The Glory

A little after noon one day last week, the scrub-pine forest that covers most of the military reservation at Fort Bragg, N.C. resounded to a distant roar. Soon the air trembled with it; across the bright blue sky rumbled 33 of the shiny, potbellied transport airplanes that the Air Force calls Flying Boxcars. The planes were low--at only a thousand feet--and in tight Vs of three. As they passed slowly over "Drop Zone Holland." a two-mile clearing in the dull green forest, they began spawning paratroopers.

Within a few minutes a thousand men of the 82nd Airborne Division dangled in air beneath green and brown camouflage parachutes. Each of the planes moving overhead was slowing almost to the stalling point as it disgorged its jumpers.

At the rear of the aerial train, Flying Boxcar No. 29 dropped out of formation in the turbulent air--probably because of engine or propeller trouble. It nosed down and glided full into a "stick" of floating paratroopers from the plane ahead. Dented and damaged by the impact of their bodies, it slid down in a long death dive and vanished behind the pine tops. A pillar of smoke rose in the distance. Ten dead men came down from the sky. Some, whose chutes had been chopped up, plummeted, some floated as casually as the living. Living jumpers from Plane No. 29 floated down, too; there had been 44 men --40 paratroopers and four Air Force crew members--aboard the Flying Boxcar. In the space of a minute, each had fought his own struggle for survival or honor.

Pilot Leo Burr Clark, an Air Force lieutenant from Charleston, S.C., banked steeply to the left, thus saving many paratroopers ahead. As bodies banged against the plane--one smashed into a propeller, one was almost decapitated by the wing, one broke the glass of Clark's windshield with a great crash--he did not forget the jumpers hooked up to the static lines in the fuselage. He set off the emergency bell, warning them of imminent danger, both the pilot and the copilot, Lieut. Stanley Robert McCaig of Tieton, Wash., were still in their seats when the plane hit.

Sergeant Hubert M. Sluss of Bristol, Va., a lean, thrice-wounded World War II paratrooper, was "pusher" for a stick of 20 paratroopers on the left side of the plane. He was last in line, and it was his duty to quarterback the jump. Luckily, all the jumpers in the plane had already "stood up and hooked up" (i.e., fastened their parachutes to the static lines in the plane). When Sluss heard the windshield break with a sound "like two cars hitting," he wasted no time. Shouting, pushing, struggling uphill as the bucking, lurching plane headed down, he got his men out and managed to jump safely himself. Jumpers on the right side of the plane got out, too--all but one.

Captain Adam G. Meister Jr. of St. Petersburg, Fla., a medical officer, had hooked up with jumpers on the right side of the plane when a red light flashed the five-minute warning earlier in the flight. But as the plane pitched in the backwash of planes ahead, he felt airsick, reached up, unhooked his chute from the static line and sat down. His chute or pack caught in the bucket seat. He sat, struggling but immovable, as the abandon-ship bell shrilled, as his fellow jumpers tumbled out, and as the plane crashed.

Sergeant Jessie Arrington, a husky (6 ft. 2 in., 190 Ibs.) Negro paratrooper from Newport News, Va., was aboard the plane to check the static line and equipment and did not intend to jump. He stayed behind "yelling to everybody we had the long bell" until all jumpers were clear. When he looked out the door, he saw that the plane was only 150 feet from the earth. He was wearing a chute with a hand-operated ripcord. "I looked at the ground and I knew there was no one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three--that's what you count before you pull the cord--time for me."

Coolly, Arrington balanced in the doorway. "I pulled the ripcord in the door so the wind would snatch me out. The wind did." He went down face first, looking at the ground. When he was below the level of the treetops, he was still falling like a stone. The chute opened fully when he was only a few feet above the ground, so late that his feet were above his head when he hit. In a split second, the plane roared through the trees above him. slammed into the ground 50 yards away (killing an eight-point, 150-lb. buck), and began to burn. Sergeant Arrington stood up, bruised but alive, ran into the fire and pulled out a dying crewman.

He toiled on at firefighting during the afternoon as helicopters droned slowly over the woods searching for bodies (15 men died in all). His company thought him dead. When he showed up, "them guys were laughing and hugging me. They sure was happy. Well, I was too." Did he want to stay in the paratroops? Said Sergeant Arrington, with dignity: "I love the glory of jumping."

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