shrugged and said okay, and then we all went to dinner that night at the Patton House on Fort Benning.
Over dinner, I learned that Sue was nineteen, employed as a secretary to the president and vice president of Burnham Van Service, and enrolled in night classes at the Columbus Center of the University of Georgia. It also turned out she was the reigning 'Miss Georgia Air Reserve' (somebody else had obviously thought she was as good-looking as I did).
In her family were five sisters and a brother (almost the exact reverse of mine). Her brother, the oldest of the children, had fought in World War II and then become a lineman with the Georgia Power Company, where he was tragically electrocuted. Her dad worked for Bibb Manufacturing Company (a textile mill in Columbus), and her mother kept the home.
From the beginning, I liked Sue a lot, and as I got to know her family, I liked them also. I'm not so sure that she thought as much of me as I did of her, but we started dating occasionally, and I continued to do my thing, soldiering as a young lieutenant.
Meanwhile, I became friends with a service station owner named Kirby Smith, who also owned a pair of modified stock cars. Although he did not drive himself, Kirby sponsored his mechanic in stock car racing. I liked racing and would go with them on the weekends, and after a time I started driving myself. We would usually go to Valdosta, Georgia, and race there on a Friday night, then on to Montgomery, Alabama, and race Saturday night, then to Atlanta for Sunday night racing, and then back to Columbus in time for me to stand reveille on Monday morning.
I liked the racing — the challenge, the competition, the risk, and living on the edge. I guess I have always been that way — and the Army has afforded similar satisfaction in most of my assignments.
Sue and I dated for eighteen months, and in August 1959, we became engaged. Three months later, we were married in her church, the Porter Memorial Baptist Church in Columbus, Georgia. Proposing to Sue, though, put an end to my racing career. When I popped the question, she gave me an ultimatum. 'It's either your racing, or me,' she said. 'You make the choice.' It didn't take me long to sort out my priorities.
As I look back over the forty-one years of our marriage, Sue has proved the best companion and wife any man could ask for — my closest friend and toughest critic. She has been a role-model mother, raising two outstanding daughters, while taking care of the family and wifely responsibilities in every command I held. Marrying her was the soundest decision I ever made.
JUMPING OUT OF AIRPLANES
Parachute and Ranger training are tough! Few people enjoy jumping out of airplanes. The risk is always there, rushing up at you; parachutes don't always open; and even when they do open correctly, bones can break when a trooper lands.
However, it's also not much fun to spend a couple of hard weeks in a swamp in summer or in the mountains in winter, with little or no sleep, having to live off the land when food is not available while conducting training as stressful and physically demanding as real combat. Ranger experience puts a soldier up against the absolute limits of mind and body.
On the other hand, soldiers who successfully make it through these ordeals have a right to feel good about themselves. The best soldiers are usually Airborne- and Ranger-qualified; and Airborne or Ranger units are usually thought of as elite.
All of this notwithstanding, in the 1960s every officer had to go through either Jump or Ranger School, and officers who expected to be assigned to a combat unit, whether infantry, armor, or artillery, had to go through both. The Army expected officers to be versatile. It wasn't enough to serve effectively in their own technical specialties; officers had to have all the skills necessary to lead a unit in combat, and the broader perspective that gave. Even officers who weren't in combat branches, such as quartermaster, ordnance, or signal, were expected to handle specialized combat-oriented tasks and challenges.
Every officer served at least two years in a combat unit before going to the branch in which he was commissioned, and to the basic officer qualification course in that branch. For those in noncombat branches, this was not only valuable experience in itself, but helped them later in serving and supporting the combat units.
This is no longer the practice in the Army, partly because the shortage of officers has meant that the services can no longer afford the luxury, and partly because of the way the Army has evolved over time. Now the Army is run the way business is, where most people are specialists. Forty years ago, everyone outside of the technical branches was seen as a generalist. The perception was that it didn't matter who you were on the battlefield, you were a better leader if you had a core of basic officer skills that enabled you to take care of your men under all circumstances.
In most ways, today's Army is a better-prepared and more effective force than the Army of forty years ago, but the discontinuation of combat unit training and experience for all officers is a real loss.
The objective of Jump School has always been to teach a soldier how to put on his parachute and equipment properly, then how to exit an airplane, descend, and land safely. Mental alertness, confidence, and the ability to react automatically to just about anything that might happen during a jump are critical.
The course normally took four weeks, but the Army was testing to see if compression could save training time and money without affecting performance, so for the 1958 class of infantry lieutenants, the course was compressed to three weeks. The instructors were all handpicked NCOs, all master jumpers — and they were professional and tough.
The program of instruction consisted of a ground week, tower week, and jump week — all punctuated with an extensive physical training program and a very stringent personal inspection each morning, especially during the first two weeks.
Following the in-ranks inspection by the Black Hats (the Airborne cadre), daily training started with a one- hour session of rigorous physical training: push-ups, squat jumps, sit-ups, pull-ups, deep knee bends, squat thrusts, and a three-mile run in combat boots. The Black Hats' favorite technique for teaching alertness was to bark: 'Hit it!' This could be directed at an individual or at the whole group. The instant anyone heard the words, he immediately had to hop up about six inches off the ground and go into the correct position for exiting an aircraft — that is, chin on chest, forearms and fingers extended as if grasping the reserve parachute, elbows held tight to the sides, and counting: 'one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand,' representing the seconds it takes a parachute to open. Once in the exit position, he'd start jumping up and down with knees bent and toes pointed to the ground. Anyone who was slow to react and/or did not do any of this correctly could expect to hear 'Give me twenty,' or however many push-ups the Black Hat wanted to lay on.
Their favored 'weapon' for ensuring conformity and mental alertness was push-ups or squat jumps for every infraction or mistake in training — no matter who committed it — so on any given day, a trainee could find himself doing two hundred or more extra push-ups.
During the first week, Stiner and the others were taught how to perform parachute landing falls from any direction (left front, right front, left side, right side, left rear, right rear). They started by standing on the ground in the sawdust pit and hopping up and then falling in whichever direction they were told to. After they'd mastered this skill from the ground — maybe a hundred or more parachute landing falls (PLFs) — they moved up to a PLF platform, a wooden structure five feet off the ground. They continued falling from there until they were proficient in every kind of PLF.
Each time anyone made a PLF, he had to simulate a 'prepared to land' position — that is, he'd reach up and pull down on the two front risers of his (simulated) parachute, with elbows tight to the side, chin tucked to the chest, knees slightly bent, feet and knees held tightly together with toes slightly pointed toward the ground. When he touched the ground, he'd roll in the direction that would most cushion his fall.
After PLFs, they advanced to the 'swing landing fall trainer,' a circular steel frame suspended by a cable that hangs over a six-foot-high platform. The student, wearing a parachute harness, attached his risers to this frame,
