“Close up and stand in the door!”
The first man stepped up to the open door. All the men had been ordered to look out at the horizon, not straight down, for obvious psychological reasons. They had also been taught to place their hands on the outer edge of the door, never on the inside. With the hands on the outside, there was nothing to hold a man in the plane, and the slightest nudge, even just the sense of the next man pressing forward, would be enough to get him out of the plane. If he tried to steady himself by putting his hands on the inside, as Gordon said, “twelve men behind couldn’t push that fellow out of there if he didn’t want to go. That’s the power of fear.” When a jumpmaster saw a man put his hands on the inside, he would pull him back and let the others go out.
Most of the men, according to Gordon, “were so psyched up and in the swim of this thing that we would almost have gone out without a parachute. It was almost that bad.” Overall, 94 percent of the men of the 506th qualified, which set a record that still stands.
On the first jump, the men went one at a time. As soon as he was in the door, the jumpmaster tapped him on the leg. Out he went.
“I shuffled up to the door and leaped into a vast, breathtaking void,” Webster remembered. “My heart popped into my mouth, my mind went blank.” The static line attached to the hook on the anchor line in the plane pulled the back cover off his main chute; a break cord, tied to the apex of the chute, pulled the canopy out of the pack and then parted. The prop blast inflated the chute, and he felt the terrific opening shock.
“From then on the jump was fun. I drifted down, oscillating, or, as civilians would say, swinging to and fro, and joyously looking around. The sky was filled with high-spirited troopers shouting back and forth.”
Standing in that open door was an obvious moment of truth. Men who had been outstanding in training, men who later won medals for bravery in combat as ordinary infantry, would freeze. Sometimes they were given a second chance, either on that flight after the others had jumped, or the next day. Usually, however, if a man froze once, he would never jump.
Two members of E Company froze. They refused to jump. One of them, Pvt. Joe Ramirez, was pushed to the back of the plane, but after everyone jumped out, he told the jumpmaster that he wanted to jump. The plane circled the field.
On the second pass, he jumped. As Pvt. Rod Strohl put it, “That took more guts than for a guy to go out the first time.”
Easy made its second jump that afternoon, with the men again going out one at a time. The next jump was a mass affair, the jumpmaster shouting “Go! Go! Go!” as the twelve men in the stick moved into the doorway. The sticks cleared
the plane in 6 seconds, to the astonishment of the jumpmaster. Carson wrote in his diary, “I think I am getting jump crazy because when I am on the ground I think of the thrill of jumping and I want to jump some more. When I feel that opening jerk, I shout with all my might.”
The fourth jump came on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, the company got the day off and a nice turkey feast.
It was the first Christmas away from home for virtually every man in the company. Carson wrote, “It don’t seem like Christmas, no snow, no tree, no presents, no mom and dad.”
On December 26, the last jump, each man got a certificate declaring that he was “entitled to be rated from this date as a qualified Parachutist.” Then the proudest moment of all, the one toward which they had been working for six months, the pinning on of the silver wings. From that moment, never to be forgotten, each member of Easy, every member of the 506th, was forever special.