The trick was learning to land in a way that transferred momentum through your body and into the ground rather than your organs or bones. This was accomplished by funneling the kinetic energy through a pendulum-like leg swing that planted your heels and stopped your slide. The reason the Black Hats spent three weeks teaching wasn’t to put the right moves in paratroopers’ minds; it was to meld them into their muscles. To make them automatic. To train their student soldiers to reflexively tense and twist and adjust just right whenever and wherever they “hit the wind.”
