First to Jump by Jerome Preisler Page B

the letter D.
    The planes appeared seemingly at once and began to release their sticks, the shadowy forms of the paratroopers dotting the night sky as they came down into the field.
    Looking up from below, surrounded by the enemy, Watson, Haller, and the rest of the Pathfinders watched them descend in the glare of the fiercely burning farmhouse. Although hardly out of danger, they knew they were no longer on their own.
    The Allied invasion of Normandy had begun.

CHAPTER TWO
    1.
    T/5 Maynard Beamesderfer remembered exactly when he’d started thinking it might be fun to jump out of an airplane with a parachute. He was sixteen or seventeen years old and on a family trip up to New York to see the ’39 World’s Fair.
    The visit was something special for the Beamesderfers. Maynard’s father was a farmhand in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and there was never much spending money at home, and the teenager lived in a world with relatively narrow borders.
    Life revolved around work for the males of the family, and he always did his part to add to the household income. In his final year of high school, Maynard—his friends just called him “Beamy”—had gotten a job at the Hershey chocolate plant about five miles from where he lived and had worked there four hours a day at thirty-five cents an hour, taking the nickel trolley over with some of his friends. During the harvest seasons, he’d earned extra wages picking tomatoes and tobacco and other crops at the local produce farms. It had helped that he spoke the broken German called Pennsylvania Dutch—his dad had been raised a Dunker, though he wasn’t very religious—because that was all the old farmers knew, and they wouldn’t hire anyone who couldn’t communicate in the dialect.
    It had taken the Beamesderfers a while to save up enough money for the World’s Fair, and Beamy went with only a dollar to spend on the attractions. But the moment he set eyes on the Parachute Jump, he was hooked. The tower was a lofty two hundred fifty feet high, and for a quarter a ride, he was strapped into a seat and pulled up on cables to its summit, then dropped to the ground under one of the brightly colored parachutes.
    Beamy had gotten on the Jump several times, waiting in the long lines and spending most of his dollar on it. The ride had electrified him and he wouldn’t forget it. He’d thought it was just plain great.
    It was about a year later that he’d seen a U.S. Army recruitment film for airborne troopers. This was right after Pearl Harbor, at a movie matinee back home in Lebanon. He had never heard of soldiers that jumped into battle with parachutes, and had figured it must be something new for the service. In the reel, the troopers wore soft leather frap hats, and the narrator explained that the drop towers they used for their drills had come from the World’s Fair. That made Beamy remember his thrilling experience on the rides.
    The jump training sounded like a “real good deal.” Being a country boy, working on the farms, he’d had dreams of seeing the bigger world around him. Whenever he and his classmates had traveled to Philly for the state basketball tournaments, the boys there had harassed them with calls of “
Here come the shitkickers!
”
and Beamy had hardly blamed them. His school didn’t even have a hardwood court, and he played basketball outdoors on the dirt. Beamy and his teammates were very proud they could compete at all with the boys at the city armory.
    With the draft having begun in 1940, Beamy’s parents and relatives had braced for the inevitability that he’d be pulled into the service at some point—of the dozen boys in his high school class, only the three strict Mennonites had legal exemptions. But his family still reacted with surprise when he told them he planned to leave school and enlist at eighteen, with a year left before graduation. The family members on