Oral History Videos

Harry Akune
Interview Length: 2:17

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
This island of Corregidor has a top site, what they call and it's a little over one mile in diameter.  And we had two small areas to land in.  So my landing area was more, it was closer to the cliff than to this, and this island was about 700 feet up in the air, you know.  And the rest of it is ocean.  So I thought, oh no, I don't want to go back.  I don't want to go in the ocean.  So I grab the rear end of this riser, the rear riser so I wouldn't swift forward.  That's what they told me to do.  And then in the process I did that.  And it slowed down but, at the same time as I descended, the shoreline became wider, you know.  So I said, oh I'm not going to go into the ocean.  By that time I look down there and a bomb shattered tree, like this.  Oh no, I'm going to get impaled, you know.  Oh, I can just feel the pain of getting impaled.  I got excited and let that rear riser go and pulled on the front one hard as I could.  Well, I'm not supposed to do that I understand.  Because what happened was, as soon as I did that, the parachute started oscillating and turning.  And now I was coming in backwards, I didn't know where I was going now.  And a few seconds later I saw the shattered tree go by.  I said, oh boy, I'm safe now I got it made.  And then my feet suddenly touched lightly, it was a really light landing.  Everybody else on that parachute run really got banged up.  This was supposed to be a 20% casualty on the jump alone.  And everybody got banged up and here I just barely touched and I slid back, leaned back, backwards.  And then rode down on the backpack of this parachute, which is board.  Rode all the way down this hill, maybe 150 feet or so.  And I said, wow.