By Gilbert Weaver
As the saying goes, “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop.” A great deal of ingenuity has gone into reintroducing someone to the ground gracefully, but no safety device is foolproof. Rockport resident Gilbert Weaver learned that lesson well enough during his service with the U.S. Army as a paratrooper, though he is among the relative few to walk away from a “failed” jump and live to tell the tale. In July 14, 1967, Weaver was inducted into the United States Army. With all the planning of the average young man of any time, he decided to have a go at joining the ranks of the airborne, inspired in no small part due to the influence of his brother, Mike Weaver, now a retired colonel.
“I went in with high hopes of being an airborne ranger,” said Weaver. “I came to find out it wasn’t that easy.” He joked that he wasn’t in particularly peak athletic condition when he joined the army. He fell out of formation during his first run, a sin for which he was frequently reminded during his time at basic training. The drill sergeant assigned to his unit was, reportedly, driven to great lengths of frustration.
“I was probably his worst nightmare going through basic,” joked Weaver. “I couldn’t get anything right. I was always in trouble.”
As if to twist the knife further, Weaver went on to advanced infantry training. Though his early hopes at becoming a paratrooper had faded considerably, he decided to sign up anyway.
As fate would have it, he received orders to report to Fort Benning in Georgia to undergo jump training. One of Weaver’s very first sights on base was a newly minted paratrooper wearing his airborne wings. It was about that time that the reality of what he had gotten himself into began to sink in.
“I didn’t know what airborne meant,” he joked. “I didn’t have any idea I was going to be jumping out of planes.”
With the benefit of harsh reality, Weaver could have backed out, but he decided to press on as he had throughout his army service. He wound up running into an old acquaintance from basic, who expressed more than a little puzzlement.
“He looked right at me and said, “You!?” laughed Weaver. “Some way or another I made it through.”
However unlikely his path to the skies was, he managed to make it routine. In February of 1968 he was assigned to American bases in Germany where he made several jumps to hone his skills. Somewhat surprisingly, these jumps never quite phased him.
“It was like walking across the street,” said Weaver.
As with any dangerous job, there’s always an element of chance no matter how well equipped and prepared. On some level, it was evident on October 1, 1968 that fortune would be somewhat uncooperative.
“That morning I got up and had to make a jump,” Weaver recalls. “For some reason, something didn’t feel right. I don’t know what it was.”
He boarded a C-141 cargo jet and managed to shake the feeling. After all, it was just another jump. However, he discovered a fault with his reserve parachute and had to fall out of line to fix it. At that point, a sergeant with more than a hundred jumps to his name told Weaver, “Son, something is not right. I don’t know what it is, but something’s wrong.”
Weaver, again, shook this off. The obvious fault in the parachute had been fixed, and there was nothing tangibly amiss beyond an oddly shared feeling of unease between two paratroopers. As it happens, there was something to both men’s intuition that day in the skies above Wurms, Germany.
“Guess what? He was right,” said Weaver.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a jump. The most catastrophic is that neither parachute opens, an event that has left few survivors. Weaver was not quite that unlucky. His parachute did open, but far later than it should have, and not with enough time to slow him for a safe descent.
“When it popped open I was okay,” he recalls. “But when I landed I didn’t land right.”
Weaver emphasized that his training did prepare him for this eventuality. Had he been able to position himself better, he might have walked away with a scare and a story, but the force of the chaotic landing was enough to break an ankle in two. The fault with the parachute was, to his knowledge, not determined. Weaver noted that no parachute is infallible, and such things happened. He was quick to point out that a flawed parachute was certainly preferable to none at all, however.
Medics were on scene quickly to assist him. Another good samaritan, an unknown second lieutenant, found Weaver’s camera and took photos of Weaver’s crash site. The developed photos were eventually returned to him, but Weaver was still recovering at the time and paid them little mind. In fact, his convalescance took place in Heidelberg, the same hospital where Patton died following his vehicular accident. Due to his injuries, he was honorably discharged from the 173rd Airborne.
After returning home, Weaver said he “jumped from one thing to another for quite a while” before finally finding himself a routine working construction at I&M Power in Rockport. He continued with the construction trade until his old injury forced his retirement.
Still, Weaver occasionally found excitement in his life. One day in January of 1990, he was returning from Evansville when he came upon a motorist stranded in floodwaters in a field off State Road 62 in Chandler.
A woman, Ruth Lewis, plunged her van into a field after an accident with a truck. The van quickly began to sink, and Weaver immediately set into the flooded field to extract her. He joked this was not an altogether pleasant experience and did not recommend taking a swim in the area, especially not during winter.
Aside from the stink and the cold, Weaver briefly found himself dragged under by the weight of his flooded boots and a sudden drop. With the help of a local police officer, other Good Samaritans and his wife, Nancy, a chain was attached to the van to pull the vehicle out of the deepest waters. Weaver was then able to break a window and extract Lewis.
Another event in his life brought him back to that much earlier bit of excitement. About a decade ago he came across the photo taken after his disastrous jump, and began to carry it with him in his wallet.
“It makes a good conversation piece,” said Weaver.
A copy of the photo was among the eventual artifacts interred earlier this year in a time capsule, which will be opened a century from now.
As willing as Weaver is to tell the tale of his survival, he is quick to point out that his fellows went on to fight in Vietnam. Even then, many were conflicted about the war, but endured it anyway.
“They’re the real heroes, not me,” he said. “The real heroes are the ones who didn’t have a choice.”
Weaver keeps in touch with many Vietnam veterans, particularly those suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, or those who suffered injuries they still carry to this day. Still others he visits simply out of respect. These include James L. Stokes and Larry Coley, both of whom served in combat.
For the past 50 years, he has made an annual pilgrimage to Beatty Cemetery in Fordsville, KY to lay flowers on the grave of David Seaton, who lost his life in Vietnam. During training, Seaton had given Weaver some valuable, if expletive-laced advice that helped him succeed.
Weaver hopes that some one will keep up that tradition when he is gone, but he is also hopeful that somehow he’ll have a reunion with the unknown photographer who took the picture of him that day.
Whatever else can be said about the misfortune of a parachuting mishap, or the fortune of surviving one, that moment will live again a century from now.
“It’s history,” said Weaver.
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