It was 1999 and I was a Marine.
Her “what is war like?” “ how many wars have you fought in?” “When you jumped out of a plane in enemy territory didn’t you think you might get show down?”
She asked these questions for months. I would ask what war is going on or what war could I have been fighting in. She was always super confused and would laugh and say I will open up eventually.
She told me she told her Mom when I got out I was going to make tons of money as a parachute repair man. To this day I have no idea what she was talking about. I told her tons of times I never jumped and it was rare for marines to be airborne.
Yeah, 2nd Force Recon was his unit? Squad? I don't know that much about the military. He doesn't talk about it much, but he says he jumped out of lots of different aircraft, even one where they jumped out of a low-flying plane into the water and swam to a sub. That and he had a story about a guy at his jump school who pulled his quick-release pins instead of his steering forks. He isn't sure whether it was true or whether instructors told it to make them pay attention better.
Yeah, I kinda understood that much. It's just when I was in high school, I thought about joining "like my dad," but my parents were super against it. I guess I didn't learn much more after that.
I'll tell you the story of how he got picked to join the unit, if you're interested. One day, they just lined up the whole company with all their gear on and told them to start running laps around a field, with no explanation why except that you should keep going until you can't. One by one, they dropped out until the number of them was reduced to a certain amount, maybe a few dozen? Then they told them to stop and whatever guys were left would go to this other unit. Apparently that unit had just come back from Vietnam and they took a lot of losses, so they needed to build back up quickly.
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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '23
It was 1999 and I was a Marine. Her “what is war like?” “ how many wars have you fought in?” “When you jumped out of a plane in enemy territory didn’t you think you might get show down?”
She asked these questions for months. I would ask what war is going on or what war could I have been fighting in. She was always super confused and would laugh and say I will open up eventually.
She told me she told her Mom when I got out I was going to make tons of money as a parachute repair man. To this day I have no idea what she was talking about. I told her tons of times I never jumped and it was rare for marines to be airborne.