The landscape just whipped by like the video was on fast-forward. The greens and browns of the South Georgia scenery mixed into a constant blur, kind of like the moments that would soon follow. The air around us was a hot, humid mix of swamp air, perspiration, and a mix of emotions that ranged from fear to excitement to anxiety to tepid anticipation. Never the less, the aircraft held about 64 of us all in different stages in our lives. Some were here to prove to themselves that they could achieve more than they thought, others were fulfilling an obligation, and some stood there due to a sense of romanticized adventure.
All 64 stood there not because the aircraft lacked seats but, rather, that the seats were collapsed in anticipation for the moment of truth, the jump. Each paratrooper, even though they were not formally called this until after the completion of their fifth jump, stood, riding some steel-surfboard going around 130 knots. All of them understood what would happen next. The jump master would begin a countdown stating minutes and seconds remaining until their exit. They would pass the information back so that the individual in the rear of the line would understand. Each person would check the person’s gear in front of them one last time to ensure that there were not any tears or rips in the static line thus ensuring a safe jump. Finally, they would slap the individual before them let them know that their gear was “ok” and the jump could continue. This process was repeated from front to back and then back to front until the jump master was finally informed “All ok jump master!”. At this point, the paratroopers all waited for one thing: the green light.
In some simplistic fashion, which bordered on genius, some decided that all paratroopers needed to know that it was time to go was a green light. During a nighttime exit, this green light cast an eerie glow throughout the belly of the C130. Details and faces were blurred together as the green light hid certain features except for height; everyone looked the same. After the final checks had been completed, everyone waited until the green light ushered them out into the open air. Sometimes this took minutes and other times it took hours. It all depending on the circumstances going on outside of the planes. If the weather was clear, the wind speed was minimal, and the drop zone was clear; then the exit was pretty quick. Otherwise, if one of these conditions was poor, the exit could take awhile. In some situation, this resulted in nausea from the constant turbulence or anxiety bordering on a panic attack from the anticipation. In each instance, these moments were drawn out like hours causing each paratrooper to face their own fears within their own minds.
It was inevitable when faced with a situation in which one could die, if the moment did not come quickly, everyone would go deep within themselves and play a horrible game of “What if”. What if my parachute didn’t open? What if I hit the ground too hard? What if someone was immediately below me preventing a proper landing? What if I became wrapped up in another jumper? What if I became snagged on the aircraft? As one can see, the mind is a wonderful; yet, terrible organ. At one point we can be fantasizing about wearing our jump wings while in the next breath seeing our deaths. Luckily, to a point, the Army had prepared all of those involved with Airborne training how to handle most of these situations. It required clear, logical thinking. You had to separate the emotion from the situation and respond accordingly.
If your parachute failed, then you did not panic because you had practiced numerous times how to respond, you pulled the reserve parachute. If you became entangled with another jumper, then you pulled the risers that controlled the parachute, bicycled, and attempted to untangle yourself. The landing should never frighten you because the landing was practiced for two weeks before even attempting to jump out of a plane. The Army prepared all of the jumpers for each possibility but that didn’t mean their minds wouldn’t stop wondering “what if”. Some became paralyzed by the fear associated with these scenarios. You could hear it in how they breathed. No longer were their breaths controlled but instead became ones bordering hyperventilating messes.
This was the situation I found myself in during one summer at Ft. Benning, Georgia. I had come to this school, the United States Army Airborne School, out of a sense of pride and obligation to my family. My father had been an Airborne soldier and one of my great uncles had been an Airborne soldier. From a young age, I was told it was just what we did in life. Other people became doctors, lawyers, or something fancy; we became soldiers and specifically soldiers that jumped out of planes. Regardless, it was my decision to follow in this family tradition of sorts which is funny because we didn’t have any true family traditions like other people. We put up Christmas trees and decorations more as an obligation and we engaged in a Thanksgiving dinner more because my grandmother wanted it than because we enjoyed it. So, for whatever reason, this was the only tradition that mattered; jumping out of planes.
I had already been here for two weeks at this point. It was July. It was South Georgia. It was humid. I was miserable. I was getting ready to jump out of a plane for the first time. Did I mention that I was getting ready to jump for the first time? No, ok well, I was and it was exactly as most people would describe it which is a mix of excitement, anxiety, feeling like your going to pee your pants, and just outright fear of what was going to happen in the next minutes. The peeing your pants, I came to find out, was actually quite normal in that, once you got into your jumping harness, you wouldn’t be able to use the bathroom. So soldiers would typically go without a bathroom break for hours meanwhile facing anxiety and panic. Have you ever been anxious about something? You know what happens? Your bladder becomes a leaky faucet and you visit the porcelain throne about every five minutes or less. It's you and that individual with the urinary tract infection making that odd eye contact each time you go to relieve the physical symptoms of your anticipation.
Back to the story. So there I was, standing in line to exit this well-made aircraft that was doing an excellent job of maintaining flight, wasn’t crashing, and would soon return to earth safely. In other words, there wasn’t a true reason, in the survival sense, to exit in the manner I would soon. The fight or flight response actually works against you in this situation because both are telling you to stay put. Nothing in your mind is agreeing with you to exit and every system in your body is letting you know this fact. You sweat more than usual. Your heartbeat is racing. Everything is on overload.
What I was experiencing and what everyone jumping for the first time experiences is fear. Fear is ok. Fear is what kept our cavemen ancestors alive as they moved through the forests at night. Fear is a powerful weapon when focused on an appropriate goal. In this example, the fear of dying, which was very real in the case of trying to float down to the ground on a thermal updraft, ensured that I was hyper-focused about all of my actions. I ensured that my gear was checked properly. I checked my friend's gear properly. I went through all of my preventive actions in my mind. I went through scenarios that would be problematic and ensured that I knew the proper solutions to ensure I landed on the ground properly. In the end, if I came to a roadblock and didn’t know the answer, I asked or relied on what I was told which was “Trust your equipment”. It became almost like a mantra of sorts.
“Does this look safe to you?”
“ I don’t know, just trust your equipment; it will be ok.”
When fear took over someone, it manifested as anxiety. This anxiety crippled someone in every sense imaginable. Some people couldn’t physically bring themselves to exit the plane and would collapse next to the door to which the jump master would berate them hoping to snap them out of their paralyzing condition. Others couldn’t control their bowels and the air became awash with the strong smells of urine and, sometimes, feces. Anxiety causes us to confront the inner demons. Basically, fear unlocks a door within our minds and causes us to spiral. Literally, we become consumed with our thoughts such that when given options, we always seem to pick the worse outcome. We all feared jumping out of the plane. Who wouldn’t fear it? Death was a potential outcome but so was walking away just fine. So why did some people dive into anxiety while others understood the fear, embraced it the best that they could, and then moved past it?
First off, it may be of use to differentiate between fear and anxiety. Fear, as defined by Webster, is an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by expectation or awareness of danger. Meanwhile, Webster defines anxiety as an apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill. The easiest way to distinguish the two is through our bodily experiences. Fear causes us to have that pit in our stomachs. It doesn’t impede our actions it just makes us more aware that something is wrong. Think of it like a mild-primitive superpower kind of like a spider-sense. Anxiety, on the other hand, causes mild nausea, dizziness, and a sense of apprehension. You may have the small moment of fear associated with the snake you just saw while hiking but twenty minutes later you have moved past the event. Fear no longer holds a grip on you. Anxiety, though, wakes you up at 3 AM and consumes you. Maybe you have insomnia or maybe you have anxiety. You can’t tell the difference because your mind is constantly going and you can’t slow down. Fear and anxiety can be caused by the same moment. Back to Airborne School, one jumper may have fear about exiting the plane while another is suddenly anxious about the impending action. The reason this occurs is due to how each individual copes with the situation.
The Army condition us to cope quite well with most situations. This was accomplished through deliberate, stressing events that made it so that when fear struck, it wasn’t the first time we had faced it. The chaos of Basic Training was purposeful in that it was attempting to “jar” a young soldier out of their previous, civilian life. I ran a Basic Training company for a year and we would pile stressing events on young soldiers just to try and get them to crack. They would face their fears in the form of land navigation at night, rappelling off of a 75-foot tower, or having to run five miles. The events weren’t designed to be some carnival funhouse of stress but rather a series of events that would stress some and not stress other. To one person the rifle range was exhilarating and to another, it was frightening. See stress is in the eye of the beholder and these varieties of events allowed you, as a soldier, to understand what sent you from fear to anxiety. Once you understand that, then you can reverse course and bring your mind back to sanity.
For Airborne School, this was accomplished through repeated exercises mimicking jumping from a plane. We all knew that the actual event of jumping from a plane could never truly be replicated but the instructors sure did try. We did hundreds of landings to condition our bodies to the response. We exercised our bodies to prepare for the loads we carried and the impact. Finally, we practiced for every bad scenario “just in case” it might happen. These repeated exposures allowed us to cope correctly when the situation surfaced. Most of us were able to recognize the fear, embrace it, and then move on. Those that didn’t or couldn’t, embraced anxiety and didn’t jump. It was that simple. One jumper in front of me faced such a dilemma.
The doors were open, the light was green, and the paratroopers were out into the open air. The static lines that pulled the chutes from our backpacks were hung tightly out the door due to the turbulence just a few inches from our bodies. We shuffled up to the door dragging our static lines on a cable to give to the jump master, turn, and then exit. Except for one individual, a young enlisted man, decided that his anxiety had gotten the best of him. He paused and froze. The jump master instructed him to jump once, twice, and then after the third time, the jump master threw him to the front of the plane as the rest of us continued to exit. The anxiety had gotten the best of him. He had become paralyzed by analysis.He went down the rabbit hole with Alice and got lost in his own mind. By the time he had come back to reality, all of us were most likely gone from the plane and his moment had passed. By refusing to jump, the soldier had elected to quit Airborne School. I’m sure, in a calm moment, he wouldn’t have made such a decision but, when faced with fear, his anxiety had won out.
We all face fear and anxiety on a daily basis. It’s funny and sad that the Army could prepare soldiers how to cope with death and bodily harm; yet, most of us suffer some form of anxiety upon leaving the military. I was no exception. A few months after leaving the military, I found myself in a job that pushed me in ways that were foreign and I didn’t understand so, when my boss called me to his office, I immediately followed the rabbit into Wonderland. I knew how to cope but that didn’t make the situation any better. I was still nauseous, heart was racing, and mind spiraling. How did I cope? I went and cut the grass. For a little context here, I cut the grass in the middle of summer, in Orlando, during the middle of the day. It wasn’t the safest thing to do but, I knew, it was healthier than letting my mind wander into fiction. What I am trying to say is that I am by no means perfect when it comes to coping. I can actually cope quite well but, instead of coping, maybe we should be calling it resilience.
The American Psychological Association (2014) defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, threats or even significant sources of stress” A simple way to see this is that resiliency is how healthy we function after a stressing event. A stressing event can be up to interpretation and, in reality, most of us face a stressing event more frequently than we would like to admit. Whether it is a child that doesn’t respond to our parenting techniques, the mounting debt, the self-doubt that creeps in, the traffic coming home from work, and I could continue to go on and on. In reality, our modern society is just as stressful as less civilized ones from our history books. Replaced are the famines, diseases, and invading armies; now we have technology outages, disparities in standards of living, and the constant competition to succeed. For this reason, everyone needs to figure out some ways to become more resilient.
Now most of us don’t have the limitless resources to be funneled through a training program like Basic Training that could stress us and equip us with ways to cope. Part of the training is getting to know yourself. Know what it is to be tired, hungry, and exhausted. These are all important baselines to know about ourselves but most of us cannot afford the time or cost to engage in these activities. Instead, we need more practical steps to assist us in our daily lives. A small practice of resiliency that can become habits and therefore a way to cope when the stressful event surfaces. I call these the six realities of resiliency and they are action, communication, time, introspection, opportunity, and being nimble or adaptability. Confidently these realities spell out ACTION which is the first rule for a reason. Being resilient means moving forward, rebounding in a sense. Those that embrace anxiety become sucked into the situation and never progress. Action is therefore key.
The other five realities are ways to further cope with the events that transpire around us. Proper communication is key in order to inform others of how we feel and get our emotions across. If the message is misinterpreted, then the Calvary won’t come to the resource and the proper resources won't be given. Having a proper view of time puts the event into perspective. Ever heard that President’s become more popular the further removed from office they become? Kind of the same effect. Introspection speaks to figuring ourselves out. The Army forced this upon us through nights of silent marching and it was inevitable that you would have to figure yourself out. As Socrates said, “ Know Thyself”. Opportunity address the reality that the event closed one door but may have opened others. Once again, like time, this really is trying to put things in perspective. Finally, adaptability. To be resilient we must be adaptable. Without this flexibility, we would be rigid and unable to adapt to the circumstances. In essence, we would never learn and therefore never progress forward.