Weren't you afraid?

One last tidbit about the military and I think I've said all I want to say. For now, at least.

A typical reaction I get after telling people what I did in the Army (jump out of perfectly good airplanes) is, "Dang, that must be scary!"

And it's a natural question. When we think about paratroopers, accidents and failed chutes come to mind. Just last year a PFC was severely injured in Taiwan's annual Han Kuang live-fire training exercise when his parachute failed to deploy fully. The exhilarating GoPro videos of people skydiving in Australia are engraved in the public psyche as deeply as the traumatic scenes of someone falling helplessly as his chute remains thin and wiry, refusing to billow out as designed.

So it makes sense that when people try to put themselves in my boots, and imagine what it feels like to sit next to the open door of a smelly, noisy C-130 with the engines roaring, looking down at the ground several thousand feet away, the first thing that comes to mind is terror. And really, it *would* be frightening if you were selected at random and chucked in the situation, told that you were going to jump out in 30 seconds when the light turned green - and oh, tuck your head in to make sure the chute's lines don't cut your ear off when it violently blasts open, and clench your feet together as tightly as you can because a slight imbalance will spin you around and around like a top, leaving you without any control. That would indeed be scary.

But it wasn't scary because we were trained for several weeks by teams of Jump School experts who made damn sure we'd simulated every conceivable situation that could occur. What do you do if you're going to land in a tree. If you're suspended more than 12 feet above the ground. If you're going to land in water. How to ditch your chute after plunging into said water. How to safely pull your reserve chute if the main doesn't deploy within 4 seconds. How to bail out if something happens to the plane. Of course, practice and training is still nothing compared to the real thing, but the point is when we were up there, I actually felt a sense of relief.

"Finally, let's do this."

I fear the unknown; the inability to control or affect what's going to happen next. It's that helplessness that gets to me, the not knowing exactly what I'm afraid of that creates a sense of dread. So in that sense, to me jumping out of an airplane is actually less scary than having a kid. There's a well-rehearsed SOP for jumping out of an airplane (and more importantly, landing safely!). There's no perfect set of instructions to follow for raising a kid. You make it up as you go - now *that* takes courage.

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Chinese version of this post here.