figured it broke his neck. He was just hanging, being drifted. We got in a half ton [truck] and were weaving our way toward him. We finally got to some farmer’s field and there’s a parachute all packed up laying there. Nobody around.
What happened was, one guy went out and kind of pushed himself off. And he hit the edge of the chute [exiting from the plane] and it armed his pins. He opened about thirty-three thousand feet. The plane was doing about three hundred knots.
What we saw when we looked at him was, he was basically just conserving his energy and his oxygen. About ten thousand feet he did a cutaway, dumped his main, and came in on his reserve. Smart fellow.
Everyplace he had harness he was black and blue.
Why did he cut away?
Two reasons. One, he was running out of oxygen. Second was, he had a piece of shit chute above him. It was all in threads, nothing more than a stabilizing anchor keeping him vertical.
Here’s a little anecdote. We were in St. Thomas. We used to come over a mountaintop that had a restaurant and a bar. The mountaintop was at 1, 200 feet. We used to fly over at 1, 250 feet and there was this big cliff. As soon as you cleared the restaurant, out you would go.
My girlfriend at the time, I brought her down to watch the big, hairy-assed frogmen do their parachuting. I had told her I would be the guy with the red smoke flare so she would recognize me. Well, the guys, everyone of them, had a red smoke flare.
We used to jump a Caribou [small cargo plane]. It had the rear deck that opened up. We used to take brand-new guys down there and put them in the Caribou. Here you come over the mountaintop. Just as soon as you clear the mountaintop, you go out.
You have the guys backed up on the ramp. Then you slap ’em on the ass and tell ’em to get out. Of course all they saw was trees. You couldn’t see the cliff that dropped off to the water. You’d slap the first guy and he’d look at you: What you talking about? We’re only at fifty feet. You’d have to kick ’em and beat ’em.
Were you ever picked up by the Fulton sky hook?
Sky hook. I’m one of eighty or ninety who ever made a live pickup. I did it on the ball field out at Coronado. The other guy was R. F. Adams.
Fox took my place the day he was killed. Fox had about a thousand free falls. He didn’t panic. He began to think. He started to get into positions to hit the water. He curled in a ball and then he decided to go in feet first. He hit the water at a kind of forty-five-degree angle and it split him from his ankle all the way up under his arm.
I then went to California to do a dual pickup with Adams. The first day, we set up but we didn’t get picked up. The lift line went up through the clouds. I couldn’t see the airplane and I didn’t like that. The pilot couldn’t see the ground so he didn’t want to make the pickup.
Let me explain something. Normally, the only thing uncomfortable on a pickup was the wind, because you were being towed backward through the air, at 150 to 200 knots, and the wind was pushing your head down. The little guys were taking the harness and pulling it over the front of their helmet and it would help hold their head into the wind. But us bigger guys, we couldn’t get the harness to come around.
So we asked Fulton if he could lengthen the harness a little. So he did. Inadvertently what happened was—normally, you’re being towed from like the center of your back, so you’re like a kind of sea anchor, you’re stabilized. But what happened was when he moved that tow point from behind you to over your head, you’re just kind of on a swivel.
Well, we got picked up. Adams was above me and I was on a pigtail. We made the usual few gyrations, the spins, the turns, and then I stabilized out. All of a sudden I make three whipping rotations to the left, in a second. I no sooner look down than it happens to me again. Now I can feel Adams above me doing the same thing.
And then the thing starts cracking the whip. It’s not only spinning, it’s cracking. The lift uniform you put on, the legs have gotten torn off, my arms have gotten torn off. My wristwatch is gone. My ears are lacerated. I’m bleeding in the groin. And I’m doing this violent, violent rotation. Three RPMs a second. And then just a quick breather and again.
And then the plane started flying to five thousand feet and that’s a sign they’re going to put a parachute on the lift line and cut you loose. But they kept pulling us up.
And then I said to myself, “When I get underneath this airplane, it’s going to beat me to death. I’m going to be hamburger.”
As luck would have it, the air flow [below the plane] stabilized us. I feel the line stop as they put Adams into the plane. And then it was my turn. They got me up into the airplane. I was limp. I was done for—and I was in superb shape. If someone said they’d give me a million dollars to sit up, I could not have done it. Adams was lying there and he was beat up as bad as I was.
It had actually bruised the—I think they call them filii—the little hairs in my ears. For three weeks I walked like a zombie, like Frankenstein. If someone called my name and I turned to see who it was, I would fall over and down. I’d drive on a perfectly smooth highway a mile to the base and get nauseous.
CHAPTER
41
When Your Eyes Freeze Shut
Engineman Master Chief Johnny Walker is a slight, dark-haired SEAL with a neatly trimmed, reddish colored mustache. He is unmarried, which is probably just as well, considering that his profession calls for him to jump out of airplanes at high altitude as often as eight times a day.
With more than thirty-three hundred jumps in his logbook, he is the senior enlisted man in the free fall parachute school at Coronado and is in charge of a team of expert jumpers who teach the art of advanced parachuting to other SEALs.
In the early 1980s, he was one of the members of SEAL Team SIX who pioneered the technique of jumping and safely opening a chute at extremely high altitudes, enabling the SEALs to travel long distances in formation before making a surreptitious landing. This is his story:
I went to static line school in 1974. Then in 1976, when I was with SEAL Team TWO, I got my initial free fall training. Our commanding officer was Captain Marcinko. Love that guy! [SEALs refer to their commanding officer as “captain” even though he is of lower rank.]
Back then free fall training was: This is how you do it. Get on the table and show me the position, then out to the airport and out of the plane you went. It lacked in a lot of the finer arts of military free fall. We did some follow-on training down in Puerto Rico—more free falls. We went to Hurlburt Field [headquarters for air force special operations near Fort Walton Beach, Florida] to do our high-altitude training—HALO.
In 1980, when I went to SEAL Team SIX, [as one of the plank owners, or original members] I think I had sixty-five jumps. For four years, that wasn’t that many jumps. When we got the team started, that’s when I really got into the jumping. There definitely was emphasis on jumping. We brought the whole team up to free fall level and then we did a lot of jump training. Depending on the type of jump, a HALO mission—twenty-five thousand feet and above—we’ll jump out and stay in the same airspace while we’re falling. On a HAHO [high altitude, high opening] mission, we’ll jump out, deploy our parachutes within about four to twelve seconds after we’ve left the bird (to kind of stagger the openings), and we’ll fly the canopies in formation down to the target.
My highest HAHO is thirty-three thousand and my highest HALO is thirty-six thousand.
What’s it feel like?
Because you step out of the bird and deploy almost immediately, you’re almost in the forward throw of the bird. You haven’t reached terminal velocity yet. But the bird is traveling fast. The openings were hard. We had some canopy damage, people getting hurt. We did a lot of experimenting with packing the parachutes to get a softer opening.
How does the packing affect the opening?
The front of the square parachute is called the nose. And it’s actually open. Looking from the front you can see different cells. The air is forced in through the front, the back is closed. So the air turns around and comes back out and creates a false front up there that gives us the ability to go through the air. It makes it just like a wing. The parachute opens from the nose to the back and then from the middle out. We roll the nose and close it off. We can make it real tight, depending on the type of jump that’s coming up. And we retard the opening that way.
When we first started, people didn’t do those types of jumps. So we had a standard packing, the same way civilians always pack. We just played with it on our own until we came up with a packing method that would slow down the opening. It was strange because when we first started all this, no one had done it. We had to find out what the problems were by doing it.
One thing we weren’t ready for was the cold at altitude. It is extremely cold up there. Our hands would go almost numb. The toggles on the parachute are about here [reaching up in front of and above his head]. You’re taking all the blood from your hands. When you get on the ground, guys would lie on the ground. Some guys would puke from the pain of the hands coming back to life. It was almost like being frozen and coming back to life.
We started playing with toggles where you could steer from down here [indicating crotch level] and keep the blood in your hands. And we played with different kinds of gloves so you had the dexterity you needed. You had to be able to grab the rip cord or if you had a malfunction, get rid of that and pull your reserve. So you had to have dexterity. We went to sports stores to get new gloves.
How long were you exposed to the cold?
It could be thirty to forty minutes, although not in extreme cold the entire time. One of the jumps we did, the outside temperature was minus eighty-two. Another strange problem is we’d wear the goggles in the bird and they’re next to your face so they’re nice and warm. And you jump out into extreme cold and the goggles would shatter. Then we jumped without goggles. The initial wind blast would tear [as in crying] your eyes. Then your eyes would freeze shut because of the water on your eyelashes. There’d be big gobs of ice on there. You’d dig your eyes out and find your eyelashes still attached to the ice cubes.
Some of those jumps could get interesting. As you go through various cloud layers, it might be snowing in the cloud. We had a couple of interesting experiences with that. The control lines are in the back. If you pull these lines down, you can slow the parachute down. If you pull down far enough, you can actually stall it. It’ll rock backwards, the same as an aircraft. If you get in an ice storm, you start getting ice rammed into this parachute and it starts to settle back here in the tail section. And if you get enough ice in there, it starts to pull down that tail for you.
We’d look up. We could see the ice in the tail section. And then of course the tail starts dropping from the weight and some of the canopies would start to stall.
Those were things we didn’t know would happen when we started this. There was no wealth of knowledge, other than to go out and try it for ourselves.
What do you do when your parachute turns into a bag of ice?
You cuss a lot. We talk to the parachutes a lot. When it’s not performing well, you end up talking to it, trying to make it feel better.
As we dropped down in altitude the ice would start to melt. Once it stalls, it tries to recover, so it rocks. It could completely stall out. For fun, sometimes, on our instructor rigs, we’ll take a couple of wraps on the steering lines so we can get more pull and pull it all the way down and just fall out of the sky that way. But when you let it go, it starts flying again.
Do all the SEALs do HAHO?
No, but since we started the school here, we are bringing a lot more into the regular teams. The expertise is still at DevGru [Naval Special Warfare Development Group, a major command that develops weapons and other equipment and new tactics for the SEAL teams]. But the others are catching up rapidly. Seven of our eighteen instructors are from DevGru. Most of the others came from the jump team. [The Leap Frogs parachute demonstration team.] When I came here to start the school in 1990, I made some calls and had others calling me looking for jobs.
All of the teams have a free fall platoon that’s more or less designated to go into more advanced parachuting.
How do you stay together when you jump at night?
You have to stay in the same airspace at night. We put a different colored light on one jumper to designate him as the leader. If I was the leader, I would jump first and turn around and pick up the aircraft heading. I might wear a red light on my back. The rest of the jumpers would wear green. They would form almost a half-moon on me. At a preset altitude, I would turn 180 degrees and track off. That tells the guys it’s
time to get separation for opening. And they’d go out and open, identify my red light again as the leader under canopy, form up behind me, and we all land on the target together.
It takes a lot of practice to do it. You have to have a team that has worked together a lot. You have to know your weak fliers in that team. You can take a weak flier and make him the leader because everyone else can get to him. If I have a big heavy guy like Rocky here [Rocky Carlock, one of the instructors] and a light guy like myself, Rocky’s going to have a hell of a time staying with me because I fall slower than he does. So I might make Rocky the leader. It’s easier for me to go faster than for him to go slower. I can go faster and stay down with Rocky.
Have you used these skills in the real world?
No. Not to my knowledge. I haven’t done it. I served under [SEAL Team SIX commanders] Marcinko, [Robert] Gormly, [Thomas] Murphy, [Richard] Woolard. Where I really got involved in instructing was at DevGru. We said we’ve got to formalize this, give the guys some better basic training. About four of us got together and started taking over all the training, about 1985. We built from there to where we had specific lesson guides to teach from. It turned into a full-time job for me, teaching free fall and the advanced techniques. When I came here I brought my course and translated it into normal navy paperwork.
Have you had any scary experiences?
Things happen to parachutes. I got into a lot of T&E [test and evaluation], testing different techniques. Some of those would get interesting. I’ve had around twenty parachutes that didn’t work perfectly and I had to get rid of them.