(Host) Chris Wren is a former editor and reporter at The New York Times.
But this Memorial Day, he will be thinking about military service and
unsung heroes.
(Wren) Let us not praise famous men on this Memorial Day. Not the politicians. Not the generals who auction off their memoirs.
Let
us praise instead the sergeants, who have held our armies together
through America’s wars. And suffer for their patriotism with too many
deployments that estrange them from their families. And too often, a
scandalous neglect, if they return home broken in body and mind.
I
never earned sergeant’s stripes. I wore the gold bars of a very green
second lieutenant. And when I wound up in Korea as a rifle platoon
leader, the sergeants taught me everything I had to know.
After
my year in Korea, I volunteered for Army Special Forces. And that took
me to jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, where two sergeants,
Norberry and Bernhart, teamed up to make my life Hell, for the next few
weeks. They ran us on the double everywhere. They made us jump for hours
through doors, and off towers thirty four feet high. They swung us high
on harnesses, and dropped us. Over and over. They could be mean as
snakes, goading us with a sarcasm that was hilarious, if you weren’t the
butt of their joke. I learned that while doing push-ups on our rest
breaks.
"Well, well, curly-locks, what have we here?" Norberry
professed shock at the blond fuzz on the scalp of the kid next to me –
who forgot to get a haircut. "How can you jump out of a plane with all
that hair blowing in your face?"
At last, we loaded onto a real
plane for our first live parachute jump. We’d rehearsed the jump
commands so many times. Stand up. Hook up. Check your static line. Check
your equipment. Sound off for equipment check.
I shuffled
forward, and looked down twelve hundred feet to our drop zone – a tiny
patch of sand. No way could I do this. I was an English major in
college!
Well, there are worse things than dying. Like
explaining to Sergeants Norberry and Bernhart why you’d changed your
mind. "Stand in the door!" Sergeant Bernhart bellowed over the deafening
engine-roar. "Go!"
Before I could think, I bounded from an
aircraft flying a hundred twenty five miles an hour. I fell five or six
seconds before the parachute deployed. And the opening shock nearly tore
me apart. I slammed into the ground as it rushed up to meet me.
Sergeants
Norberry and Bernhart shook their heads in mock despair. We had to jump
four more times, now tripping over rifles and heavy packs, before the
silver wings of a paratrooper were pinned on our chests.
Everyone’s
scared, a sergeant in my Special Forces group told me later. The
courage comes from doing it anyway. And any sergeant knows that.
Thank you, Sergeant Norberry. And God bless you, Sergeant Bernhart!