Orthopedic injuries were way up, and more Soldiers died—all because we were trying to accommodate the biggest technologi- cal innovation that the airborne community had seen in the past 35 years. It was insane. As much as we all wanted to embrace the new snazzy gear, it was literally killing us.
‘SOLDIERING ON’ Over the course of 1979 and 1980, we did our best to just
“Soldier on” and adapt to it. Ten one spring day, the brigade commander assembled all of the brigade’s jumpmasters into Towle Stadium on Fort Bragg. Te stadium was named for Pvt. John R. Towle, who received the Medal of Honor posthumously for his valiant actions during Operation Market Garden in Hol- land on Sept. 21, 1944. Towle was a trooper from the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment who single-handedly went up against German armored vehicles with his bazooka, constantly exposed to enemy small arms fire, and killed at least nine enemy soldiers before being mortally wounded by a mortar round.
By the time of our assembly, I was a rifle company commander in the 2nd Battalion of the 504th. We all knew the story of Towle’s bravery, and the stadium had special significance for us. I looked around at the several hundred of us officers and non- commissioned officers who were jumpmaster-qualified from the brigade’s three battalions and headquarters company. We didn’t know why we were assembled or what the brigade commander was going to say to us. Ten he held up an MC1-1.
We were mighty shocked and insulted when he said, “Anybody here who is afraid of this parachute, raise your hand. Raise your hand, and I will see to it that you never jump one of these again. I will personally issue you a T-10 to jump with instead.” No one raised his hand, though many of us probably wanted to. Seeing us all acquiesce, he went on, “Te Army has invested millions of dollars in this parachute, and we’re going to jump with it.” Tat was about it for that little meeting. I saw bewildered heads shake and eyes roll. “What in the hell are we doing?” I thought.
GETTING AROUND IT As the next year went by, while using all the workarounds described above to try to prevent more accidents, we some- how slowly began to abandon the use of the chute—first for
“mass tactical” jumps of many aircraft loads, then whenever we jumped full aircraft loads at night, and so forth. I don’t know the backstory, but there had to be one. Perhaps our division commander, Maj. Gen. Guy S. Meloy III, who was a real Sol- dier’s Soldier, had something to do with our backing off the use of this chute in tactical operations.
DOES THIS PARACHUTE MAKE ME LOOK SCARED?
Programmatic inertia and failures at all levels of the acquisition system led to 82nd Airborne paratroopers being ordered to jump with a flawed chute that had killed at least seven Soldiers. One trooper later joined the acquisition system that in this case had failed so catastrophically, to try to prevent it from happening again. (Image by U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center)
In any case, by the time I had served three years in that wonder- ful division, we had almost gone full circle. But I never forgot what it felt like to be on the receiving end of “new” equipment that didn’t work properly, or was insufficiently tested, or was politically promoted, or whatever led up to the misfortune of that parachute debacle. Tere was no excuse for it. It was a lead- ership failure.
CONCLUSION We later learned that the Airborne Test Board had tried its best to stop the fielding of the chute when its members observed and filmed the entanglement phenomena during development and
ASC.ARMY.MIL 131
COMMENTARY
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