"The first jump I made was kind of interesting to me, and I remember it very vividly. It was not very scary. The second jump, I was terrified, because I found out how scary it is to jump the first."
Kern: Can you tell us a little bit about the training you went through to be a smoke jumper?
Smith: Yes. You have to fall out of an airplane, and you have to land on the ground, your parachute has to open. Actually, we had about—do you know, I don't remember! That's been 1959, this is 2001—forty-two years ago. Whew! But I think we had six weeks of training, but it may have been four—four or six. A lot of it was physical, a lot of it had to do with fighting fire. They made you dig fire line and all those things that you'd already learned how to do, but you had to do a lot of that to be a smoke jumper. Had to do a lot of physical training, a lot of running, a lot of exercises, pushups, situps, back bends, all those kinds of things. And then we practiced a lot, doing things from the air, like we would practice exiting the aircraft, even though you only had to jump out about three feet. Just stand in the door and jump out. You practiced jumping out with all of your gear on and everything.
We would practice landings where not your parachute, but all of your harness and everything would slide down a wire, as if you were coming in on a landing, and you would have to learn to make a parachute roll and land safely and all those kinds of things. And then you would have to jump out of a tower where you would jump and it would simulate your parachute opening. You'd fall about twenty feet or something, and then you could certainly get that jerked-up motion from when the parachute opens, which was actually very different than that parachute actually opening, because it was much worse than that.
So we did that, and then we had five or six practice jumps where there weren't fires involved. They would just take you up in the airplane, and you would jump out of the airplane and your parachute would open and you would come to the ground and do all the rolls, and people would be critiquing you both from the air and from the ground, about how to do parachute rolls and how to land safely, and what to do if you land in a tree, and those kinds of things.
Kern: So what do you do if you land in a tree?
Smith: If you land in a tree, your jumpsuit—I don't know if you can picture this big canvas jumpsuit. You've seen pictures of big shoulders and a big high collar that comes way up to here, and a helmet with a screen on it. And in the pocket of one of the legs is what's called a let-down rope, and it's a hundred feet. And so that's in your pocket. So if you hang up in a tree, you take the let-down rope out, tie it to your parachute, and release your parachute from your harness, and then let down—you rappel down that rope to the ground. Then later you have to go get your parachute. So you have to climb back up the tree, top the tree or do something to get the parachute back on the ground, because you have to pack it out.
The gear that you take with you has to be packed out. It weighs about a hundred pounds—if it's dry. If it gets a little wet, it could weigh 130 pounds. I weighed 150 pounds.
Kern: What is some of the other equipment (unclear)?
Smith: You have your parachute and your reserve chute and this canvas jumpsuit and the harness. That's the stuff you would jump with. And then they would drop to you in a different parachute called a cargo chute, then you would have food, tools, Polaski [phonetic] shovel, a hand saw—not a chain saw. You may have climbers that you strap on your feet just so you can climb back up to get parachutes out of the trees. If any parachutes are hung up in the trees, they drop you climbers. You might have—let's see, I mentioned a sleeping bag. Hm. Those kinds of things. A lot of that was in the parachute, jumpsuit, and all that, was a lot of the weight. The food, if we had food left over, we took it. We weren't going to pack it out. But water, and those things, by the time you get everything loaded up, you had about a hundred pounds on your back.
Kern: Can you tell us about the first jump that you made?
Smith: The first jump I made was kind of interesting to me, and I remember it very vividly. It was not very scary. The second jump, I was terrified, because I found out how scary it is to jump the first time. So the second time out, then I was really scared. But it's the kind of thing, I was more scared, I guess, of saying [Ham?], "I'm not going to jump out of this airplane," than I was of jumping out of the airplane.
We jump from about 1,200 feet, 900 feet, 1,500 feet, somewhere in there. So I was up there quite a ways, but it's not way, way up there like a lot of those skydivers jump from. So it didn't take too long to get down, and the ride was a pretty quick descent. That is, you get down to the ground pretty quickly. So it's not like you have a lot of time to relish this floating down through the air. You've got to be preparing for your landing, you've gotta be guiding your parachute to see where you're going. You've gotta stay away from the trees and the power lines and the lakes and all of those things. And so there's a lot to be done in this jump, getting to the ground.
First of all, you have to make sure that your chute is open and fully open and doesn't have a line over or something that's going to increase your rate of descent. So you have to check on that. So you're pretty busy once you go out the door, before you get to the ground.
Kern: How many seconds, more or less?
Smith: I don't know. I suppose it takes a couple of minutes maybe, or three, perhaps, to get to the ground.
Kern: Did you ever have a bad land?
Smith: I never did have a really bad landing. A lot of my friends did—they wound up with sprains and broken legs and broken arms, and certainly a lot of bruises. I wound up with a lot of bruises and sore places and those things, but never anything terribly serious from jumping. I had jumped one fire and been on it for quite a few days and cut my foot pretty seriously with a Polaski tool and had to be evacuated—but not from jumping.
One of my roommates when I was going through jump training in 1959—we annually sent a small contingent of jumpers from Missoula to a spike base—that is, a distant base—and there were four people selected to go down there, and I wanted to go really badly and didn't. It was at a place called Grangeville, Idaho. And this guy was selected and was later that year killed in a plane crash. The plane that was carrying two smoke jumpers, the pilot, and a co-pilot were all killed. The pilot may not have been killed, but the two smoke jumpers were killed in that plane crash. Upon reflection, I think that could have easily been me, had I been selected for that.
Interestingly, I was dating my wife at the time that I became a smoke jumper, but we were just dating—we weren't engaged or pinned or any of those kinds of things. She had read about that in the newspaper, but had no way of knowing who it was—only that two smoke jumpers had been killed. And we weren't that tight, so I didn't immediately call her and say, "Hey, everything's okay." But a few weeks later, apparently she got a letter from me and it made her feel better.