One Nut Fucker

In the summer of '85 I had completed basic training and the Army was sending me to Fort Benning for Airborne school. I had completely screwed the pooch by mentioning out loud that I really liked the movie "The Longest Day," especially the mass airborne drop over France during D-Day. That was all they needed to decide that I was gung-ho for airborne. They never bothered to find out that I was terrified of heights.

I have never been one to question authority. The Army was good for me in this way. They said eat, I ate. They said sleep, I slept. They said kill, I killed. Well, I pretended to kill. Let me tell you, I stabbed the hell out of those bayonet dummies. (I never really understood bayonet training. With modern warfare, who gets close enough to the enemy to stab them with a knife on the end of a rifle?) So, when the Army said train to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, I didn't argue.

The first part of airborne school was fine. We spent days learning to fall over during a landing and how to pack parachutes. All of the ground based instruction was just more of the same as far as I was concerned. It wasn't until the second week when we started climbing the towers that I started having problems. It got to the point that I would just close my eyes and do everything by feel. Apparently the instructors never noticed, because I kept moving on to more advanced instruction.

Finally it came time for our qualifying jump. I must have vomited my liver out by the time we actually got on the plane. My stomach continued to flip flop as the aircraft circled higher and higher, gaining altitude and I began to rethink my whole "follow orders" method of getting by in the Army. As the plane traveled on to the drop zone I somehow managed to calm down a bit. I was trying to go to my happy place, telling myself that I could do this, it wouldn't be so bad. Just one step out of the door, a few seconds of free fall and then a gentle drop to terra firma. I even managed to contemplate the consequences of what could go wrong. Suppose the chute didn't open? I guessed that slamming into the earth at some ungodly speed couldn't be the worst way to go. Just a flash of pain and then it would all be over. I know that manner of thought sounds strange, but it worked for me.

As we sat on the hard benches waiting for our date with gravity, I felt a nudge at my side. Harrison, from Tallahassee I think, had elbowed me to get my attention. I raised my eyebrows and he began to scream at me over the roar of the engines.

"Did you hear about the one nut fucker?" I shook my head no. "Trico from the last training class. On his first jump, he had his chute harness too loose. Have you checked your leg straps?" He didn't wait for me to reply. "Trico had his leg straps too loose and you know how he had those giant balls?"

Everybody knew, even though Trico was in a different part of the training cycle than my class, we all shared communal showers. You couldn't miss the huge donkey balls that hung so low you worried that the fella might bruise them on his knees. I just nodded.

Harrison continued. "Well, he had his leg straps too loose and one of those freaky balls slipped down between his leg and the strap. When his chute popped open, of course the weight of his body jerked down on his leg strap and squeezed his left nut right out of his scrote! The damn testicle shot down his pant leg and hit the ground five minutes before he did. They say you could hear the bastard screaming the whole way down. No big deal I guess, you only need the one to get your groove on, you know what I mean? Rumour is that the Army even paid to have it replaced with something called a neuticle. Had to special order it from Sweden so it would be the same size as his right nut."

Harrison droned on with his horror story, but by this time I had completely tuned him out. Now in addition to being terrified of heights, I was very distressed over the possibility of one of my boys not surviving the jump.

I never made my qualifying jump. When my turn came, the Sargent even tried to push me out the door. I just glared at him. (Well that isn't true, you never glare at a Sargent even if you are afraid of loosing your left nut, but in my mind I glared at him.) I went back and sat down on the bench and returned to the ground the way God intended. I washed out of airborne school and soon after the Army decided they had no use for a soldier that was scared of heights AND terrified of loosing a nut. All that I have left of my time in the service is an ache in my scrotum whenever I think of the one nut fucker.