I never made it to Airborne training. Like I said, it wasn't the prospect of jumping out of airplanes that turned me off, it was all that running. From what I had heard, Airborne training was much tougher than Infantry training, and I barely made it through that. Truth be known, I shouldn't have passed some of the physical stuff, but they just pencil whipped me through it. During AIT ( for the benefit of our civilian colleague, that stands for Advanced Individual Training), they gave us the chance to opt out of our enlistment commitments, and I took it.
I was a little surprised that I was accepted into the army at all. I had a slight heart murmur left over from a bought with rheumatic fever, and my father had been rejected for military service during World War II because of something similar. I also had flat feet, which I had heard used to be grounds for rejection in the old days. I told them about it when I signed up, but they accepted me anyway. I wasn't trying to get rejected, you understand. I just thought I should be honest about everything because, well, that's the kind of guy I am. I wouldn't have lied to get in, anymore than I would have lied to get out.
Like I said, I never played sports as a kid, but I thought I was in reasonably good shape. I was really good at walking and bike riding, but it turned out that I sucked at running. I didn't know that because I never had a reason to run anywhere until I got into the army. They didn't call it "running" anyway, they called it "double time", and it was a lot like the jogging that some people do nowadays. It doesn't really get you there faster, it just tires you out faster. Standard marching cadence is 120 steps per minute, which sounds faster than it is. Double time is 180 steps per minute, so it would be more accurate to call it "time and a half", but the army doesn't care about accuracy. A standard road march will move you along at two or three miles per hour and, in those days, I could walk four miles an hour all day without breaking a sweat. Double time might be faster in the short run but, after a mile or so, I could drop out of the formation and keep up with it just walking, while other guys who dropped out were puking by the side of the road.
Running never made me puke, it just made me dizzy and short of breath. I supposed I would have passed out if I had kept at it long enough but, before that happened, the guys around me would tell me to drop out because I was screwing up their cadence with my stumbling and staggering around. It wasn't until I was hospitalized for that bleeding ulcer in 2008 that I found out what was wrong with me. They gave me every kind of test known to modern man. My heart and lungs were fine, which surprised the doctor because I had been smoking and drinking for most of my adult life. He said that I had something called "ischemia", which is like anemia only different. With anemia you don't have enough red blood cells, with ischemia you have enough red blood cells, but they don't carry as much oxygen as they are supposed to. I had lost half my blood supply because of that ulcer, so I was anemic at first, but they cleared that up in sort order with transfusions. The ischemia never went away, though, and I probably had that all my life and didn't know it. The doctor didn't say that in so many words, but it would explain why I was no good at running back in the day. Another thing was I think they gave me too much blood while I was there. The doctor didn't admit that, but it would explain why I never had high blood pressure before those transfusions and now I do. It's the only explanation that makes sense.
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