First to Jump Read Online Free PDF Page B

away from yet another deadly collision.
    The plane hit the Channel hard. Cold seawater came surging up around it in a great wave, gushing through the door of its troop section. Taylor’s expert landing had kept the plane intact, but it was flooding fast.
    â€œGet the troops out, this baby’s going down!”
    It was Sperber shouting into the troop section this time, poking his head down from the aircraft’s astrodome, the glass observation bubble above and behind its cockpit. Meant for celestial navigation, it had now become a crow’s nest from which he could scan for nearby vessels. But in those first moments after the crash, he saw neither friendly nor hostile ships around him. There was only the darkness on all sides.
    Below him in the cabin, the men were now knee-deep in freezing water. They stood up off the riveted metal floor, their soaked uniform trousers clinging to their legs, their skin prickled with gooseflesh. Lieutenant Rothwell and several others were furiously pushing the dinghies out the door, trying to get the men who couldn’t swim onto them ahead of the rest. But the lieutenant had not been able to inflate more than a few of the rafts, and the current was sweeping them away faster than anyone could haul himself inside.
    Sloshing toward the exit, Malley noticed that Private First Class Steve Pustola’s pockets were bulging with service pistols. He’d stuffed them full of the Colt .45s as they’d been passed up the line of paratroopers to be tossed overboard. A Brooklyn boy, Pustola had a thing for those guns. He never seemed to have enough of them, and, sink or swim, he’d been intent on hanging on to as many as he could. But Malley had heard that people from Brooklyn were all a little bit crazy.
    One of the men crowding at the door, Private First Class Richard M. Wright—his flame-colored hair had earned him the nickname “Red” with his teammates—was simultaneously grateful and disappointed. Grateful he was still alive, disappointed that he’d been shot down before the jump. Wright hated the brutality and carnage of war. Hated the death and the killing. But he’d paid close attention to what was happening in Europe since Hitler’s ascent to power and had come to hate the evil of Nazi tyranny more than anything on earth.
    Though warned it was tantamount to committing suicide, Red had volunteered for Pathfinder duty with his close friends Terrence “Salty” Harris and Dutch Fenstermaker, figuring it was the quickest way to join the fight. That wasn’t to be, not now, not for him and Dutch, who was a member of his stick. But Harris was on Plane Number 5, the transport right behind theirs, and Wright hoped he’d make it to Normandy.
    As he prepared to swim out the door, Red swore he’d still get into the war somehow. . .
if he survived the night
. In his mind, it was by no means a certainty. The plane was sinking in a hurry, and the sea around it might be teeming with enemy patrol boats. Wright knew it was possible he’d drown before anyone, the Germans or the Allies, fished him out of the water.
    Taking a deep gulp of air, he splashed out into the Channel, swimming away from the plane to avoid being dragged down with it. He could discern the bobbing forms of his comrades in the brilliant glow of the moon, hear them calling to each other as they struggled to keep their heads above the swells. Beyond a few feet away, he saw nothing around him. No lights, no ships, nothing.
    Then he heard some of the men shouting that they’d located one of the dinghies. He swam in its direction, guided by their voices.
    â€œThis way . . . this way . . . over here!”
    Wright’s arms and legs were almost numb from the cold when he got to the raft. He grabbed its edge and saw hands reach down from onboard to clutch at his uniform and Mae West, hoisting him up and in. At last he rolled over the side, catching