Anxious Jumpers

The three-week course that turns an infantryman into an airborne soldier is so rigorous and full of hazards (notably parachute jumps) that it seems certain to make a lot of the trainees mighty anxious.

Not so, say four psychosomaticists at Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital* who moved into the Army's Airborne Department at Fort Benning, Ga. and watched the trainees from reveille until after they were tucked in, tuckered out, at night.

In fact, paratroop training creates less anxiety than might be expected, and still less of the obvious fear-of-death kind. The doctors' key findings:

P: The anxiety created is sharply defined into two kinds: fear of harm to one's self; fear of failure, with resultant loss of esteem in the eyes of officers and buddies.

P: Harm-anxiety is a liability, and is likely to get trainees washed out, while failure-anxiety (except in immoderate amounts) goads them to do their best.

P: Anxiety goes up after a man has successfully finished the training course and no longer has anything to fear from it--what the layman would call a letdown.

P: The more intellectual and more sensitive trainees do worse than before when they become anxious, but the duller boys are goaded into doing better.

P: Most outright failures are in the group that shows greatest fear of bodily harm.

Next to them in the scale -- the ones who barely squeak through -- are those with the opposite psychological symptom: excessive fear of failure.

* In a 320-page tome, Anxiety and Stress (Blakiston Division, McGraw-Hill; $7).

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